SINGAPORE (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders on Sunday supported delaying a legally binding climate pact until 2010 or even later, but European negotiators said the move did not imply weaker action.
Some argued that legal technicalities might otherwise distract the talks in Copenhagen and it was better to focus on the core issue of cutting climate-warming emissions.
"Given the time factor and the situation of individual countries we must, in the coming weeks, focus on what is possible and not let ourselves be distracted by what is not possible," Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told the leaders.
"The Copenhagen Agreement should finally mandate continued legal negotiations and set a deadline for their conclusion," said the Copenhagen talks host, who flew into Singapore to lay out his proposal over breakfast at an Asia-Pacific summit.
Rasmussen said the December 7-18 talks should still agree key elements such as cuts in greenhouse gases for industrialised nations and funds to help developing nations. Copenhagen would also set a deadline for writing them into a legal text.
"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," Rasmussen said after the meeting, which was attended by leaders of the United States, China, Japan, Russia, Mexico, Australia and Indonesia.
WAITING FOR UNITED STATES
French Environment Minister Jean-Louis Borloo said it was clear the main obstacle was the United States' slow progress in defining its own potential emissions cuts. Continued...
HEAT OF THE MOMENT
Hacked e-mails reveal Global-Warming Fraud?
Top climate scientists discuss hiding contrary data, marginalizing
dissenters
Posted: November 20, 2009
11:27 am Eastern
© 2009 WorldNetDaily https://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116657
University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit |
Author James Delingpole writes in a London Telegraph column the most damaging revelations indicate climate-change scientists may have "manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause."
According to the Australian Investigate magazine, the 62 megabyte Zip file with documents, e-mail exchanges and other information from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit apparently was posted by an unidentified hacker on a Russian web server.
One e-mail said: "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd (sic) from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
Another expressed internal doubts: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."
Further, an e-mail exchange suggested the suppression of information: "Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment – minor family crisis."
"And, perhaps most reprehensibly," Delingpole writes, "a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority."
He cites an e-mail: "This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature.' Obviously, they found a solution to that – take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering 'Climate Research' as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board …What do others think?"
Myron Ebell, of the GlobalWarming.org website where "cooler heads prevail," said the e-mails are "shocking."
"Its kind of interesting to learn that petty politics seems to be more prevalent in the scientific community than in the political community," he said.
The documents, he said, "raise a huge number of questions about the integrity of a lot of people in the alarmist community.
More at... https://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=116657