U.N. Chief: Act Now On Global Warming

(CBS/AP)  With tales of rising seas and talk of human solidarity, world leaders at the first United Nations climate summit sought Monday to put new urgency into global talks to reduce global warming emissions.

The two headliners, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and former Vice President Al Gore, also highlighted by their presence President George W. Bush's absence from the eight hours of high-level speechmaking Monday on what to do about global warming.

Bush, who did take part later in a small, private U.N. dinner with key players on climate, rejects the idea of international treaty obligations to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" blamed for global warming - an idea central to U.N. climate negotiations.

The Republican Schwarzenegger, on the other hand, has taken the lead on emissions caps at the state level, signing legislation mandating such reductions in California.

"One responsibility we all have is action. Action, action, action," the former Hollywood action star said as he helped open the summit, winning warm applause from the assembled presidents and premiers.

"I do not believe that doom and gloom and disaster are the only outcomes," Schwarzenegger said. "Humanity is smart and nature is amazingly regenerative."

The Democrat Gore - a Hollywood figure himself as the lead in the Oscar-winning climate documentary "An Inconvenient Truth" - took his star turn at a summit luncheon, where he cited a lengthening list of global warming's impacts, from the shrinking Arctic ice cap to disappearing lakes in Africa.

"The need to act is now," Gore told delegates to the one-day summit, which drew more than 80 world leaders. "We need a mandate at Bali."

He was referring the annual U.N. climate treaty conference, scheduled for December in Bali, Indonesia, where the Europeans and others hope to initiate talks for an emissions-reduction agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol in 2012.

The 175-nation Kyoto pact, which the U.S. rejects, requires 36 industrial nations to reduce the heat-trapping gases emitted by power plants and other industrial, agricultural and transportation sources. The 1997 agreement set relatively small target reductions averaging 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The advocates of emissions caps say a breakthrough is needed at Bali to ensure an uninterrupted transition from the Kyoto deal to a new, deeper-cutting regime, something that almost certainly would require a change in the position of the U.S., long the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

Bush objects that Kyoto-style mandates would damage the U.S. economy and says they should be imposed on fast-growing poorer countries such as China and India in addition to developed nations. He instead is urging industry to cut emissions voluntarily and is emphasizing research on clean-energy technology as one answer.

On Thursday and Friday, Bush will host his own Washington climate meeting, limited to 16 "major emitter" countries, including China and India, the first in a series of U.S.-led gatherings expected to focus on those themes.

"The Washington meeting is a distraction," Hans Verolme, climate campaigner for the Worldwide Fund for Nature, told reporters here. The Bush administration needs "to show they are serious and implement domestic legislation to reduce emissions," he said.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, speaking at the summit, put the Washington meetings in a different light, describing them as designed "to support and help advance the ongoing U.N. discussion."

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Jiang Yu said Tuesday that Xie Zhenghua, the vice director of the National Development and Reform Commission, will represent China at the meeting. "We wish the meeting success in promoting better cooperation between major economic entities ... to press ahead on the track of the U.N. (Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the Kyoto Protocol," Jiang said at a briefing.

Late Monday, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was asked by reporters about Bush's position during the informal dinner discussions. "He made it quite clear that what he's going to do is help the United Nations' effort," he replied.

Japan's envoy, former Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori, told the summit Tokyo believes the separate U.S. talks will "contribute to achieving consensus" in the U.N. process, in which all agree that China, India and others must eventually accept emission limits.

But Japan, the Europeans and others, to one degree or another, stressed that all nations - including the United States - must accept binding emissions targets, something Bush gives no sign of doing.

To try to spur global negotiations, the European Union, which must reduce emissions by 8 percent under Kyoto, has committed unilaterally to a further reduction of at least 20 percent by 2020.

Speaking for the EU, French President Nicolas Sarkozy told Monday's gathering that "all the developed countries and the largest emitters" must commit to a 50 percent reduction by 2050. In a comment clearly aimed at Washington, he also said the U.N. negotiations are the only "legitimate framework," a point stressed repeatedly by Ban as well.

[co2max]

SignOf4-
Can you substantiate that claim you made about James Hansen? I disagree with his focus on human influence on climate change, but I respect him otherwise as a planetary scientist. He has come across much like a bit of whiner, though he seems not to be much restrained by agency controls on what he says.

[signof4]

How many people, for instance, know that James Hansen, a man billed as a lonely "NASA whistleblower" standing up to the mighty U.S. government, was really funded by Soros'' Open Society Institute , which gave him "legal and media advice"?

That''s right, Hansen was packaged for the media by Soros'' flagship "philanthropy," by as much as $720,000, most likely under the OSI''s "politicization of science" program.

Nice, huh? Another lib democrat fraud!

[co2max]

celestes-
To answer your question about life elsewhere in the universe .. .
Well, I''ll see yes to that up front.
But, the life that is out there somewhere may be unrecognizable to us. Or it is life as nature may invent it in another guise, but would not qualify as such in our terms, but we were able to study it very closely.
Moreover, I think that life may have originated a number of times here on earth over the first billion or so years, then the type which eventually flourished here and lead to spiders, dolphins, monkeys, etc. squeezed all the other forms.
The follow-up to that would be whether intelligent life had developed able to invent any sort of technology. I used to think it was very likely, perhaps having existed very long ago and gone away or may arise much later somewhere far away. But as I have focussed my studies on earth history and the advent of modern humans on earth, I realize that we are here presently by sheer luck. Our civilization is enjoying a brief period of relative optimal conditions which will eventually turn the other way and force us back into caves and low populations.

[co2max]

celestes-
That image for which you provided the link is the one I suspected I would see. Wikipedia is mainly useful for getting sources and digging deeper into the background information. But the plots are not a good representation of the story even if they do present the truth, as much as the scale allows. For instance, the carbon dioxide graph looks practically flat and smooth as glass till the end of 18th Century, then it starts to rise and eventually peak in present times. What that plot fails to demonstrate is the link between temperature change and CO2 content during episodes in the past 1000 years like the Medieval Warm Period and The Little Ice Age, the overall range for which is a temperature swing of 3-5 degrees C. I think it is the inconvenience of these variances in climate history which compell the global warming element to deny these aspects of our past and declare that anecdotal history is irrelevant, meaningless or just plan wrong. To the contrary, anecdotal evidence has been extremely valuable and serve as data points in the overall record to cause the rest of to wonder, just actually else really is going on these days. To that, we find that there are many forcings of climate going on right now, or are potentially doing so, and thus the verbal battle is engaged on this issue.

[clestes-2009]

CO2Max,

Actually yes I have read about it, bur only superficially. It is an interesting theory. It is obvious to anyone who knows anything about phsyics or astronomy that the Sun''s behavoir has monumental effects on earth''s atmosphere.

So, here is a question that is off the point but I am curious. Do you think there is life somewhere else in the universe? Not necessarily human as we understand it.

[clestes-2009]

In fact check out the whole thing. There is simply no way that DRASTIC increase in CO2 is from nature.

There has been no catastrophic event like a volcano that would explain it. It MUST be from the fossil fuel consumption by cars, coal mine and whatever else uses oil or byproducts of oil, all of which produce CO2.

[co2max]

I would be interested in the link to the Ernst Beck item you mentioned. Thx.
Meanwhile, on the subject of aerial-laden influences on climate, have you given much attention to the research going on with cosmic rays and the effect of the solar magnetic field to control their incidence on near-earth space? Henrik Svensmark of Denmark is leading that research, mainly in Europe but interest in it is snowballing. Many of those who believe in opposition to you and me, scoff at the idea and characterize these effects as sun-spot nonsense, but that is way off the mark. I''m not ready to make conclusions about it, but I do think that cosmic ray bombardment in the lower atmosphere, which has an effect on widespread low-level (3000m altitude) cloudcover deserves to be considered as relevant to climate research.

[clestes-2009]

Sorry guys,

back from a long break. I do have to work occasionally!

For further corelation on CO2 and temp rise see this link.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Carbon_Dioxide_400kyr-2.png

[abbe91]

abbe91-
"Actually, it has been my understanding that the deaths of several million people over the past 3 decades around the world can be traced back to the needless ban on DDT."

I am not completely against the ban for one thing (nothing is never clear-cut): the agricultural part.
The DDT appears to be very efficient for fighting malaria on the vector side and is cheap enough for Africa to afford. Continuous use of DDT in agricultural context has a drawback which has been seen in countries which first ban it and then came back to it: it contributes to create DDT resistance in mosquitoes and reduces its efficiency in the fight against malaria.
I think you are right about the numbers. Between 300 and 500 million affected by malaria, about 1 million of deaths per year, 90 % in Africa. Some countries still use DDT, some ban it (which makes my two last posts half-way correct).

[abbe91]

"Come back to earth and consider our case where we are talking about a very minor fraction of 1 percent concentration ... ".

Yes. First you find out that the big arguments against CO2 (deep ice measurements and the hockey stick curve) do not stand. Then you see that the models accuracy is very limited (to say the least). You need to get back to basics and look at orders of magnitude and such.
Your point about the very minor fraction of 1 percent of CO2 is an important one. To get a real effect on the climate, it would mean that we are near some critical point (critical as in phase transitions) which is unlikely, given all the feedbacks, and also given the facts that higher CO2 levels were present earlier, possibly 200 years ago. I don''t know if you are familiar with Ernst Beck''s paper. I''ll post a link if you want.
Then, the other important point, is the effect of water vapor. Of course, it works both ways, and the net effect is difficult to determine accurately, but I expect it to be higher, much higher than the CO2 contribution.