Climate change advances inexorably, like the momentum of the huge glaciers it is destroying.  Meanwhile the human race is tap-dancing between it and the granite wall the ice will finally reach.

Senior Chinese climate negotiator, Su Wei, likened the US to Zhubajie, the vain pig character from a mythical Chinese classic who preens itself in a mirror. “It has no measures or actions to show for itself, and instead it criticizes China, which is actively taking measures and actions,” Su said of the United States.

America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol, the only agreement that contains legally binding emission reduction targets after the Copenhagen summit failed to produce more than a non-binding accord, has been harped on by countless countries.

Jonathan Pershing of the US delegation replied that they would not agree to any deal that did not also bind China. It’s part of a large scale tug of war between developing and developed nations. Developing countries argue that richer nations need to do more because they have contributed the bulk of the world’s greenhouse gases in the past.

As countries are stuck at an impasse, the new UN climate report released shows that glaciers in western China are expected to shrink by 27.2% by 2050. It’s a shift that will wreak havoc on crop production and exacerbate droughts.

From The Shanghiist.com