The Climate 9 with family and friends outside court this morning.
The first major climate trial since the failure of the Copenhagen talks begins today in Aberdeen sheriff’s court.
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I am in Bonn for the first substantive meeting for climate change negotiations since the debacle in Copenhagen. We are back in the gloomy and grandiose Maritim hotel where the conference takes place and yesterday felt very much like Groundhog day ̵… [...] NEW YORK CITY–More than 100 countries have signed on to the Copenhagen Accord –the nonbinding agreement to combat climate change hastily agreed to this past December at a summit of world leaders. As signatories, the countries agree to cut greenhouse gas emissions to keep global average temperatures from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius. The countries that have signed up to date represent more than 80 percent of the global emissions of such heat-trapping gases. [More] The Copenhagen Accord is far from the fair, ambitious and binding deal the world needs to prevent dangerous climate change. Based on an analysis of the Accord’s strength and weaknesses, however, WWF believes it could become a stepping stone towards a fair, ambitious and binding deal. In WWF’s view, the Accord could inform and advance the UN climate negotiation process, for which a 2010 work plan and schedule must be established quickly. [...] The bulk of the world’s nations ignored a January 31 deadline to submit action plans to combat climate change under the terms of the Copenhagen Accord (pdf). But the majority of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions will be affected by commitments that were submitted to the United Nations in recent days, in keeping with the last-minute, non-binding accord hammered out in December. [More] The U.S. officially committed in writing yesterday to the greenhouse gas emission cuts proposed by President Obama in Copenhagen –4 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The letter to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) commits the nation to combat climate change, but with a caveat: any such commitment must be backed by legislation, which has not passed the U.S. Senate. [More] Gland, Switzerland: Sunday’s deadline for countries to lodge targets and details of emission reduction programs under the Copenhagen Accord, is the opportunity for nations that pushed the climate accord to show they are serious about it, WWF said yesterday. “Currently, the Copenhagen Accord sets out one agreed goal – keeping the world below the two degrees Celsius danger threshold for global warming ,” said Kim Carstensen, leader of WWF’s global climate initiative.“Sunday is the self-imposed deadline for countries to lay out what they are actually going to do to keep the world out of the danger zone.” Carstensen said that for the great majority countries this implied a considerable increase on commitments so far. Copenhagen–Even under this city’s low, leaden skies, at least one thing remained clear as leaders from 193 countries gathered to negotiate climate agreements: one ton of carbon dioxide emitted in the U.S. has the same effect as one ton emitted in India or anywhere else. That simple truism is part of a huge body of data pointing to humanity’s effect on climate, and for most negotiators, the weight of that evidence seems to have crushed any doubt they may have felt in the wake of the 1,000-plus e-mails and computer code stolen from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). The theft made headlines as “Climategate” in November, and many private correspondences among scientists became public. Climate contrarians and politicians, including Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, have claimed that the messages show that climate science was far from settled, that “tricks” were used and that researchers hid unfavorable data. [More] Here’s my conclusion: the only strong evidence we have that Oklahoma Senator James M. Inhofe isn’t a clown is that his car isn’t small enough. As I write in early December, the Copenhagen climate change conference has just begun. And Inhofe, that gleeful anarchist, says he is going to Copenhagen to try to sabotage the affair. Inhofe has famously called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” (Actually, the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people was Lord Amherst’s distribution of smallpox-ridden blankets, but I digress.) But he has also called global warming the “second largest hoax ever played on the American people after the separation of church and state.” Well, it’s good to know that the senator is capable of revising his theories after he acquires new information, a necessary condition for a truly scientific worldview. [More] Lead U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern said Thursday the Copenhagen Accord represents the best way forward for a binding global climate deal but that success likely rests with a smaller group of major emitters working outside the unwieldy, multi-national United Nations process. [More] |
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