Pope Heads to Climate Talks as Rare Word -- Optimism -- Surfaces.

>>> Leaders press for greenhouse gas cuts ahead of Paris meeting

>>> Billions in climate aid for poor countries still at issue

Optimism’s not a mood usually associated with global warming.

Yet when President Barack Obama, Pope Francis and other world leaders start gathering in New York next week, they’ll be in sight of a goal that seemed unattainable just a few years ago: an agreement that may actually slow the pace of rising temperatures.

The Pope will address the United Nations on Sept. 25 and is expected to pick up where he left off in a June letter to the world’s Catholics, making the moral argument for attacking climate change. Two days later, Obama will meet with leaders from China, Germany, France and close to 40 other nations, hoping to give a push from the top for a deal to rein in greenhouse gases.

It’s a far cry from Copenhagen in 2009, when the last UN attempt at a climate pact ended in chaos and finger-pointing between developing countries and wealthier, industrialized nations. Six years later, the talks are back on track, with New York the latest stop on a road that organizers hope will end with a landmark agreement in Paris in December.

After years of diplomatic jockeying, “there finally is momentum,” said David Waskow, director of climate initiatives at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based research group. “The arrows are all pointing in the right direction.”

The turnaround’s come amid a host of developments: a half-decade of increasingly irrefutable science pointing to the dangers of a warmer world, from extended droughts to rising sea levels and raging forest fires; a veritable revolution in clean energy that’s offered more affordable alternatives to fossil fuels; and years of diplomacy designed to bring fast-growing nations like China and India into the fold for pollution limits. 

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