This week’s G8 summit has been less than inspirational. The expected battles over numbers and responsibility are no shocker, but the emerging in vs. out crowd in who and what will be taken into account when the chips are down is revealing.

The Alliance of Small Island States is a UN-based group of 42 island countries. In some ways, small island countries have the most to worry about with climate change issues. Rising ocean levels threaten to take away much of their coastline, create extreme weather conditions, and in extreme cases completely flood over their island, like I wrote about for the Carteret Islands.

Securing a voice for countries that have long been viewed by larger, “developed” nations as vacation spots and economically insignificant could prove to be a friction point as the world’s leaders flesh out the lines between economic stability and human concerns.

As for the Alliance of Small Island States, they made their collective voice heard in Italy this week: "Two degrees of temperature rise is unacceptable," said AOSIS Chair Dessima Williams.

The G8 countries had agreed, in conjunction with the Major Economies Forum that global temperatures should not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) by 2050.

"The world has an obligation to ensure that no island is left behind," said Williams.

The AOSIS will have to take the “squeaky wheel gets the oil” method on this one, as there are few economic or political cards to play in such a power-flush series of meetings. Williams and AOSIS is calling for emissions cuts that will limit the temperature rise to "well below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels.”

So here’s the deal, according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (kind of a great name). They estimate that temperatures will go up anywhere from 1.1 to 6.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century. Why the range? It all depends on what kind of policies the governments of the world adopt to battle climate change, they say.

So it can be bad or less bad, is kind of the deal.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is asking for real commitments from the countries at the G8 summit, and that they needed to commit to deeper cuts. With Copenhagen approaching in December, you can feel the different voices clearing their throats and starting to speak up, louder and louder.

Ban is asking for specific goals and calling on the richest of the world’s countries to do the bulk of the work, something along the lines of: You guys make 80% of the emissions, so you should take on the bulk of the action to curb them.

And how can you argue with that, I mean really. I am sort of expecting the few months leading up to December to be intense to the point of screaming. It may be the moment when Obama’s star starts to fall- when he has to take a globally visible stand on an issue that will determine the future of both international environmental policy and the international economy.