Pessimism as climate summit opens in Poland

Delegates from nearly 200 nations began two weeks of talks yesterday to tackle deep political divisions at the most important UN meeting on global warming since the 2015 Paris meeting agreed to shift away from fossil fuels.

Expectations are low that negotiations in Katowice, in the heart of Poland’s coal region, will fully resolve concerns laid out in recent reports on the severity of rising greenhouse gases. The political scene has also been transformed since the Paris agreement, and the fragile global unity that brought about that accord has collapsed.