After two weeks of climate negotiations in Doha, bleary-eyed ministers, negotiators, and advocates are headed back home to the various regions around the world. Few, if any, are leaving entirely satisfied. The pace of progress on climate change is still too slow and the political will for greater ambition remains elusive. Yet these talks did achieve the basic goal of extending the Kyoto Protocol and moving countries onto a single negotiating track toward a new climate agreement. This leaves the door for more progress ahead. This year’s talks took place against the backdrop of two disturbing trends. On the one hand, there are multiple signs that climate change is here and its impacts are already being felt around the world. On the other hand, the world remains tied to the consumption of fossil fuels that drive more and more greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. With each passing day that we don’t shift directions, we are increasingly locking ourselves into more unstable climate future. The real question is: Can the international talks have a real impact on climate change? But before we get to that question, let’s look more closely at the two trends: First, in recent years, we’ve seen a surge in climate and extreme weather events, along with analysis and other evidence that the world is on an unsustainable course. The most recent and tragic example was Super Typhoon Bopha that swept across the Philippines this week, killing at least 500 people and leaving tens of thousands displaced. Typhoons aren’t unusual in the Philippines, but this one is the most southern on record and it arrived particularly late in the year. The storm, of course, comes on the heels of Hurricane Sandy, which swept through theCaribbean and up the East Coast of the United States, leaving hundreds dead, and thousands without power or property. These are the kind of extreme weather events that are becoming more common in a warming world. Last month, the US government has just reported, was the 332nd in succession in which the global temperature was above the average for the 20th century: though individual areas have sometimes suffered cold spells, the last below-average month worldwide was February 1985. And the effects are increasingly showing. Already we are seeing that polar ice is melting faster than expected and sea levels are rising beyond many projections. For instance, NOAA (US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) just released a study showing that sea levels could rise as much as 6.6 feet by the end of the century. The World Bank’s report, “Turning Down the Heat,” explores a world with four degrees Celsius of global temperature growth. The picture is not pretty. Four degrees would bring more intense wild res, heat waves, and withering droughts. Ocean life would die off, while pests and disease would increase, the report says. The European Environment Agency this week published a 300-page report detailing the impact of global warming on the continent, from crops to coasts, floods to forests—and earlier this year the giant Climate Vulnerability Monitor report concluded that it was already costing about 1 per cent of global GDP and, together with the carbon-based economy, causing five million deaths a year, mainly in poor countries. That brings us to the second major trend, which is the world’s ongoing dependence on fossil fuels. WRI (World Resources Institute)recently released an analysis showing that there are nearly 1,200 new proposed coal plants worldwide. While not all of these will be developed, even a fraction of them would drive up global emissions. Oil, likewise, remains a dominant fuel source. And, despite the enormous profits, the International Energy Agency has reported that government subsidies for fossil fuels were six times those for renewable energy in 2011. This dependence on fossil fuels keeps pushing up the global emissions. Total annual greenhouse gas emissions have increased by about a third over the past decade, and carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere are now higher than at any time in the past 15 million years. That’s why what happens in the global climate agreements is so crucial. The UN is the only venue that brings all countries together and gives each a chance to have a voice. It provides a common arena that enhances transparency and accountability among countries. Of course, the international system cannot solve the problem on its own. We need business leaders, government officials, and the public to step up as well. We need more of their voices in the debate. Fortunately, public understanding of climate change is on the rise, as is support for action.Greater domestic action can instill confidence and help build momentum.With more national leadership, the UN can move faster and take a bigger bite out of global emissions. Turning again to the Doha meeting, it’s certainly clear that the meeting alone won’t do enough to address this issue. But it does put countries on a track and provides them with the opportunity to raise their ambition. The big task, therefore, is to make progress on a commitment made at the last climate summit, in Durban in 2011, to reach a new agreement “with legal force” by 2015, binding all countries to control emissions. This, in itself, was a breakthrough, and there are some reasons for cautious optimism that progress will continue. Many of the obstacles to progress in the past are diminishing. The United States—through regulation and using shale gas—is likely to hit its target for reducing emissions by 17 percent by 2020, and President Obama has started to talk about acting on climate change, for the first time in years, after his election and Superstorm Sandy. Saudi Arabia, long the strongest opponent of change, is now investing heavily in solar power. China is starting its own emissions trading scheme to control carbon releases, and its new leadership is expected to give a higher priority to the environment. It’s time for world leaders, negotiators and the public to increase their intensity, to develop more specific strategies, and deliver more emission reductions. We need to build on Doha and get on a path to a strong, fair and ambitious climate agreement.