The climate talks in Copenhagen remain deadlocked as many activists went peacefully back to the streets tonight to call for strong action. I joined about 500 activists, brought together by 350.org, for a torchlight vigil in a main downtown square. Expressing a shared sense of real disappointment, the crowd spelled out the words “Climate Shame” with the beautiful flickering lights. In the snowy night air, with Christmas decorations all over this city, it was both sad and strangely uplifting.

Civil Society spells out “Climate Shame” in downtown Copenhagen. (Credit: Robert vanWaarden/Spectral Q)

We still don’t know what final results will come from the talks involving 193 countries. But I’m trying to stay positive. Clearly there will be no binding treaty that gets us anywhere near the science-based emissions reductions we need. But the issues being intensely debated by the US, China, and the rest of the nations are critically important issues that must be resolved in any future treaty. Those issues, of course, are reduction targets, verification methods, and the financing of clean energy development and adaption in the developing world. Hopefully at least two of these three major issues can be resolved here: verification methods and finance.

That could leave for 2010 a final agreement on science-based reductions that get us on a pathway of 350 parts per million carbon in the atmosphere, the only level that leading scientists say is safe by the end of the century.

We’ll see what happens Saturday at the talks. So much is at stake.