* Talks to show if world agrees with idea of delay
* Denmark says time too short for legally binding treaty
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent - Sun Nov 15, 2009 8:55am EST
OSLO, Nov 15 (Reuters) - About 40 environment ministers meet in Copenhagen on Monday to try to salvage a U.N. climate deal next month, after leaders at an Asia Pacific summit rallied round a plan to delay a legally binding deal beyond 2009. The ministers, including from top greenhouse gas emitters China and the United States, are due to meet for two days in a Copenhagen hotel in one of the final chances to break a long-running deadlock between rich and poor.
The meeting will test how far the rest of the world agrees with U.S. President Barack Obama and leaders at an Asia Pacific summit in Singapore who on Sunday gave support to plans by Denmark to agree only a political deal, not a full legal treaty, in Copenhagen.
Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen outlined a plan for a 5-8 page "political agreement" in Copenhagen to cover key issues such as curbs on greenhouse gas emissions, and that sets a deadline for agreeing a binding legal text sometime in future.
But African nations, the least developed countries, small island states and some European nations have all insisted that a proper treaty should be agreed in Copenhagen.
"Every indication is that (these nations) still want a legally binding outcome in Copenhagen," said Kim Carstensen of the WWF environmental group which also wants a treaty agreed there. "It's just too early to lower the ambition," he said.
Rasmussen said Copenhagen could still agree goals such as cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by developed nations, actions by developing nations to slow their rising emissions and funds to help the poor, even if they were not enshrined in legal text.
"We are not aiming to let anyone off the hook," he said.
FACE-SAVING?
"I doubt the majority of countries will buy this 'face-saving' plan," said Kaisa Kosonen of Greenpeace, saying it ignored the needs of nations most vulnerable to more floods, droughts, sandstorms, disease or rising sea levels.
The ministers' talks this week in Copenhagen are due to be closed to the media, except for a final news conference.
Developing nations insist that rich countries must agree to deep 2020 cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions and come up with billions of dollars to help the poor cope.
But rich nations, hit by recession and with unemployment above 10 percent in the United States for the first time since the 1980s, have been reluctant to promise too much in the sluggish negotiations, launched in Bali, Indonesia in 2007.
A big problem is that the United States, the only industrialized nation outside the existing Kyoto Protocol for curbing emissions until 2012, has not yet agreed carbon-capping laws. Many nations are unwilling to act while uncertainty remains about Washington's commitment. (Editing by Mark Trevelyan) (For an Interactive factbox on the Climate Change conference in Copenhagen please click here) -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: blogs.reuters.com/environment/
Climate talks seek to salvage U.N. Copenhagen deal
Jellyfish swarm northward in warming world - http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/climate_09_jellyfish_menacehttp://movies.yahoo.com/feature/2012-roland-emmerich.html#watchU.N. Using Climate to Push One World Government Reforms »
The United Nations (U.N.) Climate Change Conference is currently drafting a treaty that would place the United States under an unelected, undemocratic world body with the power to impose taxes and place limits on industry, transportation, mining and energy production. Read this article and decide whether this is the One World Government power grab so many fear…More »
From: Newsmax.com – E-mail
'Consensus' on Climate Change Is 'Fake,' Scientists Say.
A team of scientists has sent a letter to all U.S. senators warning that a claim there is "consensus" in the scientific community on the climate change issue is false.
The letter dated Oct. 29 reads in part: "You have recently received a letter from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), purporting to convey a 'consensus' of the scientific community that immediate and drastic action is needed to avert a climatic catastrophe. . .
"The claim of consensus is fake, designed to stampede you into actions that will cripple our economy, and which you will regret for many years. There is no consensus, and even if there were, consensus is not the test of scientific validity. Theories that disagree with the facts are wrong, consensus or no."
The five signees of the letter include professors from Princeton University , the University of Virginia and the University of California , Santa Barbara .
The letter refers to an earlier open letter sent to Congress by those five signees and others declaring: "The sky is not falling. The earth has been cooling for 10 years, without help. The present cooling was NOT predicted by the alarmists' computer models, and has come as an embarrassment to them. . .
"We are flooded with claims that the evidence is clear, that the debate is closed, that we must act immediately, etc., but in fact there is no such evidence. It doesn't exist."
The Oct. 29 letter also notes that the American Physical Society, an organization of physicists, did not sign the AAAS letter and states the society is "at this moment reviewing its stance on so-called global warming, having received a petition from its membership to do so. That petition was signed by 160 distinguished members and fellows of the society, including one Nobelist and 12 members of the National Academies. Indeed a score of the signers are Members and Fellows of the AAAS, none of whom were consulted before the AAAS letter to you."
The petition reads in part: "Studies of a variety of natural processes, including ocean cycles and solar variability, indicate that they can account for variations in the Earth's climate on the time scale of decades and centuries. Current climate models appear insufficiently reliable to properly account for natural and anthropogenic contributions to past climate change, much less project future climate.
"The APS supports an objective scientific effort to understand the effects of all processes — natural and human — on the Earth's climate."
The 160 signees of the petition range alphabetically from Harold M. Agnew, former White House science councilor and former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, to Martin V. Zombeck, a physicist formerly with theHarvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and include Ivar Giaever, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 1973.
Editorial: Pope's New Encyclical Speaks Against, not for One-World Government and New World Order
July 8, 2009 ( LifeSiteNews.com ) - Newspapers, blogs, talk-shows on radio and television are full of discussion over Pope Benedict XVI's supposed call for a "new world order" or a "one-world government." These ideas are, however, neither based in reality nor a clear reading of the Pope's latest encyclical,Caritas in Veritate , the release of which yesterday spawned the heated discussion.
The Pope actually speaks directly against a one-world government, and, as would be expected from those who have read his previous writings, calls for massive reform of the United Nations. Confusion seems to have come from paragraph 67 of the encyclical, which has some choice pull-quotes which have spiced the pages of the world's news, from the New York Times to those of conspiracy theorist bloggers seeing the Pope as the Anti-Christ.
The key quote which has led to the charge reads: "To manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result; to bring about integral and timely disarmament, food security and peace; to guarantee the protection of the environment and to regulate migration: for all this, there is urgent need of a true world political authority, as my predecessor Blessed John XXIII indicated some years ago."
However, in paragraph 41, the Holy Father specifically differentiates his concept of a world political authority from that of a one-world government. "We must," he says "promote a dispersed political authority." He explains that "The integrated economy of the present day does not make the role of States redundant, but rather it commits governments to greater collaboration with one another. Both wisdom and prudence suggest not being too precipitous in declaring the demise of the State. In terms of the resolution of the current crisis, the State's role seems destined to grow, as it regains many of its competences. In some nations, moreover, the construction or reconstruction of the State remains a key factor in their development."
Later in the encyclical (57) he speaks of the opposite concept to one-world government -subsidiarity (the principle of Catholic social teaching which states that matters ought to be handled by the smallest, lowest or least centralized competent authority) - as being essential. "In order not to produce a dangerous universal power of a tyrannical nature, the governance of globalization must be marked by subsidiarity," says the Pope.
Another of the key quotes which is being extracted for shock value from the encyclical is this: "In the face of the unrelenting growth of global interdependence, there is a strongly felt need, even in the midst of a global recession, for a reform of the United Nations Organization, and likewise of economic institutions and international finance, so that the concept of the family of nations can acquire real teeth."
Since long before his papacy, Joseph Ratzinger has vigorously fought the United Nations' vision of a 'New World Order'. As early as 1997 , and repeated subsequently , Ratzinger took public aim at such a vision, noting that the philosophy coming from UN conferences and the Millennium Summit "proposes strategies to reduce the number of guests at the table of humanity, so that the presumed happiness [we] have attained will not be affected."
"At the base of this New World Order", he said is the ideology of "women's empowerment," which erroneously sees "the principal obstacles to [a woman's] fulfillment [as] the family and maternity." The then-cardinal advised that "at this stage of the development of the new image of the new world, Christians - and not just them but in any case they even more than others - have the duty to protest."
Benedict XVI in fact repeats those criticisms in the new encyclical. In Caritas in Veritate , the Pope slams "practices of demographic control, on the part of governments that often promote contraception and even go so far as to impose abortion." He also denounces international economic bodies such as the IMF and World Bank (without specifically naming them) for their lending practices which tie aid to so-called 'family planning.' "There is reason to suspect that development aid is sometimes linked to specific health-care policies which de facto involve the imposition of strong birth control measures," says the encyclical.
Any vision of a proper ordering of the world, of international economics or political cooperation, suggests the Pope, must be based on a "moral order." That includes first and foremost "the fundamental right to life" from conception to natural death, the recognition of the family based on marriage between one man and one woman as the basis of society and freedom for faith and cooperation among all peoples based on principles of natural law.
http://www.lifesitenews.com/ldn/2009/jul/09070812.html%20Reply%20to%20Post
Pictorial History (Chart) of our Future Demise (Scheduled for December 31st) If We Don’t Stop It (Below) – Agenda 21, Cap and Trade in U.S and the Copenhagen Treaty… and much more
Links you need to explore: Club of Rome & Codex Alimentarious/Earth Charter/UNESCO…
Agenda 21 - Video
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