Do you keep your promises? Well, so do I. But nations are notoriously bad at it. Hitler said in the Munich Agreement that he'd be content with Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland, and the Native Americans signed 370 treaties with the U.S. government between 1778 and 1871, most of which whites broke.

Despite the dismal history, however, the international community has just put a host of greenhouse reduction efforts on the table. And according to Andrew Light, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress (CAP) now in Copenhagen, if the 17 largest economies "commit to all of the policies for carbon-pollution reduction they have on the table now, the world will have reached 65% of the emissions reductions required by 2020 to stop human-caused temperature increase at two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels."

I know that sounds kind of technical, but it means we could possibly, maybe avoid the worst effects of global warming, which we know as dramatically rising sea levels, disappearing beaches, lost biodiversity (the extinction of the polar bear in the wild by 2050 is just one consequence), coral bleaching, increased droughts and heat waves, and much more.

Here's the video view from the floor of the conference in Copenhagen: