The three day international climate conference in Copenhagen, billed as a chance to appraise the latest assessments of climate change impacts ahead of the December meet in the same location, is just about wrapped up. Olive Heffernan, of Nature Reports Climate Change, and Oliver Morton are there and blogging on the Climate Feedback blog. Oliver also followed the conference in detail on Twitter.

Nature’s latest coverage from the conference (earlier news here):

On Wednesday, Chris Jones, of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, warned that the Amazon forest was pretty much committed to dieback. (see also, The Guardian, The Times)

Though no-one knows whether geoengineering can be made to work, Chris Santillo, of Greenpeace, wants to shut it down; while scientists such as David Keith and Ken Caldeira want more research.

The conference attracted enormous UK media interest, along with local (Danish) representation – but there was little attendance by US reporters. Is global coverage too thin?

Marshall Burke, of Stanford University, discussing crop yields and food scarcity as climate changes, thinks the situation is gloomier than the IPCC had foreseen. In one model, a 1ºC rise in global temperature could give a 25% increase in food prices, hurting some poor farmers and a lot of poor consumers.

The conference’s closing statement (AP):

“Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories — or even worse — are being realised”