Sarah Palin Questions Urgency Of Climate Change Deal...Al Gore Rebuts

Gore: Modern GOP leadership denies global warming issues. With climate change in the news, former Vice President Al Gore strikes back at deniers, particularly Sarah Palin. Gore says “global warming is not a political issue but a moral one.”

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Al Gore rebuts Palin's Climate Change claims

A former vice president and a former vice presidential nominee are engaged in a public battle over climate change, a tiff sparked by Sarah Palin's op-ed in Wednesday's Washington Post and furthered by Al Gore's rebuttal on MSNBC.

In a piece titled "Copenhagen's Political Science," the former Alaska governor charged that "leading climate 'experts'" have "destroyed records, manipulated data to 'hide the decline' in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals."

Gore bit back during an interview with NBC's Andrea Mitchell to air Wednesday afternoon. The former presidential candidate said "the deniers are persisting in an era of unreality. The entire North Polar ice cap is disappearing before our eyes ... what do they think is happening?"

Palin was referring to correspondence between some of the world's leading climate scientists. The e-mails were recently stolen from Britain's University of East Anglia and leaked on the Internet.

Skeptics of man-made global warming say the e-mails prove that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about climate change.

Last week, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue raised by the e-mails was serious and would be looked at in detail.

Palin also took to Facebook to allege that concerns over global warming are "doomsday scare tactics pushed by an environmental priesthood."

Gore said Wednesday that the scientific community has worked intensively on the issue for twenty years. "It's a principle in physics," he told Mitchell. "It's like gravity, it exists."

Palin said she's personally witnessed "the impact of changing weather patterns." But she said that "while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes."

"This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen," added Palin in The Washington Post. "Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits — not pursuing a political agenda."

She added that, in light of the e-mail controversy, President Barack Obama should boycott the upcoming climate change conference in Denmark. "Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference," said Palin.

Gore attributed the partisan divide over climate change to the leadership of the modern Republican party, which he feels has adopted a stronger stance on denying global warming.

Gore emphasized that climate change should be a bipartisan issue. "It used to be," he said.

He cited Lindsey Graham as one example of a Republican leader who accepts the science.






Copenhagen's Political Science


With the publication of damaging e-mails from a climate research center in Britain, the radical environmental movement appears to face a tipping point. The revelation of appalling actions by so-called climate change experts allows the American public to finally understand the concerns so many of us have articulated on this issue.

"Climate-gate," as the e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia have become known, exposes a highly politicized scientific circle -- the same circle whose work underlies efforts at the Copenhagen climate change conference. The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won't change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worse.

The e-mails reveal that leading climate "experts" deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to "hide the decline" in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals. What's more, the documents show that there was no real consensus even within the CRU crowd. Some scientists had strong doubts about the accuracy of estimates of temperatures from centuries ago, estimates used to back claims that more recent temperatures are rising at an alarming rate.

This scandal obviously calls into question the proposals being pushed in Copenhagen. I've always believed that policy should be based on sound science, not politics. As governor of Alaska, I took a stand against politicized science when I sued the federal government over its decision to list the polar bear as an endangered species despite the fact that the polar bear population had more than doubled.

I got clobbered for my actions by radical environmentalists nationwide, but I stood by my view that adding a healthy species to the endangered list under the guise of "climate change impacts" was an abuse of the Endangered Species Act. This would have irreversibly hurt both Alaska's economy and the nation's, while also reducing opportunities for responsible development.

Our representatives in Copenhagen should remember that good environmental policymaking is about weighing real-world costs and benefits -- not pursuing a political agenda. That's not to say I deny the reality of some changes in climate -- far from it. I saw the impact of changing weather patterns firsthand while serving as governor of our only Arctic state. I was one of the first governors to create a subcabinet to deal specifically with the issue and to recommend common-sense policies to respond to the coastal erosion, thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice that affect Alaska's communities and infrastructure.

But while we recognize the occurrence of these natural, cyclical environmental trends, we can't say with assurance that man's activities cause weather changes. We can say, however, that any potential benefits of proposed emissions reduction policies are far outweighed by their economic costs. And those costs are real.

Unlike the proposals China and India offered prior to Copenhagen -- which actually allow them to increase their emissions -- President Obama's proposal calls for serious cuts in our own long-term carbon emissions. Meeting such targets would require Congress to pass its cap-and-tax plans, which will result in job losses and higher energy costs (as Obama admitted during the campaign). That's not exactly what most Americans are hoping for these days. And as public opposition continues to stall Congress's cap-and-tax legislation, Environmental Protection Agency bureaucrats plan to regulate carbon emissions themselves, doing an end run around the American people.

In fact, we're not the only nation whose people are questioning climate change schemes. In the European Union, energy prices skyrocketed after it began a cap-and-tax program. Meanwhile, Australia's Parliament recently defeated a cap-and-tax bill. Surely other nations will follow suit, particularly as the climate e-mail scandal continues to unfold.

In his inaugural address, President Obama declared his intention to "restore science to its rightful place." But instead of staying home from Copenhagen and sending a message that the United States will not be a party to fraudulent scientific practices, the president has upped the ante. He plans to fly in at the climax of the conference in hopes of sealing a "deal." Whatever deal he gets, it will be no deal for the American people. What Obama really hopes to bring home from Copenhagen is more pressure to pass the Democrats' cap-and-tax proposal. This is a political move. The last thing America needs is misguided legislation that will raise taxes and cost jobs -- particularly when the push for such legislation rests on agenda-driven science.

Without trustworthy science and with so much at stake, Americans should be wary about what comes out of this politicized conference. The president should boycott Copenhagen.



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Sources: MSNBC, Washington Post, Amazon.com, Google Maps

Global Media Demands Climate Change Deal Be Reached...56 International Newspapers

Copenhagen Climate Change Conference: "Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation"


Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.



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Sources: Guardian.co.uk, Politico, Google Maps

Climate Change Summit Attendees Nervous About Hacked E-mails Data

Hacked e-mails about Climate Change data causes heated debated.

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Climate Talks Open With Calls for Urgent Action



A much-anticipated global meeting of nearly 200 nations — all seeking what has so far been elusive common ground on the issue of climate change — got under way here on Monday with an impassioned airing of what leaders here called the political and moral imperatives at hand.

“The clock has ticked down to zero,” said the United Nations’ climate chief, Yvo de Boer. “After two years of negotiation, the time has come to deliver.”

From now until Dec. 18, delegates will attempt to hammer out some of the most vexing details attending the pursuit of a global climate deal. Among these: Broad cuts in greenhouse gas emissions — particularly from big polluters like the United States and China — and a commitment from wealthy nations to deliver what could ultimately be hundreds of billions of dollars in financing to poor countries, who argue that they are ill-equipped to deal with a problem they did little to create.

Several countries announced new emissions goals in the days leading up to the meeting here, including China, Brazil, the United States and more recently India and South Africa — though many conference participants have noted that these remain far too low to keep rising temperatures in check over coming decades.

The pledges so far are “not going to get us as far we need to go, to really stay within the two-degree limit,” said Koko Warner, an observer with the United Nations University in Bonn who specializes in adaptation issues. “We don’t want to admit it, because the consequences are so bad,” she said.

Still, speakers at the opening plenary — which began with a slickly-produced video appeal from children across the world to save them from what looked like an apocalyptic future of deserts and rising seas — aimed to spur negotiators forward.

After several hundred delegates and observers settled in the main conference hall to music from a trumpeter, a harpist and the Danish Girls Choir, Connie Hedegaard, the Danish minister presiding over the conference, highlighted the recent string of emissions commitments.

“Every positive announcement will improve our chances of staying below the two-degrees Celsius target,” she said, “But as we all know only too well,” she added, "we are not there yet.”

“This goes for financing as well,” Ms. Hedegaard said, noting that arriving at consensus on that issue “may be an even bigger challenge” than emissions cuts.

Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, addressed the delegates and spoke of the urgent need for action, and had pointed remarks for those who “find it difficult to accept” climate change science -- particularly after e-mail messages and files allegedly stolen from a British climate research center three weeks ago raised questions about data manipulation among some leading climate scientists.

Dr. Pachauri ticked down a list of independent trends that robustly reflect the warming of the global climate. “Internal consistency from multiple lines of evidence strongly supports the work of the scientific community, including the individuals singled out in these e-mail messages,” he said.

Both outside and inside the plenary, the mood among negotiators and other participants was one of cautious optimism. Jonathan Pershing, the State Department’s special envoy for climate who was representing the United States at the opening plenary, said he saw strong evidence that the conference would prove a critical juncture in efforts to get traction on curbing emissions and helping poor countries limit vulnerability to climate hazards — particularly given the decision by more than 100 leaders, including President Obama, to attend.

He also said he saw no indication that efforts could be blunted by Saudi Arabia and other countries that have raised concerns about climate findings based on the e-mail scandal.

Outside the Bella Center, pressure — and some criticism — was mounting on conference participants to overcome differences and deliver results during the coming days.

An open letter from the environmental group Friends of the Earth condemned what it called “undemocratic practices adopted by the Danish Presidency of convening small and exclusive groups of countries before the Copenhagen meeting” — a reference to the rumored existence of an “alternate” treaty document being readied by some big players in the negotiations, including conference organizers, should efforts to sort out differences on the current text be fruitless.

Other blocs — including China — are rumored to be working on similar alternative documents of their own.

Meanwhile, in what appeared to be an unprecedented action, 56 newspapers around the world published the same editorial calling for “decisive action” in Copenhagen.

“In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage,” read the editorial, which was spearheaded by Britain’s Guardian newspaper. “Yet so far the world’s response has been feeble and half-hearted.”

Continued inaction, the authors asserted, would ravage the planet and wreak havoc on economies and livelihoods.

“The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history’s judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it,” the editorial concluded. “We implore them to make the right choice.”



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Sources: NY Times, MSNBC, Daily Mail, Google Maps

Historic Climate Change Summit Meeting Kicks Off

Nations gather for Climate Summit. Nearly 200 nations have gathered in Denmark for a climate summit that environmental groups hope will lead to comprehensive measures to stop global warming. NBC’s Anne Thompson reports.

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Hacked e-mails about Climate Change data causes heated debated.

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Cautious optimism precedes Climate Summit being held in Copenhagen, Denmark.

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Biggest Climate Meeting in history kicks off


The biggest climate meeting in history, with 15,000 participants from 192 nations, opened in Copenhagen on Monday with host Denmark saying an unmissable opportunity to protect the planet was "within reach."

"The world is depositing hope with you for a short while in the history of mankind," Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told delegates at the opening ceremony of the talks, seeking to agree the first U.N. climate pact in 12 years.

He said that 110 world leaders, including President Barack Obama, would attend a summit at the end of the Dec. 7-18 meeting to agree deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions for the rich by 2020 and raise billions of dollars for the poor in aid.

"A deal is within our reach," Rasmussen said.

The presence of so many world leaders "reflects an unprecedented mobilization of political determination to combat climate change. It represents a huge opportunity. An opportunity the world cannot afford to miss," Rasmussen said.

"The ultimate responsibility rests with the citizens of the world, who will ultimately bear the fatal consequences, if we fail to act," he said.

Rich-Poor divide

But the summit will have to overcome deep distrust between rich and poor nations about sharing the cost of emissions cuts.

Activists asked delegates arriving at the conference center, with a large wind turbine nearby, to go through a green gateway marked "Vote Earth" or a red one marked "Global Warming". They told off anyone choosing red.

Others handed out free coffee to delegates, pamphlets about global warming and buttons urging wider use of public transport.

The attendance of the leaders and pledges to curb emissions by all the top emitters -- led by China, the United States, Russia and India -- have raised hopes for an accord after sluggish negotiations in the past two years.

South Africa added new impetus, saying on Sunday it would cut its carbon emissions to 34 percent below expected levels by 2020, if rich countries furnished financial and technological help.

World leaders did not attend when environment ministers agreed the existing U.N. climate pact, the Kyoto Protocol, in 1997.

Brightened hopes

Plans by world leaders to attend have brightened hopes since Rasmussen said last month that time had run out to agree a full legal treaty in 2009. The aim for Copenhagen is a politically binding deal and a new deadline in 2010 for legal details.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, writing in the Guardian newspaper on Monday, said: "The British government is absolutely clear about what we must achieve. Our aim is a comprehensive and global agreement that is then converted to an internationally legally binding treaty in no more than six months."

He added: "If by the end of next week we have not got an ambitious agreement, it will be an indictment of our generation that our children will not forgive."

Some 56 newspapers from 45 countries including The Guardian, Le Monde, El Pais and Toronto Star on Monday published a joint editorial urging world leaders to take decisive action.

"Humanity faces a profound emergency. Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet," it said.

"The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw a calamity coming but did not avert it."

Pinprick in rising temperatures

The Kyoto pact binds industrialized nations to cut emissions until 2012 and even its supporters admit it is only a pinprick in rising world temperatures, especially since Washington did not join its allies in ratifying the pact.

This time, the idea is to get action from all major emitters including China and India to help avert more droughts, desertification, wildfires, species extinctions and rising seas.

The meeting will test how far developing nations will stick to entrenched positions, for example that rich nations must cut their greenhouse gases by at least 40 percent by 2020 -- far deeper than targets on offer.

The United Nations wants developed nations to agree deep cuts in greenhouse emissions by 2020 and come up with immediate, $10 billion a year in new funds to help the poor cope. He wants developing nations to start slowing their rising emissions.



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Sources: MSNBC, Reuters, TIME, Google Maps

Copenhagen Prostitutes Offer Free Sex To Climate Summit Attendees...Job Strategy

Prostitutes Offer Free Climate Summit Sex



Copenhagen Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards to city hotels warning summit guests not to patronize Danish sex workers during the upcoming conference. Now, the prostitutes have struck back, offering free sex to anyone who produces one of the warnings.

Copenhagen's city council in conjunction with Lord Mayor Ritt Bjerregaard sent postcards out to 160 Copenhagen hotels urging COP15 guests and delegates to 'Be sustainable - don't buy sex'.

"Dear hotel owner, we would like to urge you not to arrange contacts between hotel guests and prostitutes," the approach to hotels says.

Now, Copenhagen prostitutes are up in arms, saying that the council has no business meddling in their affairs. They have now offered free sex to anyone who can produce one of the offending postcards and their COP15 identity card, according to the Web site avisen.dk.

Discrimination

According to the report, the move has been organized by the Sex Workers Interest Group (SIO).

"This is sheer discrimination. Ritt Bjerregaard is abusing her position as Lord Mayor in using her power to prevent us carrying out our perfectly legal job. I don't understand how she can be allowed to contact people in this way," SIO Spokeswoman Susanne Møller tells avisen.dk.

Møller adds that it is reprehensible and unfair that Copenhagen politicians have chosen to use the UN Climate Summit as a platform for a hetz against sex workers.

"But they've done it and we have to defend ourselves," Møller says.



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Sources: Speigel Online International, Politiken.dk, Google Maps