NY-ÅLESUND, Svalbard—Spectacular views of mountains and glaciers here in the world’s most northerly permanent human settlement contrasted with business and political leaders’ pessimism and concern about the enormous gap between the action on climate that science deems necessary and what politics considers realistic.

“We must push beyond the politically feasible,” said Tora Aasland, Norway’s minister of research and higher education.

“Here we are at the edge of the North Pole where climate change is easier to see....How do we communicate the urgency of our situation?” Aasland asked several dozen attendees at a recent high-level symposium in Ny-Ålesund, on the western coast of Spitsbergen Island about 1,200 kilometers from the North Pole.

She emphasized that we already know what to do and how to do it, including reducing fossil fuel energy use, improving energy efficiency, and investing in new technologies like carbon capture and storage.

Taking action on climate is imperative and an ambitious international agreement is urgently needed based on what scientists say is required to stabilize the climate system, participants concluded in a final statement. However, the current series of international climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany, have bogged down and are on the edge of collapse, several participants noted.

Copenhagen, the site of the final round of climate negotiations this December, “will turn into a blame game” with a weak agreement or complete collapse, predicted Andreas Merkl, director of global initiatives for ClimateWorks, Germany, an international network of philanthropic, technical and policy-advocacy nongovernment organizations working to create a low-carbon economy.

“The only way to get a positive result is through strong leadership from [US President Barack] Obama, [German Chancellor Andrea] Merkel and [Chinese Premier] Wen Jiabao,” Merkl told the symposium.

POLAR ice caps are melting faster and oceans are rising more than the United Nations projected just two years ago, 10 universities said in a report suggesting that climate change has been underestimated.

Global sea levels will climb a meter (39 inches) by 2100, 69 percent more than the most dire forecast made in 2007 by the UN’s climate panel, according to the study released over the weekend in Brussels. The forecast was based on new findings, including that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing 179 billion tons of ice a year.

“We have to act immediately and we have to act strongly,” Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of Germany’s Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told reporters in the Belgian capital.

“Time is clearly running out.”

In six months, negotiators from 192 nations will meet in Copenhagen to broker a new treaty to fight global warming by limiting the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels and clearing forests.

“A lukewarm agreement” in the Danish capital “is not only inexcusable, it would be reckless,” Schellnhuber said.

Fossil-fuel combustion in the world’s power plants, vehicles and heaters alone released 31.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, 1.8 percent more than in 2007, according to calculations from BP Plc. data.

Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division created what it calls “the world’s first real-time carbon counter,” to record and display the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

The device, displayed on a 70-foot-tall billboard, was switched over the weekend at 33rd Street and 7th Avenue in New York, above Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden.