Global climate summit opens with calls for action, rebukes of critics
By Jim Tankersley
With strong appeals for action and sharp rebukes of their critics, diplomats from around the world launched a two-week negotiating summit in the Danish capital today in hopes of producing a new agreement to curb climate change.
“The time for formal statements is over,” said the United Nations’ leading climate official, Yvo de Boer, at an opening ceremony filled with dignitaries and punctuated with a video-screen plea from children warning of dire consequences stemming from warming global temperatures. “The time for restating well-known positions is past. Copenhagen will only be a success if it delivers significant and immediate action.”
“This is our chance,” added conference President Connie Hedegaard of Denmark. “If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do.”
Delegates from island nations, which could disappear if global seas rise high enough because of warming temperatures, added an extra measure of urgency, threatening to reject anything short of a legally binding treaty. Other nations, including the world’s largest economies and the host Danes, have set their sights lower, aiming for a “political agreement” that would lay the foundation for a legal treaty.
“If a legally binding outcome is not achieved,” Grenadian diplomat Dessima Williams, speaking for the island nations, told the assembled delegates, “we do not accept a political agreement will be adequate, and we will have to consider our options.”
To those warnings, some of the most important players at the conference — particularly the United States — added optimism.
“We are committed to achieving the strongest possible outcome in the next two weeks,” Jonathan Pershing, the Obama administration’s deputy special envoy for climate change, told reporters, adding later: “There is a deal to be done.”
Punctuating the remarks was an announcement by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which formally declared greenhouse gases a danger to human health and subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
That decision allows the Obama administration to cut down on emissions even if Congress does not pass legislation dealing with climate change. .
Republicans in Washington renewed calls today for the administration to hold off on the so-called endangerment finding until it investigates thousands of documents hacked from the computers of a leading climate research university in Britain and posted online last month. Climate skeptics say the documents undercut the evidence that humans are warming the planet.
By not investigating the hacked documents, administration officials are guilty of a “sad abdication of their responsibility to ensure that U.S. policies are not driven by corrupted science and data,” said Rep. Darrell Issa ( R-Vista).
Conference leaders in Copenhagen returned fire on the skeptics today, saying the document scandal in no way undermines a scientific consensus on climate change.
The head of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, called the evidence of global warming “overwhelming” and said the document scandal “shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC.”
Pershing told reporters that the documents and the furor surrounding them would have “virtually no effect at all” on climate legislation pending before Congress.
“The science is incredibly robust,” he said, “and as we look forward, I worry much more about not acting urgently than about what will ultimately be a small blip on this process.”
