THE DAILY CHART: Gloom in Cancun

As leaders converge on Cancun for a fresh round of high-level climate talks, pessimism reigns supreme. As Climate Spectator's Giles Parkinson explains, there is still a deep mistrust between key players and many are still frustrated about the failings of the last major climate summit in Copenhagen. There, the best that delegates could muster was a non-binding agreement to attempt to keep the world less than 2°C warmer than pre-industrial times – generally accepted as the 'danger' threshold. But the International Energy Association has pointed out that the measures loosely agreed to in Copenhagen would still see the world's temperature climb 3.5 per cent by 2100, and the graph below, from the Economist, shows just how difficult the 2°C target would be to achieve.

The Copenhagen plans are graphed under "new policies", which aren't so different from the business-as-usual "current policies". Critically, the 2°C target would require a doubling of the decarbonisation rate over the next decade, from 1.4 per cent to 2.8 per cent, and then a doubling again from 2020 to 2035, to 5.5 per cent.  Amid this new bout of Cancun cynicism, the IEA's chief economist, Fatih Birol, nicely sums up the Copenhagen plan as being "too good to be true".