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But even if countries live up to their commitments on gas emissions, a stark gap remains — measured in tens of billions of tons of projected flows of carbon dioxide — between the nations’ combined pledges and what would be required to reliably avert the risks of disruptive changes in rainfall and drought, ecosystems and polar ice cover from global warming, scientists say.

The chances of success substantially hinge on whether Mr. Obama can fulfill his promises to reduce American greenhouse gas emissions and raise tens of billions of dollars to help other countries deal with global warming. That in turn depends in large part on whether Congress takes action on a bill that puts a price on carbon and devotes a substantial part of the proceeds to foreign aid. And that is no sure thing.

Before the parties gathered in Copenhagen, the United States and China had been sniping at each other over various aspects of the proposed agreement, particularly over American demands that Beijing agree to a system of international monitoring, through which its public promise to reduce the carbon intensity of its economy — the rate of emissions per unit of economic activity — could be verified. But as that friction was growing, there was also significant progress on sharing clean energy technology and even exchanges between American and Chinese environmental officials over ways to accurately measure greenhouse gas emissions.

President Obama and Premier Wen Jiabao of China conducted a productive summit meeting in Beijing last month. On Thanksgiving Day, the Chinese government announced its pollution reduction target and said it would enforce it with domestic law. American officials privately said the target was too low and raised questions about the reliability of Beijing’s reporting methods, saying that some form of international monitoring would be necessary. China protested and declared that it would not sacrifice its sovereignty to an outside verification scheme.

The friction boiled over on Friday, as Mr. Obama arrived at the Copenhagen meeting.

Twice during the day, Mr. Wen sent an underling to represent him at the meetings with Mr. Obama. To make things worse, each time it was a lower-level official.

It was bad enough, said officials, describing the atmosphere later, that Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei was sitting at the table with President Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and other world leaders. But Friday afternoon, after what administration officials believed had been a constructive one-on-one meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen, the Chinese premier sent his special representative on climate change negotiations, Yu Qingtai, to a meeting of the leaders of major countries, including Mr. Obama.

An annoyed White House made a point of noting the snub in a statement to reporters. Mr. Obama, for his part, said to his staff: “I don’t want to mess around with this anymore. I want to talk to Wen,” according to an aide.

The White House set up an evening meeting between Mr. Obama and Mr. Wen. It also set up a separate meeting with Jacob Zuma, the president of South Africa, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil, and Manmohan Singh, the Indian prime minister. The approval of those was needed to seal any climate deal.

Other options, including those aimed more directly at water supply, are to seed clouds with the hopes of increasing snow volumes in the high-elevation mountains. Local governments and power companies spend tens of millions of dollars a year on such seeding projects that have been shown to increase snowpack.

But, experts say, such efforts are increasingly undermined by dust and soot accumulations that increase the melt rate of snowpacks, regardless of their depth.

And the problems will persist as long as the Western climate continues to warm, perhaps by as much as 7 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 90 years, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

If such conditions persist, Painter said this year's dust storm intensity and early snowmelt could become the norm across the region.

Belnap, the USGS research ecologist, said focused attention could help reverse the trend, but it will take more effort on the part of government and landowners.

"We do not manage for dust. We don't even think about it," she said. "I think the time is coming where we are going to have to decide we need to think about dust."

What it all means

If a 1 metre rise in sea level doesn't sound like much, consider this: about 60 million people live within 1 metre of mean sea level, a number expected to grow to about 130 million by 2100.

Much of this population lives in the nine major river deltas in south and southeast Asia. Parts of countries such as Bangladesh, along with some island nations like the Maldives, will simply be submerged.

According to a 2005 report, a 1-metre rise in sea level will affect 13 million people in five European countries and destroy property worth $600 billion, with the Netherlands the worst affected. In the UK, existing defences are insufficient to protect parts of the east and south coast, including the cities of Hull and Portsmouth.

Besides inundation, higher seas raise the risk of severe storm surges and dangerous flooding. The entire Atlantic seaboard of North America, including New York, Boston and Washington DC, and the Gulf coast will become more vulnerable to hurricanes. Today's 100-year storm floods might occur as often as every four years - in which case it will make more sense to abandon devastated regions and towns than to keep rebuilding them.

With a workable climate bill in his pocket, President Obama might have been able to begin building that global consensus in Italy. Instead, it looks as if the delegates from other nations may have done what 219 U.S. House members who voted up Waxman-Markey last month did not: critically read the 1,400-page American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009 and deduce that it's no more fit to rescue our climate than a V-2 rocket was to land a man on the moon.

I share that conclusion, and have explained why to members of Congress before and will again at a Capitol Hill briefing on July 13. Science has exposed the climate threat and revealed this inconvenient truth: If we burn even half of Earth's remaining fossil fuels we will destroy the planet as humanity knows it. The added emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide will set our Earth irreversibly onto a course toward an ice-free state, a course that will initiate a chain reaction of irreversible and catastrophic climate changes.

The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere now stands at 387 parts per million, the highest level in 600,000 years and more than 100 ppm higher than the amount at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Burning just the oil and gas sitting in known fields will drive atmospheric CO2 well over 400 ppm and ignite a devil's cauldron of melted icecaps, bubbling permafrost, and combustible forests from which there will be no turning back. But if we cut off the largest source of carbon dioxide, coal, we have a chance to bring CO2 back to 350 ppm and still lower through agricultural and forestry practices that increase carbon storage in trees and soil.

The essential step, then, is to phase out coal emissions over the next two decades. And to declare off limits artificial high-carbon fuels such as tar sands and shale while moving to phase out dependence on conventional petroleum as well.

It's a depressing outlook.

Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.

The fact is that the planet is changing faster than even pessimists
expected: ice caps are shrinking, arid zones spreading, at a terrifying
rate. And according to a number of recent studies, catastrophe - a rise
in temperature so large as to be almost unthinkable - can no longer be
considered a mere possibility. It is, instead, the most likely outcome
if we continue along our present course.

Thus researchers at M.I.T., who were previously predicting a
temperature rise of a little more than 4 degrees by the end of this
century, are now predicting a rise of more than 9 degrees. Why? Global
greenhouse gas emissions are rising faster than expected; some
mitigating factors, like absorption of carbon dioxide by the oceans,
are turning out to be weaker than hoped; and there's growing evidence
that climate change is self-reinforcing - that, for example, rising
temperatures will cause some arctic tundra to defrost, releasing even
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As a recent authoritative U.S. government report points
out, by the end of this century New Hampshire may well have the climate
of North Carolina today, Illinois may have the climate of East Texas,
and across the country extreme, deadly heat waves - the kind that
traditionally occur only once in a generation - may become annual or
biannual events.

In other words, we're facing a clear and present danger to our way
of life, perhaps even to civilization itself. How can anyone justify
failing to act?

Kennett argues that much of the geological research community has turned a blind eye to the evidence of methane hydrate's role in climate change. "It's a paradigm problem. The community is not prepared at this time to make a paradigm shift," he says. "[Climate change] is the biggest issue of our time. I think we need to look at this."

He suggests we start by taking a cold, hard look at the Arctic, where a great deal of methane hydrate exists in permafrost and under the continental shelf. Because of the extreme cold, hydrates are stable at shallower depths in the Arctic than anywhere else on Earth. Warm up the Arctic a bit, and these shallow hydrates will be the first to come apart, Kennett warns. "Is this already happening? Are we living in it now?"

Kennett has valid reasons for wondering. Inside the Arctic Circle, the ocean is reportedly bubbling like a freshly uncorked magnum of Dom Perignon. In September, scientists aboard a Russian research vessel described methane gas fizzing up from the seabed in several areas of the Arctic. Just a few days later, British scientists exploring the ocean west of the Norwegian island of Svalbard reported hundreds of these methane plumes.

It all sounds pretty ominous, but researchers aren't ready to attribute the recently observed methane bubbles in the Arctic to melting hydrates. Scientific reports of the plumes have not yet been published or peer-reviewed. Although Kennett is fearful of a methane catastrophe, he's not yet sure this is it. "I need to be convinced," he says.

He's not the only one. For one thing, says Archer, "there weren't observations before, so it's hard to say if it's a new phenomenon." Perhaps methane has been sputtering up from the Arctic for decades, with no one around to see it. What's more, many potential sources of methane exist. As bacteria break down thawing organic matter, they release the gas as a byproduct. "There's all this juicy organic carbon preserved in these areas," Archer points out. "These methane escapes could be from decomposing peat."

Ruppel, too, is a long way from ringing any alarm bells over the Arctic bubbles. "Perhaps people are jumping to conclusions before the story is really clear in the Arctic," she says. "My suspicion is that almost all of that methane has nothing to do with gas hydrates."

But let's imagine, for the sake of argument, that the Arctic gas plumes do turn out to be from methane hydrates. Does that mean it's curtains for life as we know it? Not necessarily.