LE BOURGET, France—There’s no better place to sit and gloom longingly about the world than in a Parisian café, especially if that café is six miles north of the city in a glass-and-steel warehouse at the climate change conference.

These are undeniably dark times. The people in this city are still sorting through last month’s massacre, at the hands mainly of their own neighbors, wondering if more is to come. The war in Syria is spiraling out of control. Russia and Turkey are staring each other down. The killing back home in the United States continues without remorse or end. There is hunger, disease, people fleeing for their lives.

Looming above it all is the threat that the planet and its atmosphere may soon become unlivable for us or our children—the very threat the negotiators in suits and dashikis with pink-bottomed paper badges around their necks are supposed to be here to solve.

Also, it’s freezing here in the Media Centre, and a coffee and a croissant cost €3.30.

So forgive me if it all makes one wonder if perhaps things are hopeless, if our lives in this entropic universe are ultimately bound for disorder and doom, to fail. Today it sort of felt that way in the talks. The morning began with what many interpreted as a threat from 134 of the 196 parties here—including China, India, and most of the world’s developing countries—to scuttle the whole deal.