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Osama Faisal / AP
Activists criticizing what they called a slow pace to climate talks protest Saturday at the convention center in Qatar. Norway's environment minister, Bard Vegar, speaks to some of them.
DOHA, Qatar -- Almost 200 nations on Saturday extended until 2020 a weak international plan for fighting global warming, averting a new setback to two decades of U.N. efforts that have failed to halt rising greenhouse gas emissions.
The eight-year extension of the Kyoto Protocol keeps it alive as the sole legally binding plan for combating global warming. But it was sapped by the withdrawal of Russia, Japan and Canada, so its signatories now account for only 15 percent of global greenhouse emissions.
A package of decisions, known as the Doha Climate Gateway, would also postpone until 2013 a dispute over demands from developing nations for more cash to help them cope with global warming.
All sides say the Doha decisions fell far short of recommendations by scientists for tougher action.
Though expectations were low for the two-week conference, many developing countries rejected the deal as insufficient to put the world on track to fight the rising temperatures that are raising sea levels. Some Pacific island nations see this as a threat to their existence.
"This is not where we wanted to be at the end of the meeting, I assure you," said Nauru Foreign Minister Kieren Keke, who leads an alliance of small island states. "It certainly isn't where we need to be in order to prevent islands from going under and other unimaginable impacts."
"It was not an easy ride. It was not a beautiful ride. It was not a fast ride, but we managed to cross the bridge and hopefully we can increase our speed," added European Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard.
She said the deal would pave the way to talks on a new, global U.N. pact meant be agreed in 2015 and enter into force in 2020, when Kyoto now expires. It will have emissions goals for all, including emerging nations led by China and India.
The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which controls the greenhouse gas emissions of rich countries, expires this year. However, the second phase only covers about 15 percent of global emissions after Canada, Japan, New Zealand and Russia opted out.
Originally, Kyoto obliged about 35 industrialized nations to cut greenhouse gas emissions by an average of at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels during the period from 2008 to 2012.
The U.S. never joined Kyoto, partly because it didn't include China and other fast-growing developing countries.
Poor countries came into the talks in Doha demanding a timetable on how rich countries would scale up climate change aid for them to $100 billion annually by 2020 — a general pledge that was made three years ago.
But rich nations -- including the United States, members of the European Union and Japan -- are still grappling with the effects of a financial crisis and were not interested in detailed talks on aid in Doha.
The agreement on financing made no reference to any mid-term financing targets, just a general pledge to "identify pathways for mobilizing the scaling up of climate finance."
The two-week U.N. meeting had been due to end on Friday but the talks went on into Saturday evening.
World carbon dioxide emissions are set to rise by 2.6 percent this year, and are more than 50 percent higher than in 1990. Recent growth has come mostly from emerging nations, led by China and India.
The Associated Press and Reuters contributed to this report.
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How dare these third world countries attempt to extort money from the rich countries. If these damned tribes want to join the advanced world, let them try Capitalism and Freedom, and earn their own way. They should get NOTHING, ZERO, NADA from other countries with respect to global climate patterns. The developed world should not throw money down these sewers of mysticism and savagery. Enough already.
the idea that man can change the weather is crazy. if you killed all humans today it would lower carbon production on earth by 4.5% . that means that you would still have 95.5% of the existing production. and we are in the second decade of cooling.
You can't reason with a liberal. They all suffer from a mental disorder .
It's the 4.5% that throws the carbon cycle out of balance; like eating extra calories each day. And we are definitely not in the second decade of cooling; global temperatures are now essentially as warm as they've ever been since measurements began; as warm without an El Nino as it was in 1998 with a strong El Nino to warm the atmosphere.
There hasn't been any global warming in 16 years.
Could it be that this has all been manufactured?
Yes. Yes it could .
Wrong, after adjusting for the effects of El Nino ... see my previous comment above.
The planet's human source environmental problems are so immense there is no way they can be solved in a few days.
Sierra Club notes that humans, especially subsistence level peoples are devastating the forests and wilds and killing and poaching animals. But the US refuses to send birth control overseas because of pressure from right wing religious groups! In Scientific American some decades ago an article maintained that the unanswered amount of birth control requested even back then in those countries amounted to 60 million dollars worth!!! A pittance compared to what the military spends in a week.
The coral of the world is being bleached by CO2 in warmed seawater and those coral atolls contain vast amounts of the planet's life and help control the sea from ramming into shorelines. This is the warmest year on record. The expectation predicted over fifteen years ago was that it would change the conveyor belt of the overheated North Atlantic which would cause super storms and the jet stream to change its course.
The rainforests are being depleted so they can raise cattle for burgers and now soybeans to make ethanol! China has so many people to house and feed that the amount of energy and raw materials they would need don't even exist. Ocean trawlers send out skeins of metal nets for literally miles and miles then collect everything onto the gigantic ship decks, where crew select a handful of pricey fish, then the entire deck tilts gushing tons of dying fish and sea creatures into the water.
We humans have destroyed thousand of species.
We have "topped" whole mountains in West Virginia to rape for coal and clear cut forests in Canada for timber and now ravage as far as the eye can see for oil sands; just check out pictures of the devastation.
Americans act as if they are somehow "entitled" to what the rest of the world considers luxury. The worst part of this all is that people choose to be ignorant, do not know how to judge the source for their "scientific knowledge", if they have any at all, and allow politicians and not scientists to control the destiny of the planet. We have engineers and botanists and biologists and they should be funded not half the moronic things in the Federal Budget.
This Earth was paradise an epic mechanical/biological wonder destroyed by greed and ignorance.
LMFAO...are you actually citing the Sierra Club? Nothing like an unbaised disinterested source. An organization staffed by attorneys who rely on donations for survival and mindless drones to do their field work. Kind of the environmental equivalent of Scientology. All the talking points to cite are partiall true and can be attributed to the normal fluxes and changes of the Earths systems. I am a geologist who has also been an environmental consultant. Most of the global warming religion is pure cap. Yes it has become a religion for people like you. You want to vilify and stone people who do not agree with your dogma.
Maybe leftists like you don't understand economics. The US did not invade Canada and steal its oil sands, the were exploited for profit, providing jobs, and income to people and allowed develop advances like computers that allow brainless twits like you the ability to get on the web and spout mindless drivel so you can make your pathetic self feel better about your miserable life.
The problem is that the wrong scientists ARE advising governments. Scientists with an agenda. They falsify data and use bad science to create political movements. Man made global warming is just one such movement. The earth changes, it has for millions of years, and being one of those scientifically ignorant people you mention, you wouldn't know that would you?
We can stop earth climate change no matter what we do. We cannot stop tornados or hurricanes either. Climate change is fear mongering at its worst. Go back to taking care of your cats, and watching Oprah and Dr. Phil.
Sierra Club is the biggest bunch of control freaks and buzzkills on the planet . There's your communist group right there.
I am reading a book called Bloodlands, the land between Hitler and Stalin. It occured to me, that the Climate Change is Europe's new anti-semitism. Not that they stopped hating Jews, its just the latest fiction fed to the ignorant European masses to distract them from the failure of European Socialism. Climate Change is all about politics and redistribution of wealth. Just like Hitler and Stalin blamed the Jews for the Great Depression, the current green movement wants to blame corporations and the US failed European socialism. Governments are going along with it because they see it as a source of new revenues to bail themselves out. Even in the face of the exposure of the manipulated data and bad science behind the man-made global warming scam, people still believe it and political organizations still push it. It is incomprehensible. I am a geoscientist of some 32 years experience and I cannot understand how people can actually believe this crap. A few hot summers do not a pattern make, ice caps melt over decades and reform over periods. That is the trend we are seeing. Believers in this crap are the worst kind of gullible, credulous idiots, and we wonder how the whole German nation could follow Hitler and exterminate millions because the were different. This is the same kind of toxic group think that had Europeans burning tens of thousands of women for witchcraft. There is just about as much scientific basis to believe in man-made global warming as there was in witchcraft. It has become a religion of the left, fervently believed in by the have nots, anxiously waiting to get theirs, when the redistribution begins. I've lived and gone to school in Europe and folks the average European is just as ignorant and poorly educated as the average American. In some sense they are worse because the are controlled by oppressive governments that appear to be democratic, but are far from it. The freedoms we are seeing eroded in the US are those we take for granted, and in time we will labor under the yoke of a government on the European model, few actual rights, and we will be manipulated at every turn. George Orwell saw it in Europe first hand. The pity is that most people are too stupid and ignorant to even know what is happening to them.
Well, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, so I just don't by into your explanation. Conspiracy theories simply require to many variables to be aligned and far to many people involved to be practical. Not saying that I believe in AGW; but I certainly don't believe in a worldwide conspiracy based on government and scientific collusion - and that is pretty much what would be necessary to explain the facts (facts regarding number of scientists and governments supporting these efforts - not the climate data itself).
Khalifah is 100 % correct , the climate issue is being used as a vehicle for world wide socialism/communism. It'll be a complete orwelian society in another decade . That's the real threat .
And as for resorting to referring to a fellow scientist in terms like "brainless twits like you... spout mindless drivel so you can make your pathetic self feel better about your miserable life", really you ought to buy a mirror... K-Marts about ten bucks and in this case well worth the environmental impact.
The US did not agree to Kyoto the first time. Yet Co2 in the US DROPPED. Countries that did sign Kyoto have INCREASED their CO2 emissions.
Very true on both counts. China is now the top polluter and US emissions have dropped substantially.
Ah yes , the redistribution of wealth isn't going as smoothly as planned . Even when it does the climate will continue to do what it's doing .
I look at these posts and I have to laugh. In all my years on this earth I've just about heard it all. Global cooling, which wasn't that long ago, was going to throw us into the next ice age - how much money did we tax payers throw at that one. Acid rain, which never really happened but every rusty thing we looked at as having to do with acid rain. How much money was thrown at that scam. Sorry folks, if a government scientist said so, it is usually a scam. Keep allowing the government to terrorize you into spending more of your hard earned money on things that cannot be changed and the stupidity will just keep on proliferating. Idiots!!
That's EXACTLY it. When the "scientist" is on the govt payroll , they'll say whatever the scammin govts of the world tell them to . They'd probably get offed if they disagreed . Western Countries are already closely monitoring their emissions. Where I live they have "air care" where you have to get your car tested for emissions or you don't get insurance . It's third world and asian countries where they couldn't give a crap. China has got to be the bigget polluter on the planet .
Acid rain did happen and still happens; it's just that we got it under control using pollution control equipment such as scrubbers. Unfortunately CO2 is a fundamental byproduct of burning carbon fuels, and is therefore much more difficult to limit.
Khalifa... I also read articles in Nature and Science and other such journals and conduct my own research. I point to materials available to mosty people who do not have a university library card. To that end I suggest you visit the Koshland Science Museum in Washington, D.C. a repository of the National Academy of Science, that coven of witchcraft, and view the very visual wall displays. One of them based upon ice core samples, tree bark from three thousand year old creatures and such real data shows the dramatic rise in CO2 especially since "the industrial revolution". Yes the Earth tilts on its axis and the axis has a "wobble" which can account for cycles, but the data clearly shows the human contribution is way "off the cyclical charts". The Koshland chart runs across the middle of the museum wall and then spikes to the top of the ceiling during our century.
I have sat with the scientists from Greenpeace who have gathered real data like from fish counts from countries whose industries have kept records since the 1700's where fish weighed in the hundreds of pounds and now weigh under a hundred in the North Sea. Supertrawlers scrape the ocean floor destroying everything and haunt shorelines while factory ships have flatlined species like sardine and anchovy.
The conveyor belt action of the North Atlantic is well studied. The melting polar ice caps have dumped fresh water into the salt water at such a rate that the subduction of cold under warm water which keeps England warmer than Canada and the tropical waters cooler so that super hurricanes are less likely to happen is slowing in a physical manner predicted decades ago. The results are exactly as predicted then: super hurricanes and snowy UK winters. The heat and CO2 and emitted gases we humans generate and then waste most of has contributed to the melting poles.
Have you ever looked at a picture of a tar sand operation? These are not six acre well head sites but hundreds and hundreds of acres where huge machines scrape every living thing off the face of the earth as far as the eye can see. In no way is this "efficient". This is not "commerce", it is Earth rape and the costs to the environment and to the consumer for its inefficient technology especially if they build the rest of the idiotic pipeline are outrageous. The same monies placed into "off the grid" technology infrastructure and new research would be far better an investment. Role models like fashion icons wearing sweaters in the winter and riding bikes would go a long way and that is just a start. Forty per cent of the energy provided by coal is wasted before we get it and humans waste more leaving lights and equipment on or running around in winter without warm bathrobes and slippers or boots and wool socks.
For a scientist you seem to be even less objective than those who comment here with less of an education. You are the one with an advocacy. The data that proves humans are pillaging the Earth comes from every physical and biological sector and can be found in peer reviewed scientific journals.
Nature dictates: adapt or perish. The sad part is the hubris that we humans are entitled to take every other species with us.
Time to switch sides.
All the emissions created by man are a pimple on a gnats butt compared to natural volcanic events... which belch millions of tons of S02... a much more dangerous gas then CO2.... this is a scam to fleece industrialized nations to subsidize third world @!$%#holes that would be doing fine if they had property right and people had incentive to create businesses and wealth.
Volcanic events currently only emit 1% as much CO2 as human activity, and probably not all that much more sulfur aerosols than China emits. Sulfur and carbon are separate issues; both can be dangerous.
Humans are the most natural and most recent advancement in mammals. They are not the final version or the last ones standing. Relax. Death will occur. Third planet will carry on. Stressing out is pointless. Chicken little is a story book character. So far the speculation is pretty far out there. Can't tell us what they don't know. They may tell us they are 99% positive this man-made climate change is real. 99%? So you're not sure then right?
Climate change is natural, spontaneous, and never ending. Can't stop time either. Too much speculation can lead to the wrong conclusion and subsequently the wrong action. Take the models for what they are and quit yer bitchin' There are examples of islands that used to be here all over the globe. The coasts of most were under water at one point. Recently enough we can still see signs of it. They will be again. Cyclic nature of the third planet. It will drive humans to design technology to leave here and explore and to adapt to the inevitable conditions for those who stay. We will evolve.
The solution is Evolution. Darwin was right. Accept it.
It's not about the bogus climate change claims or about getting everyone to produce less polutants... it's just a plan to fleece productive nations to give National Welfare to the deadbeats.... Global Progressiveism....
The entire statement of "Climate control" is arrogant in itself. This is just a money grab by nations trying to bilk more money out of other countries. It's all it ever has been.
liberals - the party of chicken little and the panicking tax fanatics .
No human influence in sea level.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2012/12/new-paper-finds-no-evidence-of-human.html
Greenland ice sheet has gained ice since little ice age.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00373.1
CO2 has no bearing on drought.
http://www.c3headlines.com/2012/12/severe-2012-us-drought-not-caused-by-human-co2-confirms-noaa.html
Arctic refreezing faster than normal.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/2012/12/winds-and-warmth-influence-freeze-up/
Then there is the story of increasing snowfall in Greenland, Increase in snow and growing glaciers in the Himalayas and record cold in Alaska and Norway.
Record cold for December in Australia and December snow in Australia.
If sure isn't warming out there. Winter is hanging on in the Southern hemisphere and is really ramping up in the Northern hemisphere.
New record for longest length of time since a major hurricane hit the US. New record for fewest tornadoes in July and this year is 400 tornadoes short of average.
Storms aren't getting more frequent or more severe.
Sandy was a post tropical cyclone. In 1954 Three Cat 3 hurricanes hit the east coast. Sandy hit during a full moon and combined with a cold front but so did Cat 3 Hazel in 1954.
But do hold onto your winter coats and snow shovels. You might need them for the next 30 years.
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/07/17/joe-bastardi-show-parallels-to-the-1950s-and-tells-us-what-to-expect-looking-forward/
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/new-and-cool/its_the_amo_stupid1/
http://nextgrandminimum.wordpress.com/2012/11/10/russians-scientist-the-next-grand-minimum/
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2012/11/global-cooling-climate-and-weather.html
There was a 30 year cooling trend in the 50s, 60s and 70s. Remember global cooling? Then we had 30 years of warming. There is a 60 to 70 year cycle of cooling and warming. Cooling is returning.
NASA reported that wind and current play the two biggest roles on how much Arctic sea ice forms. NASA also reported that an Arctic storm in August broke up the ice and led to the low ice in September.
All the people that like flying all over the world to meetings, staying in fancy hotels and eating expensive food love to tell the rest of us that unless the regular people (us) give up those same things the world is going to overheat and roast.
Instead one third of the CO2 put out by man was released since 1998 and the temperature anomaly is the same today as it was 16 years ago.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/06/a-problem-nearly-one-third-of-co2-emissions-occured-since-1998-and-it-hasnt-warmed/
CO2 isn't the all powerful evil thing people have been told.
You ignore many important facts ... arctic sea ice was lowest ever this September; global warming has been statistically linked to precipitation and droughts in some areas; temperature anomaly today is as high without El Nino as it was in 1998 with strong El Nino. Cooling is not returning ... slight cooling during 40s, 50s and 60s can be linked to other forms of industrial pollution.
Does anybody really want the useless UN dictating to you what you can or can't do.
I love it. No more extortion using a bogus global warming semi-viable theory by poor countries from rich countries. And if the islands sink, there will be plenty of time for these people to build canoes, at a fee somewhat less than $ 100 million a pop.
Even Canada knows that the emperor has no clothes.
Sure it's global warming, but why should that have anything to do with climate treaty talks amid bipartisan calls for global warming action. You can't prevent it or even slow it down unless you want to block out the sun. Let's get real!
http://sjbauer.newsvine.com/_news/2012/12/31/16269826-controversy-over-ipcc-5th-assessment-report-due-2013
The earth will take care of itself so all of you idiots that collect money by putting out all of your bull@!$%# should go to Africa on the back of an alligator. No, we are not going to shut down all of the coal fired electrical plants and we need to build more nucelar plants.