Copenhagen Schmopenhagen: What happened?

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/science/earth/20accord.html?pagewanted=1&ref=world

So Copenhagen, after months of talk and preparation finishes out its days.

Headlines:

COPENHAGEN TALKS: Climate deal faces poor nations’ fury

No joy in Copenhagen Copenhagen climate summit stumbles across the finish line unfinished Obama then says, "We have made a meaningful and unprecedented breakthrough." What does that even mean though? What does "progress" mean? Okay, so each country will index their commitments to climate change and state what they want to cut. But who is the watchdog? Who is coercing? The most powerful countries are the biggest polluters so who is going to watch them? Then, developing (and undeveloped) countries are expected to write down their emissions cuts, but is there the technical expertise in those countries to do this task? I feel that each country is looking to the rest of the world for answers to climate change and sometimes the domestic answers are not as apparent or important. Everyone comes to Copenhagen looking for answers and the countries who they depend on answers from (China and America say) will not necessarily give them to them clearly. It results in a "step" or a "breakthrough" but to a lot of people this is not enough. Countries pledge huge amounts of money (The US is pledging $3.6 million to 2011-2012 solutions) but what does this mean? Where does it go? Are GLOBAL POLICY and charters the answer to a scientific problem? If we want to fix Global Warming, lets start at home America. Yes Obama says that we put a lot of money to that, but he also pledged a lot of money to help Developing countries go green. What would happen if that money were to go to domestic movements? After all, we are the biggest polluter.... I'm no expert though. Neither in policy nor science. Maybe I should go into chemistry instead of sociology. Biology instead of English. I still laugh at Scientific American's answer to the problem: "Is Birth Control the Answer to Environmental Ills?" My Aunt Becky thinks so.... http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=is-birth-control-the-answer-to-envi-2009-09-23 Looks like Women and Gender studies. WOOT WOOT! Oh Global Warming.