Climate activists and government officials have found something to agree on: Neither side expects next week's UN conference in Cancun, Mexico, to produce a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

"I'm a little depressed about Cancun," said Al Gore, who has been both a climate campaigner and a US Vice President. "The problem is not going away, it's getting steadily worse."

In a passionate essay entitled, There won't be a bailout for the earth, Johann Hari summed up the problem this way:

Why are the world's governments bothering? Why are they jetting to Cancun next week to discuss what to do now about global warming? The vogue has passed. The fad has faded. Global warming is yesterday's apocalypse. Didn't somebody leak an email that showed it was all made up? Doesn't it sometimes snow in the winter? Didn't Al Gore get fat, or something?

Alas, the biosphere doesn't read Vogue. Nobody thought to tell it that global warming is so 2007. All it knows is three facts. 2010 is globally the hottest year since records began. 2010 is the year humanity's emissions of planet-warming gases reached its highest level ever. And exactly as the climate scientists predicted, we are seeing a rapid increase in catastrophic weather events, from the choking of Moscow by gigantic unprecedented forest fires to the drowning of one quarter of Pakistan.

Before the Great Crash of 2008, the people who warned about the injection of huge destabilizing risk into our financial system seemed like arcane, anal bores. Now we all sit in the rubble and wish we had listened. The great ecological crash will be worse, because nature doesn't do bailouts.

Hari's essay in The Independent continues:

The Antarctic -- which locks of 90 percent of the world's ice -- has now seen eight of its ice shelves fully or partially collapse. The world's most distinguished climate scientists, after recording this, say we will face a three to six feet rise in sea level this century. That means the drowning of London, Bangkok, Venice, Cairo and Shanghai, and entire countries like Bangladesh and the Maldives.

And that's just one effect of the way we are altering the chemical composition of the atmosphere. Perhaps the most startling news story of the year passed almost unnoticed. Plant plankton are tiny creatures that live in the oceans and carry out a job you and I depend on to stay alive. They produce half the world's oxygen, and suck up planet-warming carbon dioxide. Yet this year, one of the world's most distinguished scientific journals, Nature, revealed that 40 per cent of them have been killed by the warming of the oceans since 1950. Professor Boris Worm, who co-authored the study, said in shock: "I've been trying to think of a biological change that’s bigger than this and I can't think of one."

That has been the result of less than one degree of warming. Now we are on course for at least three degrees this century.

Next week's UN talks are aimed at achieving a deal that cuts carbon emissions to below current levels in order to keep global temperature rise within two degrees Centigrade (2C).

Monte Paulsen reports on carbon shift for The Tyee.