U.N. Makes Headway In Climate Talks

Proposals Include Limiting Emissions By Industries, Compensating Countries For Halting Deforestation

(AP)  Talks on a new global warming agreement have begun to resolve some major sticking points, the U.N. climate chief said Wednesday, sounding a promising note after months of sluggish negotiations often marked by confrontation among industrial and developing countries.

Yvo de Boer, who in the past has chided delegates for delays, gave an upbeat assessment at the end of a weeklong conference of 160 nations, the latest round in a two-year process that is due to end with the signing of an accord in December 2009.

"This has been a very important and a very encouraging meeting, said De Boer. "The process has speeded up, and governments are becoming very serious about negotiating a result."

Environmentalists agreed progress had been made. "Accra shows that overcoming the muddle of conflicting views and crafting an effective deal to tackle climate change is possible," said the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF).

The delegates found some common ground on ways to help developing countries limit emissions and strategies for compensating poorer countries, especially in Africa, that will likely be hard hit by the effects of global warming.

Last year, a U.N. panel of scientists said that climate change already is happening, and the earth's temperature would continue to rise even if carbon emissions were reduced to zero today because of the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But they warned of possible catastrophic effects unless emissions peak within the next 10 to 15 years and then decline sharply.

"We are running out of time on this problem, from the scientific point of view," said Bill Hare, a scientist for Greenpeace who was an author of last year's report for the U.N. panel.

Hare said researchers were investigating "alarming" reports in the last few days of the release of methane from the Arctic Ocean, possibly from the warming of the sea. He said scientists had long feared that such an event was "a potential trigger of rapid and abrupt and extreme climate change."

Accra was the third round this year in the U.N. talks, which aim for a treaty to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol regulating the emissions of 37 industrial countries and setting out ways they can benefit from helping poor countries use clean energy.

The U.S. rejected the Kyoto accord, arguing it would harm American business and that it made no comparable demands on emerging economies. China, India and other large developing countries refused to accept a binding arrangement that would limit their development and their declared mission to ease poverty at home.

"The poor want to lead a dignified life, a life that is secure," said Mohamed Adow, of Christian Aid Africa. "They need to develop, and the opportunity unfortunately is linked to having energy."

In what could be a step toward a compromise, the Accra talks made headway on an arrangement that would focus on limiting carbon emissions by specific industries such as steel, cement or power generation. Unlike industrial countries, developing countries would face no binding targets on their economies as a whole.

In a second area of progress, delegates agreed that countries should be compensated for slowing or halting deforestation, and that countries where forests have largely been depleted should be rewarded for conserving and expanding their remaining forest cover.

(Left: Deforestation near the city of Santarem in the Brazilian state of Para.)

New and detailed proposals also were suggested for raising the hundreds of billions of dollars needed to help poor countries grapple with the effects of climate change. Poor countries, especially in Africa, are expected to suffer harsher drought, flooding and crop failures, and hundreds of millions of people will feel the stress of water shortages.

De Boer said the various proposals will be packaged together for the next round of talks in Poznan, Poland, in December, in what would amount to "a first version of a negotiating text."

Whether a treaty can be reached on time will depend on the next U.S. administration, which will be elected a few weeks before Poznan but will not take office until six weeks afterward. The pace will depend "on how quickly a U.S. team can be put in place, how fast they can get their positions sorted out, and when they can start to negotiate," said Jake Schmidt, of the National Resources Defense Council.


For more on the United Nations' climate change talks in Accra, Ghana, visit their Website.

[libsluv2spit]

we managed to move from ''global cooling'' of the 70''s to ''global warming'' of the 00"s

[libsluv2spit]

the UN cannot even save thier own arses let alone save the planet..TO SAVE THE PLANET, REMOVE THE UN..

[seafang]

How can these UN blowhards in August of 2008 be still talking about GLOBAL WARMING when the actual observational science shows that there has been NO GLOBAL WARMING since about 1995, with a momentary El Nino glitch in 1998 that lasted less than a year; and despite the fact that the mean global surface temperature dropped between Jan 2007 and Jan 2008 by the largest amount of temperature change that has ever been observed on earth, and it has been going down ever since that time, so essentially ALL of the GLOBAL WARMING OF THE LAST 100 YEARS has been given up in the last few years, and the solar indications are that it is going to continue to get colder for maybe the next 30 years.
And while all this cooling has been going on, the Kyoto Bull Sh*t has produced exactly zero reductions in green house gas emissions, and atmospheric CO2 has increased by maybe 20 ppm since 1995; and yet IT STILL CONTINUES TO GET COLDER !! NOT HOTTER.

These CBS and UN kooks belong in an institution for the criminally insane. YOU GOT THE SCIENCE COMPLETELY WRONG; AND CO2 HAS ALMOST NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GLOBAL SURFACE TEMPERATURE.

So long as we have the oceans, we could not significantly alter the temperature of this planet either up or down if we wanted to.

[erasmus81]

HawkSprings

Has your kid graduated yet?

Better be gettin'' my room ready as soon as he does.
Remember my favorite colors are green and purple.:)

[hawksprings]

What a farce.

What''s going to happen is that some point in the future the Climate will cool down on it''s own like it has countless times before, but the all the wacko Algore types will say "We did it!" even though the concentration of CO2 will still be the same or more as it is today.

Either that or as the myth of Human Caused Global Warming is more and more exposed, and as the climate does not cook us all, it will be less and less talked about until it is a distant memory or footnote in our history books, just like the 1970''s predictions of Global Cooling are today.

But Big Brother will have a little more control over all of our lives and wallets.