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Climate science alive and well despite scandals: scientists
San Diego, California (AFP) Feb 19, 2010 Climate science is alive and well despite the scandal of leaked emails in Britain and "glitches" in a report by the UN climate change panel, top scientists said Friday. "There's consensus that action is justified, indeed imperative to reduce the problem of a really serious long-term global effect on the climate," said Lord Martin Rees, president of the British academy of science, the Royal Society. "My personal take is the key bit of evidence is the rise in CO2 concentration plus simple physics. If we had no data other than that, that would be enough," Rees told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Climate change sceptics seized on a leak of thousands of emails and other documents from researchers at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Britain, which appeared to show scientists saying global warming was not as serious as previously thought. That scandal, dubbed Climategate, came just weeks before UN talks on climate change in Copenhagen in December. Several weeks after the talks, another scandal rocked the world of climate science, when the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was accused of basing a report about ice disappearing from the world's mountain peaks on a student essay and an article in a mountaineering magazine. But scientists weren't out for the count; they just can't, ethically, "go into the gutter" the way the media have in attacking the science world over the leakks, said Jerry North of Texas A&M University. "It's easy vilify scientists but scientists cannot go into the gutter and turn the attacks the other way. "But the climate science paradigm is in fact quite healthy. We just have a lot of challenges about how we communicate," said North. Scientists may be good at crunching numberss and data, but they're bad at doing their own public relations, said Ralph Cicerone, president of the National Academy of Sciences. "There are a lot of smart people working on climate change right now, but we're not doing a good job of translating what we're learning to the public," said Cicerone. "Instead when we have a major snowstorm on the east coast of the US, jokes are proliferating about how wrong all this global warming stuff was. And yet you turn on your television and look at the winter Olympics in Canada and you find no snow..."
earlier related report His resignation, announced Thursday, takes effect July 1, five months before world leaders are to convene in Mexico to hammer out a binding global treaty aimed at combating climate change. And it comes as the United Nations is battling a public relations disaster related to its climate change science. "It's a setback for the process," the Irish Times' Frank McDonald, the journalist in Europe who probably knows most about the climate circus, told United Press International in a telephone interview Thursday. "Yvo was very much part of this. He knew where the bodies were buried." De Boer, 55, takes his hat after organizing a rather disappointing climate conference in Copenhagen, where 120 world leaders failed to agree to more than vague promises to limit carbon dioxide emissions. Experts have blasted the so-called Copenhagen Accord, a text patched together in the final hours of the Copenhagen meeting. The non-binding text was merely noted but not adopted by the conference parties. It sets the limit of global warming to 3.6 degrees F and provides short- and long-term finance to help poor nations cope with climate change; it also set 2015 as a review year to see if global action needs to be more urgent to meet the challenge. But it remains a voluntary text, and even if nations commit to it, they are not legally bound to honor their pledges. Observers say time is running out for a binding deal to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which runs out in 2012, to be agreed in Mexico -- so de Boer's resignation doesn't come at a good time. The Dutch diplomat during the past years jetted from capital to capital in a bid to bridge the trust gap between rich and poor nations. He was often frustrated by the pace of negotiations but never vented his frustration publicly, observers say. The son of diplomats from the Netherlands, de Boer joined climate negotiations in the 1990s and has headed the United Nations' climate brief since 2006. He put in his most memorable performance at the Bali talks, when he broke down on the podium after being accused by China of mishandling negotiating arrangements, which he strongly denied. The Bali Action Plan, which for the first time united the world on post-Kyoto climate change efforts, elevated climate protection to the global stage. Experts, including McDonald of the Irish Times, point to John Ashe, the Antigua and Barbuda diplomat and an expert of the climate talks, as a possible successor. De Boer will leave politics to advise the Dutch audit and consulting firm, KPMG, on climate change and sustainability. "I have always maintained that, while governments provide the necessary policy framework, the real solutions must come from business," he said in a statement. "I now have the chance to make this happen."
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Copenhagen climate summit a 'failure': Medvedev Moscow (AFP) Feb 18, 2010 The United Nations climate change summit in Copenhagen was a failure but should serve as a lesson for the future, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev said on Thursday. "We need to admit that it was a failure... but at the same time it was a lesson. Such events require a different kind of preparation in the future," Medevedev said at a meeting with Russian officials. He affirmed however tha ... read more |
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