Meaningful Agreement: Obama Says 'A First Step' Climate Deal Has Been Reached In

[Shonnon]

Meaningful Agreement: Obama Says 'A First Step' Climate Deal Has Been Reached In Copenhagen
Huffington Post   |  Katherine Goldstein/Craig Kanalley
First Posted: 12-18-09 04:14 PM   |   Updated: 12-18-09 06:31 PM

A 'meaningful agreement' has been reached at the Copenhagen climate change conference, according to U.S. officials.

The deal includes China, India, and South Africa, but it is not enough to combat the threat of climate change, according to an official.

The New York Times has obtained a copy of an official administration memo:


    Today, following a multilateral meeting between President Obama, Premier Wen, Prime Minister Singh, and President Zuma a meaningful agreement was reached. Its not sufficient to combat the threat of climate change but its an important first step.

    We entered this negotiation at a time when there were significant differences between countries. Developed and developing countries have now agreed to listing their national actions and commitments, a finance mechanism, to set a mitigation target of two degrees celsius and to provide information on the implementation of their actions through national communicatios, with provisions for international consultations and analysis under clearly defined guidelines.

    No country is entirely satisfied with each element but this is a meaningful and historic step forward and a foundation from which to make further progress.

    We thank the emerging economies for their voluntary actions and especially appreciate the work and leadership of the europeans in this effort.

[Shonnon]

UPDATE: President Obama spoke at at a press conference Friday night at the Copenhagen climate talks stating that an agreement had been reached, but stressed that this is a "first step" in the process of regulating global emissions. This agreement is not legally binding, an important aspect that environmental advocates had been pushing for over the last two years of talks. Speaking about the failure to reach a legally binding agreement, Obama stated, "If we just waited for that, we'd not make any progress."

To see the full text of the agreement, which is being called The Copenhagen Accord, Grist.org has the full document.

http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-18-text-of-the-not-yet-final-climate-deal/

[Shonnon]

The Washington Post goes on to describe the agreement as:

    "appear[ing] to fall short of even modest expectations for the summit. As part of the agreement -- brokered after a last-minute meeting between Obama and his counterparts from China, India and South Africa -- industrialized and developing nations agreed to list their national actions and commitments in their fight against climate change, while vowing to take action to prevent the Earth's temperature from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius. In addition, they agreed to provide information on the implementation of their actions, which would be subject to international review and analysis."

UPDATE: Reactions from environmental groups from around the world are beginning to pour in. Friends Of The Earth, an NGO which had been highly involved in advocating for an fair, ambitious and legally binding deal, released the following statement:

    "Climate negotiations in Copenhagen have yielded a sham agreement with no real requirements for any countries. This is not a strong deal or a just one -- it isn't even a real one. It's just repackaging old positions and pretending they're new. The actions it suggests for the rich countries that caused the climate crisis are extraordinarily inadequate. This is a disastrous outcome for people around the world who face increasingly dire impacts from a destabilizing climate.

    ---

    "The failure to produce anything meaningful in Copenhagen must serve as a wake up call to all who care about the future. It is a call to action. Corporate polluters and other special interests have such overwhelming influence that rich country governments are willing to agree only to fig leaf solutions. This is unacceptable, and it must change.

[Shonnon]

Bill McKibben, author and founder of 350.org, gave the following statement:

    "This is a declaration that small and poor countries don't matter, that international civil society doesn't matter, and that serious limits on carbon don't matter. The president has wrecked the UN and he's wrecked the possibility of a tough plan to control global warming. It may get Obama a reputation as a tough American leader, but it's at the expense of everything progressives have held dear. 189 countries have been left powerless, and the foxes now guard the carbon henhouse without any oversight."

Kumi Naidoo, The Executive Director of Greenpeace, stated:

    "Not fair, not ambitious and not legally binding. The job of world leaders is not done. Today they failed to avert catastrophic climate change.

    The city of Copenhagen is a climate crime scene tonight, with the guilty men and women fleeing to the airport in shame. World leaders had a once in a generation chance to change the world for good, to avert catastrophic climate change. In the end they produced a poor deal full of loopholes big enough to fly Air Force One through.

    We have seen a year of crises, but today it is clear that the biggest one facing humanity is a leadership crisis."

[Volitzer]

Climate-gate just blew up in their faces.  All the data was proven unreliable.  Many climatologists have data proving the contrary.

Why are you women here so gullible to enviro-fraud ??

Why don't women work to boycott aspartame which turns to fermaldehyde in your liver or sucralose which destroys the liver's digestive cells ??

Now-a-days women are buying this stuff by the 12 and 20 packs.

But no they worry about "climate-change" and suck down their eugenic diet colas.

It's nothing personal Shonnon, but CO2 is what plants use to make plant sugars.  Reference the carbon cycle and photosynthesis.

That and many places are reporting one of the coldest winters on record.

[Robert0326]

Climate change is a natural occurrence.  Granted I'd like to breath clean air but man is not the sole reason for the change in climate patterns. 

[Brandi Dye]

Yeah, actually it is in this case. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, thus making the world warmer.

Now, that doesn't just mean that the world is warmer all the time, these brief spells of cold and snow mean nothing,  You have to extrapolate the data over long periods of time, not short periods of time, i.e. decades, not seasons.

As for CO2 being harmless as Volitzer suggests, wrong. Too much CO2, like too many of ANY gases we find in our atmosphere make the world uninhabitable. So, the correct way to put it is:  yes, CO2 in small doses is harmless, in larger doses (like we have not) it is not.

As for your insults about women, Voliter, they might mean something to us, if you knew what you were talking about, science, for instance.

[Volitzer]

Yeah, actually it is in this case. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the atmosphere, thus making the world warmer.

Now, that doesn't just mean that the world is warmer all the time, these brief spells of cold and snow mean nothing,  You have to extrapolate the data over long periods of time, not short periods of time, i.e. decades, not seasons.

As for CO2 being harmless as Volitzer suggests, wrong. Too much CO2, like too many of ANY gases we find in our atmosphere make the world uninhabitable. So, the correct way to put it is:  yes, CO2 in small doses is harmless, in larger doses (like we have not) it is not.

As for your insults about women, Volitzer, they might mean something to us, if you knew what you were talking about, science, for instance.

Okay then disprove what I have said about aspartame and sucralose then.

Also you have temperatures on Mars rise and fall depending on the sunspots, more sunspots the hotter the less sunspots the colder.  Mars is mainly CO2 and yet it cools when the sunspots disappear.  There is also plenty of photosynthetic activity on the surface of the planet if you get info from Space Scientists rather than NASA PR people.  Humans can't breath the atmosphere but the plants are doing fine.

Ever notice how you shut a climate changer up when you mention sunspots ?

[Klitza]

"Also you have temperatures on Mars rise and fall depending on the sunspots, more sunspots the hotter the less sunspots the colder."

How do you know what the temperature is on Mars or it's climate history? All you have is pictures of the surface, no one has ever been there.

[Robert0326]

Aspartame (or APM) (pronounced /ˈæspərteɪm/ or /əˈspɑrteɪm/) is the name for an artificial, non-saccharide sweetener used as a sugar substitute in many foods and beverages. In the European Union, it is known under the E number (additive code) E951. Aspartame is the methyl ester of a phenylalanine/aspartic acid dipeptide.

Aspartame was first synthesized in 1965. Its use in food products was approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration in 1980. Because its breakdown products include phenylalanine, aspartame is among the many substances that must be avoided by people with phenylketonuria (PKU), a rare genetic condition. Although some political activists, conspiracy theorists, and a few medical researchers have questioned the safety of aspartame,[3] the most recent medical review on the subject concluded that "the weight of existing scientific evidence indicates that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a non-nutritive sweetener."

Sucralose is a zero-calorie sugar substitute artificial sweetener. In the European Union, it is also known under the E number (additive code) E955. Sucralose is approximately 600 times as sweet as sucrose (table sugar),[2] twice as sweet as saccharin, and 3.3 times as sweet as aspartame. Unlike aspartame, it is stable under heat and over a broad range of pH conditions. Therefore, it can be used in baking or in products that require a longer shelf life. The commercial success of sucralose-based products stems from its favorable comparison to other low-calorie sweeteners in terms of taste, stability, and safety.[3]

Sucralose is typically added to foods in very small quantities. Sucralose products manufactured in the US for domestic consumption are commonly formulated by the addition of "bulking" ingredients such as glucose (dextrose) and maltodextrin to give a degree of sweetness per unit volume comparable to sucrose, and to give some products an appearance similar to granular sugar. Some examples of these sweeteners are Splenda, SucraPlus, Candys and Cukren.

What do these have to do with climate change Volitzer?  I know... Not a damn thing.

[Volitzer]

My point is that these women are actually worrying about a problem that doesn't exist - climate-change.  All the while they typically are the ones who slurp down sodas with all these chemicals in them.

The chemicals will do their liver harm.  Things that do the body harm are bad for their physiological environment.  Hence real environmentalism.  Sucralose, aspartame and sodium-fluoride are all toxic.  True environmentalists fight human exposure to things that are toxic.  Case and Point.

[Robert0326]

Ok if climate change doesn't exist then explain the dozens of ice ages within the past few 100,000 years.

[Volitzer]

Exactly there have been ice ages long before humans have started driving cars and burning fossil fuels.  Meaning that human kind has nothing to do with any current climate changes going on.

Now one thing humans are responsible for is the CO emissions from burning various fuels that do not get absorbed during photosynthesis.  Smog cities are a problem.  However in say the state of NY the winteres there will clean out the air of any CO pollutants, versus California where it tends to linger.  So California would need to curb emissions since the weather there doesn't clean the atmosphere like the North East's does.

[Volitzer]

Climategate: The Official Cover-up Continues

http://www.prisonplanet.com/climategate-the-official-cover-up-continues.html

James Delingpole
London Telegraph
Friday, February 12, 2010

If there’s one thing that stinks even more than Climategate, it’s the attempts we’re seeing everywhere from the IPCC and Penn State University to the BBC to pretend that nothing seriously bad has happened, that “the science” is still “settled”, and that it’s perfectly OK for the authorities go on throwing loads more of our money at a problem that doesn’t exist.

The latest example of this noisome phenomenon is Sir Muir Russell’s official whitewash – sorry “independent inquiry”  into the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) scandal.

The inquiry has not even begun and already it has told its first blatant lie – seen here on its official website.

    Do any of the Review team members have a predetermined view on climate change and climate science?
    No.  Members of the research team come from a variety of scientific backgrounds. They were selected on the basis they have no prejudicial interest in climate change and climate science and for the contribution they can make to the issues the Review is looking at.

By what bizarre logic, then, did Sir Muir think it a good idea to appoint to his panel the editor of Nature, Dr Philip Campbell? Dr Campbell is hardly neutral: his magazine has for years been arguing aggressively in favour of the AGW, and which published this editorial in the wake of Climategate:

(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)

Climategate: The Official Cover up Continues 100210banner1

    The e-mail archives stolen last month from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (UEA), UK, have been greeted by the climate-change-denialist fringe as a propaganda windfall (see page 551). To these denialists, the scientists’ scathing remarks about certain controversial palaeoclimate reconstructions qualify as the proverbial ’smoking gun’: proof that mainstream climate researchers have systematically conspired to suppress evidence contradicting their doctrine that humans are warming the globe.

    This paranoid interpretation would be laughable were it not for the fact that obstructionist politicians in the US Senate will probably use it next year as an excuse to stiffen their opposition to the country’s much needed climate bill. Nothing in the e-mails undermines the scientific case that global warming is real — or that human activities are almost certainly the cause. That case is supported by multiple, robust lines of evidence, including several that are completely independent of the climate reconstructions debated in the e-mails.

Dr Campbell has since resigned his post – and rightly so. But are we to feel any more confident about the alleged neutrality of another of Sir Muir’s appointments, Professor Geoffrey Boulton?

http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100025934/climategate-the-official-cover-up-continues/

[Shonnon]

My point is that these women are actually worrying about a problem that doesn't exist - climate-change.  All the while they typically are the ones who slurp down sodas with all these chemicals in them.

How do you know that women are "slurping down sodas?"  I don't, they are unhealthy for you, high fructose corn syrup adds pounds and some of the other materials are said to cause cancer.  Don't treat people with stereotypes, you'll sound more intelligent.