Jan
Copenhagen deadline dead
It really hasn’t been pretty for global warmers since the East Anglia emails hit the internet. The dominoes are falling, one after another. So much pomp and enthusiasm at Copenhagen, now dashed with the reality that on 20 of 192 countries have actually “signed up.”
Here’s how the Guardian explains it:
The UN has dropped the 31 January deadline by which time all countries were expected to officially state their emission reduction targets or list the actions they planned to take to counter climate change.
Yvo de Boer, UN climate change chief, today changed the original date set at last month’s fractious Copenhagen climate summit, saying that it was now a “soft” deadline, which countries could sign up to when they chose. “I do not expect everyone to meet the deadline. Countries are not being asked if they want to adhere… but to indicate if they want to be associated [with the Copenhagen accord].
“I see the accord as a living document that tracks actions that countries want to take,” he told journalists in Bonn.
“It’s a soft deadline. Countries are not being asked to sign the accord to take on legally binding targets, only to indicate their intention,” he said.
The deadline was intended to be the first test of the “Copenhagen accord”, the weak, three-page document that emerged at the end of the summit, and which fell far short of original expectations. It seeks to bind all countries to a goal of limiting warming to no more than 2C above pre-industrial times and proposes that $100bn a year be provided for poor countries to reduce emissions and adapt to climate change after 2020.
But with just 10 days to go, only 20 countries out of 192 have signed up, with many clearly unready or unwilling to put their name to the document. Countries which have signed so far include India, Russia, Mexico, Australia, France and Norway.
Complete story: Guardian
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It will be interesting to see how this gets spun in Mexico. Where is the outrage? I am ticked off that our politicians are not inquiring into this. The information that is available is more than enough for anyone to question what is going on here. Everybody is innocent until proven guilty but we are not talking about a petty shoplifter here. We need an investigation into this. There is no way that our policticians have not heard of climategate. I ‘ll cut them some slack during COP15 because the release of the e-mails/codes was new. It is still on the table to pass a legally binding agreement based on IPCC AR4. Taxpayers and the main stream media should be screaming.
I would designate Yvo de Boer the UN Climate Change Bloviator in chief except that Rajendra Pachauri seems even more deserving.
Soft deadline huh? I don’t remember any of those when I was at school. It was either a deadline or it wasn’t. Oh well, a soft deadline for a soft science I suppose.
‘soft deadline’? Yet another climate oxymoron to rank up there with ‘homogenized raw data.’
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