What does the "Pussy Riot" verdict have to do with humanity's ability to survive climate change?

Everything.

Because there exist at (at least) two massive former communist world powers who eventually will have to cooperate with the west if we're all to somehow safely manage what's happening to the planet's climate.

Especially if we wish to come out of the other side of a decades-long, perhaps centuries-long, period of climate instability with western ideals of freedom and democracy more or less intact and expanding.

One of the commentators in my Sunday "paper," the exceptionally well-named Carole Cadwalladr, writes that, "[i]t took a bunch of bright, sassy women in colourful balaclavas to blow the lid off Putin's Russia," exposing it for the medieval fiefdom it has become (and perhaps has always been).

I spend a lot of time keeping up with the ideas of the great and the good of the world of climate change science and policy. For the most part this is a worthwhile endeavor, and certainly necessary if I'm to explain to my own students what those ideas mean and what they are worth, which is how I earn my keep in this world.

But I don't hear a lot of acknowledgement from climate leaders that this difficult geopolitical situation exists. And I hear virtually no commentary about how we might resolve it.

But, unless there's some secret plan I'm not aware of, it seems self-evident that humanity cannot mitigate climate change without the cooperation of China and Russia. Either has access to enough carbon and has enough people, or enough influence with other countries who have carbon and people, to prevent any less-than-completely-global climate mitigation solution from working.

Without them, we can only adapt.

Even adaptation would be difficult without stabilization. Knowing what I know about the carbon flux (the basic box model of earth's atmosphere's carbon concentration, sinks and sources), I can't even currently figure out how we might stabilize, without the full cooperation of these two global powers, and I don't see how this cooperation would be forthcoming without Russian and/or Chinese democracy.

I suppose, if iron fertilization or something like it works well enough, we might somehow manage to independently sequester enough global carbon annually to offset Chinese and/or Russian carbon, and future increases due to Chinese and/or Russian growth, but how long could we keep this up? That's a pretty big "if" there.

If someone knows something I don't about how this might be possible, please write and tell me.

In the meantime, the best hope for humanity seems to be, as Ms. Cadwalladr states, "...just a bunch of highly-educated, articulate young women."

We should all be enormously grateful to these women, currently the spearhead of democracy.

Hopefully, they won't have to spend as long in Siberia as many previous generations of Russian political dissidents have.