Two weeks before initiating a round of talks in Indonesia to re-negotiate the Kyoto Protocol, delegates from 130 countries have met in Valencia (Spain) this week and developed a 20-page report summarizing the many compromises required by governments before it is too late to reverse global warming.
The text, which puts together the most significant conclusions of three reports on climate change published earlier this year by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, urges countries to start combating climate change now.
Also the document calls on the United States and China, the world’s two greatest greenhouse gas emitters, to change their stance on this global scale problem and embrace the new policy guidelines.
The Kyoto Protocol was negotiated in 1997 and will expire in 2012. It forces 36 countries to reduce their carbon emissions by 2012. But the United States and China have not really played the game. While both of them are signatories to the treaty, the United States has never ratified it. China’s case is different. As a developing country, it was not bound by the protocol’s emissions cap.
The meeting in Bali next month will test policymakers’ commitment to reduce carbon emissions and to regulate human activity responsible for the rise in temperatures of the Earth. The world will be paying close attention to their willingness to compromise because much of what is then decided will determine what lies ahead for the future of mankind and the whole of the planet.
Both former Vice-President Al Gore and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change share the 2007 Nobel Prize in the Peace Category awarded earlier this year.
Original Source (s):
CNN article
New York Times
Picture Credit (s):
ABC News
Aitana, thank you for this report. We have seen pitifully little about this most recent IPCC report in our American news.
Deborah
The IPCC and the UN are both farces. The one constant in global climate is change. Always was and slways will be. Humans have no discernible effect.
The IPCC is now composed mainly of political appointees and activitist. It is also composed of people who will get their wallet “Greener” if people embrace GW. At one point of its history it may have been composed of Scientist, but not now.
If global warming is a cause in our climate change, then how come we humans don’t do anything about about it. In my own oppion i believe that for so many decades we as the whole world has been puluting earth every day. What if global warming is only a fracture of the cause to our world. What if underground volcanoes was really the cause to this. Can we as human beings do anything about it? Earth is old , and yes it has the power to heel itself, but really i believed that the mayan’s were right about the time when earth will be gone. Our time is nearing, and we should prepare for the coming changes in our civilization for which one day the revelations might be true.