Posted by admin on 04 9th, 2010 | no responses

U.N. climate talks in Bonn are off to a rocky start

by Agence France-Presse Activists outside the Bonn climate talks ask negotiators to “pick up the pieces” after CopenhagenPhoto courtesy WWF Climate via FlickrBONN — Hopes of hoisting the U.N. process for climate change out of the mire after December’s flawed Copenhagen summit suffered a setback at talks here on Friday. In their first parley since the stormy December meeting, countries in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) divided over how to plot the way forward, and the mood was soured by fresh finger-pointing. “The one thing we learn from history is that we never learn from history,” said Tosi Mpanu Mpanu of the Democratic Republic of Congo, representing African nations. Copenhagen damaged “the trust that is necessary for any partnership,” he said. The three-day gathering in the former West German capital takes place nearly four months after a summit that, far from rallying humankind behind a post-2012 climate-stabilizing pact, came within an inch of disaster. Attended by some 120 heads of state and government, the summit was saved after a couple of dozen leaders cobbled together a brief document outlining areas of agreement. Their “Copenhagen Accord” sets down a general goal of limiting global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), includes rich and poor countries in pledges for tackling greenhouse gases, and earmarks nearly $30 billion in aid from 2010-2012, with prospects of up to $100 billion annually by 2020. But criticism of the accord resurfaced on Friday. Left-led countries in the Caribbean and Latin America noted that emissions pledges under the Copenhagen Accord are only voluntary and, at present levels, would ensure warming of 4 degrees C (7.2

More on SKCEA.org:

  • The 6 Winners from the Going Green Film Fest
    Watch trailers from the winning movies at the 2010 Going Green Film Fest....
  • Halloween a day late: IPCC digs into the really scary stuff of climate change
    by Sarah Laskow. The International Panel on Climate Change is gearing up to release its next big report, and climate deniers are gearing up to poke futilely at it, claiming it's wrong in every way possible. But if you, like a normal human being, believe in science, you can g...
  • New Hampshire Farm Closes After 378 Years
    In 1632, an English settler, John Tuttle, made his way across the pond to the New World. At that time there were only 100 European colonists in what would become the state of New Hampshire. King Charles I granted Tuttle a small land grant in this area. Tuttle felled trees and sta...
  • Climate scientist: It’s only going to get hotter
    by Sarah Laskow. It's tricky to talk about the link between heat waves like the one half of America is suffering under and climate change. But climate scientist Peter Gleick does a good job . He writes: Not only is it hot, it's hotter than it used to be … It's...
  • Erratics in Antarctica
    A team from the University of Leeds and Aberystwyth University has returned from the Antarctica with exciting new information on the behavior of the giant Antarctic Ice Sheet. The Antarctic Ice Sheet is of exceptional interest to geoscientists due to its size and location, which ...

Comments »

No comments yet.

RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URL

Leave a comment

*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.
Click to hear an audio file of the anti-spam word