Dec. 11 2011: Climate talks end with late deal. With talks running nearly 36 hours beyond their scheduled close, UN climate talks have closed with an agreement that the chair said had "saved tomorrow, today" by forcing countries for the first time to admit that their current policies are inadequate and must be strengthened by 2015. The European Union will place its current emission-cutting pledges inside the legally-binding Kyoto Protocol, a key demand of developing countries. The agreement here has not in itself taken us off the 4C path we are on, but it has re-established the principle that climate change should be tackled through international law, not national, voluntarism." link
Getting a deal was a success, but a pitiful one - a guarantee our children will be worse off than us. The world's climate debt is soaring and postponing action threatens an environmental austerity far greater than today's economic woes. link

November 28: Canada to withdraw from Kyoto protocol. Just a few hours after talks began in Durban, Canadian environment minister Peter Kent was confirming to reporters in the capital Ottawa that its involvement with Kyoto was over. Canada declared four years ago that it did not intend to meet its existing Kyoto Protocol commitment - to bring annual emissions in the period 2008-12 down by 6% from their 1990 level. They have in fact risen by about one-third since 1990. With 12 months notice needed to withdraw, Canada would begin formally withdrawing from the protocol in December. Russia and Japan also said they would make no further cuts. link

November 28 - COP 17 begins. While arguing that the Durban climate talks are closer to a breakthrough than most people think - all we need is strong leaders - James Murray, editor of Business Green, concludes it is almost certain that we will get two weeks of bickering over technicalities that will leave those businesses leading the low carbon revolution once again having to reassure themselves that they are on the right track and their commitment to addressing the climate change threat will be vindicated. And all for the want of the kind of real political leadership made famous by Mandela and his peers. link

Nov. 20 2011: Rich nations 'give up' on new treaty until 2020.  Ahead of critical talks in Durban, most of the world's leading economies now privately admit that no new global climate agreement will be reached before 2016 at the earliest, and that even if it were negotiated by then, they would stipulate it could not come into force until 2020. The eight-year delay is the worst contemplated by world governments during 20 years of tortuous negotiations on greenhouse gas emissions, and comes despite intensifying warnings from scientists and economists about the rapidly increasing dangers of putting off prompt action. After the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009 ended amid scenes of chaos, governments pledged to try to sign a new treaty in 2012. The date is critical, because next year marks the expiry of the current provisions of the Kyoto protocol, the only legally binding international agreement to limit emissions. link

Oct. 18 2011: The death of the Kyoto process. There seems little possibility that next month's climate summit in Durban will produce an emissions reduction agreement, meaning the world will soon lack any binding CO2 targets. Europe may soon find itself alone in the fight against global warming. The Kyoto Protocol, the world's only binding climate agreement, will soon expire. The most important means to date of compelling industrialized nations to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions seems likely to become a mere footnote in history. link

Oct. 10 2011: UN negotiators may seek to extend the Kyoto Protocol, excluding Canada, Japan and Russia, said Christiana Figueres, the UN’s top climate diplomat. The European Union’s conditional willingness to extend “has been exceedingly helpful by building a bridge” between developed and developing nations, said Figueres. Canada, Russia and China have all said they won’t accept new binding targets under Kyoto unless all major economies are bound. Any extension of Kyoto would still require agreement from about 200 nations at the talks, which would be a challenge to negotiate. The U.S. rejects the current UN system, which pools major economies such as China, India and Brazil with smaller developing nations in a group that has fewer commitments than developed countries. link

other recent news:

Oct. 7 2011: World's leading companies commit to reducing emissions. The latest round of climate change talks in Panama this week may once again end in deadlock, but that has not stopped over 90 of the world's largest businesses stepping up their calls for governments to deliver an ambitious international climate change treaty. Firms are being invited to sign up to the 2ºC Challenge Communiqué. Scheduled to be formally launched on October 20 over 90 companies have already signed up to the text, including some of the world's largest firms, such as BAA, BT, Tesco, Nestle, Johnson & Johnson, Swiss Re, Shell, Toyota, and latest signatory Ricoh.Further companies are being invited to sign up and the organisers are hoping to exceed the 1,000 firms that endorsed the Copenhagen Communiqué in 2010. link

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U.S. is structurally unable to ever sign up to a global climate treaty with binding targets. Where do the talks go from here? For most of the last 20 years, people worried about climate change have been trying to deal with the problem by negotiating a binding global treaty to reduce the emissions that cause it. But after years of high-profile climate talks, at Rio, Nairobi, Bali, Copenhagen, Cancun, “the negotiations haven’t got us close to that deal,” says Robert Falkner, an expert on international relations and global governance at the London School of Economics. Even Christina Figueres, the United Nations’ climate change chief, now says publicly that “this planet is not going to be saved by any big bang agreement.” “The fact is that it’s unreasonable to expect that there is going to be one large comprehensive agreement that will address all issues and will miraculously change the way that we’ve been doing things for a hundred years,” she said before the last major climate negotiations, in Cancun.

With the world on a path to a 4-degree Celsius or higher temperature rise by 2100, are the negotiations simply a waste of time and resources? Is there a better way of trying to rein in emissions and help the world’s more vulnerable people deal with the impacts of climate change? A growing number of climate experts say the answer is to try adopting a “building blocks” approach to addressing climate change. That means pushing forward with thousands of smaller international, national, regional and local efforts to address the problem while keeping the talks going to, with luck, provide a framework for all the disparate pieces down the road. “That is, I would argue, the future for climate negotiations,” Falkner said at a recent conference on climate change in the Caribbean. “It is a second-best future but one we must accept as a fact.”

Efforts to negotiate one global climate treaty, he said, face several fatal flaws. The first, as virtually everyone is aware by this point, is that the United States, the world’s second biggest carbon emitter behind China, and the biggest historical producer of the gases, is unlikely to ever join a binding climate treaty. Because of the country’s divisive politics and the need for a two-thirds vote in the Senate to ratify any international treaty, “I would argue the U.S. is structurally unable to ever sign up to a global climate treaty with binding targets,” Falkner said. link

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What is the IPCC? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme the (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization to provide the world with a clear scientific view on the current state of knowledge in climate change and its potential environmental and socio-economic impacts. It is endorsed by the UN General Assembly.
The IPCC is a scientific body. It reviews and assesses the most recent scientific, technical and socio-economic information produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of climate change. It does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters. 
Thousands of scientists from all over the world contribute to the work of the IPCC on a voluntary basis. The IPCC is an intergovernmental body. It is open to all member countries of the United Nations (UN) and WMO. Currently 194 countries are members of the IPCC. Governments participate in the review process and the plenary Sessions, where main decisions about the IPCC work programme are taken and reports are accepted, adopted and approved. The IPCC Bureau Members, including the Chair, are also elected during the plenary Sessions.  link to IPCC

July 22 2011: New Zealand will next week play host July 25-26 July to more than 60 climate change negotiators in a meeting designed to tackle one of the key stumbling blocks to an international climate change deal ahead of the United Nation's crucial annual summit in Durban at the end of the year. New Zealand’s minister responsible for international climate change negotiations confirmed that the meeting will focus on how individual nations report and monitor their emissions and focus on the crucial issue of transparency around emissions reductions. link

The last round of U.N. climate talks before an annual summit in South Africa this year will be held in Panama. The inter-sessional meeting will be held in Panama City from October 1 to 7.

 A leaked letter from the United Nations' climate chief suggests the Copenhagen climate summit failed because the presence of 130 world leaders paralysed decision-making and the Danish presidency backed the US and other western nations over the interests of the poor. Yvo deBoer wrote: "Inviting heads of state seemed like a good idea. But it seriously backfired, " he wrote. "Their early arrival did not have the catalytic effect that was hoped for. link    

Analysis of Copenhagen -   What was agreed and what was left out 
Editorial on Copenhagen by Alan Burns  -  read   

Call for International Climate Court. Cochabamba conference closes with call for rich countries to halve greenhouse gas emissions and set up a court to punish climate crimes - link

March 2010: China and India join Copenhagen accord. Since Copenhagen, there has been confusion over how a legally binding treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions can be achieved. All observers, including the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, are now clear that no such deal will be signed in 2010, with a meeting in South Africa in December 2011 now seen as the earliest date. The US now appears isolated as India, China, and many other countries, firmly support the idea of continuing with the two existing UN negotiating tracks to try to achieve a consensus. link

February 2010: Fifty-five countries pledge to cut greenhouse emissions. Examination of the pledges shows that no countries have strengthened the commitments which they announced at Copenhagen and doubt that a deal can be agreed in 2010 still exists. link

January 2010: Investors with $13 trillion in assets call for governments rules.   
The world's largest investors issue a statement calling on the United States and other governments to "act now to catalyze development of a low-carbon economy and to attract the vast amount of private capital necessary for such a transformation." Some 85% of the financial resources needed to cope with climate challenges must come from private sources. The U.S., European and Australian investor groups, who together represent $13 trillion in assets, called for "a price on carbon emissions" and "well-designed carbon markets" to provide "a cost-effective way of achieving emissions reductions." link