‘15 Days to Copenhagen’
The disappointing results of negotiations in Bonn last week are indication that industrialised countries are unwilling to make substantial contributions to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
The disappointing results of negotiations in Bonn last week are indication that industrialised countries are unwilling to make substantial contributions to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions.
They failed once again to meet the expectations formulated in 2007 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
In a report in February 2007, the IPCC called for reductions of up to 40 percent up to 2020. Without substantial reductions, it warned, the average earth temperature would rise by more than two degrees Celsius by 2050.
Two degrees is considered the most that earth can tolerate if it is to maintain its ecological equilibrium.
A temperature rise beyond this point, the IPCC said, would lead to environmental catastrophes from severe droughts to further melting of glaciers and rise in sea level, and stronger and more frequent cyclones and hurricanes.
The industrialised nations – other than the U.S. - responsible for most greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change, proposed reduction by 16 to 24 percent by 2020 relative to 1990 levels.
The U.S., the largest polluting country per capita by far, did not commit itself even to this.
The total reductions offered by industrialised nations add up to far less if U.S. emissions are taken into account.
"If we count the U.S. emissions, then the reductions proposed in Bonn by industrialised nations fall to 10 to 15 percent," Martin Kaiser, climate change expert with the environmental organisation Greenpeace told IPS.
"If we continue at this rate we're not going to make it," Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which hosted the meeting in Bonn, told a news conference after the closing of the negotiations.
Some 2,000 delegates from 192 nations took part in the Bonn talks.
The conference in Copenhagen is expected to produce a binding global agreement on reducing emissions, to take over from the Kyoto protocol on climate change which expires in 2012.
De Boer said there are now only 15 days of negotiations left until the Copenhagen meeting.
"A climate deal in Copenhagen this year is an unequivocal requirement to stop climate change from slipping out of control," he said.
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