DIPLOMACY OR DROUGHT?: The destiny of our planet depends on successful talks at Copenhagen.
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This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim emissions - none of which deliver the necessary cuts - and an altered climate.

Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that, absent international agreement, the children and grandchildren of those living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world's poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet is heading toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

The December talks are, in other words, the last, best chance to change course before chaos descends.

"The choice facing the present generation is an awesome one," said former Vice President Al Gore during a speech before the Society of Environmental Journalists last month. "Never before has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions that will have implications for all succeeding generations."

Failure, Gore added, would be "catastrophic" - not only given the urgency of changes already underway, but because it challenges the efficacy of the rule of law as "an instrument of redemption."

Collapse in Copenhagen could not just become an obstacle to further progress, however. It also might force society to confront choices and decisions few in the scientific and policy world want to face.

"Copenhagen is mitigation," said Guy Brasseur, director of the Climate Service Center in Hamburg, Germany. "If that fails, we move to adaptation and geo-engineering."

Adaptation will require hundreds of billions of dollars on the low end. It will force a vast transfer of wealth, technology and aid from industrialized counties to developing ones. That buys no more than a Band-aid for those most at risk, said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development.

"We've failed our primary task of preventing harm," said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. "Now we are going to be tasked with protecting those most vulnerable to harm. And soon we are going to be confronted with globally catastrophic harm."

"There really is nothing to do but adapt today."

That's where Copenhagen comes in.

The diplomatic gathering, from Dec. 7 to 18, has one goal: create an "ambitious global agreement incorporating all the countries of the world" to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

It will be the 16th in a line of negotiations extending back 20 years, some more successful than others, all aimed at curbing humanity's appetite for fossil fuel.

There is deep pessimism that it will succeed. Deep divides on how best to tackle the problem exist between developed countries. Even deeper divides separate developed from developing worlds.

But there have been surprises before.

At the 2007 talks in Bali, all signs pointed to failure until delegates awoke the day after the talks were to end and discovered key players had worked through the night to reach an agreement.

"You don't know the answer before you actually get there, and very often you don't know the answer before the last couple of days," said Doug Boucher, a climate expert for the Union of Concerned Scientists who has participated at several international talks.

"It's really the extreme pressure of the final deadline that gets countries to make the compromises, make the bargains necessary to get to the final agreement."

And there will be pressure.

Previous negotiations all pointed to 2009 as the year to draw a line in the sand, but it's more than just a diplomatic deadline. By virtually every metric - emissions, deforestation, fuel use, land development, economic growth - business-as-usual projections point to catastrophe.

"Civilization will experience the greatest disruption in its history," said Jeffrey Kiehl, a senior scientist at NCAR's climate change research program. "We're applying a forcing to the planet that it hasn't seen for tens to hundreds of millions of years, ... when there was no ice at either pole."

"I don't think we want to go down that path."