Will Paris yield a decisive climate deal?

The UN climate change conference in Paris in December is expected by many to deliver a decisive plan to curb global warming, more precisely to prevent global temperatures from rising 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial levels. Keeping temperatures below that level is what climate scientists have been fighting for since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, where the world vowed to avoid undefined "dangerous" human interference with the climate system.

Alas, 20 years later when Rio de Janeiro hosted the UN Convention on Sustainable Development, the world hadn't done much to keep temperatures from rising above the 2C level this century. The world has not acted as an integrated community since the threat of the depleting ozone subsided after the Montreal Protocol to the Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer came into force in 1985.

The world doesn't function on the principle of one for all and all for one. Instead, it follows the principle of making the most of the available resources and exploring further to exploit potential resources.