Last chance to check climate change

December 8 – Setting targets for controlling global-warming emissions and agreeing on how much rich countries should pay for poor nations’ clean energy technology and other projects to counter a changing climate are two key building blocks of a framework that is expected to take shape in the 2-week Copenhagen conference, which began yesterday.

The world looks to Copenhagen “to witness what I believe will be an historic turning point in the fight against climate change,” says Yvo de Boer of the UN, which is organising the conference.

Under the grand roof of Copenhagen’s modern Bella Centre, delegates will also deal with the technicalities of protecting forests, measuring emissions, setting rules for “carbon credits,” enforcing an eventual treaty, and other concerns.

Underlining Copenhagen’s importance, at least 100 national leaders, led by President Barack Obama, will converge on the Danish capital to offer high-level backing to the talks. On Friday, the White House announced that Obama would come to Copenhagen on December 18, the conference’s last scheduled day.

Global temperatures are rising by 0.19 degrees C (0.34 degrees F) a decade, and twice as fast in the far north, melting Arctic sea ice at record rates. In the Copenhagen talks’ final days, the world meteorological organisation is expected to confirm this was the warmest decade on record.

Oceans are rising faster than predicted. The world’s power plants, automobiles, burning forests and other sources are producing 29 percent more carbon dioxide than in 2000. Not in 2 million years has so much CO2 built up in the atmosphere, says the global carbon project, an international research group.

From the Arctic, from threatened Pacific islands, from industrial capitals, it’s that fear that’s bringing 15,000 delegates, environmentalists, business lobbyists, scientists, journalists and others to this quiet grey city of parks and bicycling commuters.

It will also draw hundreds of police reinforcements and protesters, activists demanding “climate justice.” Wary of confrontation, authorities have sealed off the conference site with massive concrete blocks topped by 6-foot-high metal fences.

The emissions cuts offered this time around, to follow Kyoto reductions expiring in 2012, have disappointed scientists and poorer nations facing damaging climate change. They say greenhouse gases, by 2020, must be reduced by 25 to 40 percent below 1990 output. That would keep temperatures in the less dangerous range of 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) above pre-industrial levels, they say.

The developing world, for the first time, is offering its own actions – not straight reductions, but clean energy projects and other steps to slow the growth of their emissions.

An analysis by European research organisations found the industrialised nations’ targets together amount to only 8 to 12 percent below 1990 levels, far short of what scientists urge. This track would produce global warming of well over 3 degrees C (5.4 degrees F) by 2100, it said.

In Copenhagen, rich and poor will argue over the legal structure of an eventual deal, as poorer nations resist any effort to bind them legally, and subject them to close scrutiny, as they pursue greener economies. They cite the 1992 treaty, which distinguished between two worlds, recognising an obligation by the rich to undo the climate damage they’ve done, and by the poor to raise their peoples from poverty.

source: kuensel