Reality Check on Climate Summit: No Final Agreement Expected in Copenhagen
EmailFrom Sunlen Miller
SINGAPORE – President Obama attended an unscheduled and last minute meeting on climate change this morning in Singapore, in which the 19 APEC leaders agreed that the upcoming international Copenhagen summit in December would be “the first step in a process” but not the final step in reaching an agreement on how best to combat global warming.
The hastily arranged breakfast meeting, left off of President Obama’s formal schedule while in Singapore, was organized by Australian Prime Minister Rudd and Mexican President Calderón.
The Prime Minister of Denmark, Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the U.N.-sponsored climate conference's chairman, flew to Singapore overnight to brief the group about the negotiations leading up to Copenhagen. Rasmussen's proposal included a realization that there will not be an agreement coming out of Copenhagen, and more negotiations will be necessary.
“There was, I'd say, a general consensus of support for what Prime Minister Rasmussen laid out, which is — he called it was ‘one agreement, two steps,’ where Copenhagen would be the first step in a process towards a internationally legally binding agreement,” Obama's deputy national security adviser for international economic matters, Mike Froman said Sunday morning. “That in Copenhagen he would seek to achieve a politically binding agreement that covered all the major elements of the negotiations, including mitigation, adaptation, technology, and finance.”
Froman described there being a “realistic assessment” by the leaders that it was “unrealistic to expect a full internationally legally binding agreement to be negotiated between now and when Copenhagen starts in 22 days.”
“I don't think the negotiations have proceeded in such a way that any of the leaders thought it was likely that we were going to achieve a final agreement in Copenhagen, and yet thought that it was important that Copenhagen be an important step forward, including with operational impact,” he said.
Further negotiations are expected beyond Copenhagen as part of an ongoing process to reach an agreement, possibly in Mexico City next year.
During the meeting Mr. Obama supported Prime Minister Rasmussen’s way forward and told the leaders that they should not make “the perfect the energy of the good,” in negotiating a way forward to combat global warming.
“He said there were two choices that we faced, given where we were in the negotiations: One was to have a political declaration that said we tried, we didn't achieve an agreement, and we'll keep on trying — and the other was to see if we could reach the sort of accord that the Danish Prime Minister laid out that would have immediate operational impact even as a step towards ongoing negotiations.”
Mr. Obama did not tell the other leaders this morning whether he would attend the summit in early December.
During an interview with Reuters last week, President Obama said he would be willing to attend the summit if it appears a deal is in the world and his presence would help seal the deal.
“If I am confident that all of the countries involved are bargaining in good faith and we are on the brink of a meaningful agreement and my presence in Copenhagen will make a difference in tipping us over the edge, then certainly that's something that I will do," Obama said in his interview with Reuters.
Those attending the summit this morning were: President Obama, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, Brunei’s Sultan Hassanal Bolkiah, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Chile’s President Michelle Bachelet, China’s President Hu Jinato, Japan’s Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, Indonesia’s President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, South Korea’s President Lee Myung Bak, Malaysia’s Prime Minister Najib Razak, Mexico’s President Felipe Calderon, New Zealand’s Prime Minister John Key, Papua New Guinea’s Prime Minister Michael Somare, Peru’s President Alan Garcia, Philippine’s President Gloria Arroyo, Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev, Thailand’s Prime Minister Abhisit Vejjajiva, Vietnam’s President Nguyen Minh Triet, and Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen.
The Copenhagen climate change summit is scheduled for December 7th – 15th.
-Sunlen Miller
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NOAA: “The (national) average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data…For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record.”
Posted by: James Danley | November 14, 2009, 11:19 pm 11:19 pm
YOOHOOOO ! They ain’t no Climate Change.
Posted by: Ron | November 14, 2009, 11:35 pm 11:35 pm
Posted by: James Danley | Nov 14, 2009 11:19:37 PM
Thanks for the national weather report. Now for noaa’s Global climate info:
The combined global land and ocean surface temperature for October 2009 was the sixth warmest on record, with an anomaly of 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 14.0°C (57.1°F).
The global land surface temperature for October 2009 was 0.82°C (1.48°F) above the 20th century average of 9.3°C (48.7°F), and ranked as the sixth warmest October on record.
The worldwide ocean temperature was the fifth warmest October on record, with an anomaly of 0.50°C (0.90°F) above the 20th century average of 15.9°C (60.6°F).
For the year to date, the global combined land and ocean surface temperature of 14.7 °C (58.4 °F) tied with 2007 as the fifth-warmest January-through-October period on record. This value is 0.56°C (1.01°F) above the 20th century average.
Posted by: Good for the Goose | November 14, 2009, 11:59 pm 11:59 pm
Thre always seems to be conflicting information. This is from NPR:
Some 3,000 scientific robots that are plying the ocean have sent home a puzzling message. These diving instruments suggest that the oceans have not warmed up at all over the past four or five years.
Willis has been studying the ocean with a fleet of robotic instruments called the Argo system. The buoys can dive 3,000 feet down and measure ocean temperature. Since the system was fully deployed in 2003, it has recorded no warming of the global oceans.
“There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant.”
Posted by: w | November 15, 2009, 12:48 am 12:48 am
Posted by: w | Nov 15, 2009 12:48:57 AM
When the air is heating up, one would expect the surface of the ocean to heat up first – which noaa’s Global climate information would support.
One would expect the heating up of the depths of the oceans (3000 feet) to take place more slowly.
Posted by: tierra | November 15, 2009, 1:41 am 1:41 am
Warming of the planet has happened hundreds of times in the past,also cooling Ice ages and melting so many times under the ice in the north they find palm trees that take a hundred years to mature so we know that the ice had completly melted for at least a hundred years. In texas there is evidence that the oceans had rose over 100 feet several times ITS NATURAL.
Posted by: earl | November 15, 2009, 7:54 am 7:54 am
“One would expect the heating up of the depths of the oceans (3000 feet) to take place more slowly.”
Yes, if the only source of heat was the air! However, there are underground volcanoes that quickly heat up the ocean floor. The steam rises quickly to the surface and the surrounding hot water spreads throughout the oceans by the currents.
Posted by: James Danley | November 15, 2009, 9:14 am 9:14 am
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday shows that 29% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing his role as President. Thirty-nine percent (39%) Strongly Disapprove giving Obama a Presidential Approval Index rating of -10.
Posted by: Fascist Hyena | November 15, 2009, 9:54 am 9:54 am
The Waxman-Markey bill would reduce US per capita carbon emissions by the year 2050 to the level of the year 1875.
And yet serfs and yokels continue to take these fools seriously.
Posted by: Fascist Hyena | November 15, 2009, 11:54 am 11:54 am
Good for the Goose:”Thanks for the national weather report. Now for noaa’s Global climate info: …”
Then you proceed to provide a global weather report. Try this, go the NOAA website and ask why they don’t apply any UHI adjustments to their data sets and see what kind of response you get. Tom Karl is an unapologetic alarmist and has been so for years. Ask him why over 85% of his temperature monitoring stations aren’t sited correctly according to their own specifications.
The NOAA data set is the worst one out there, and that’s saying something.
Care to explain why all IPCC models have grossly overestimated warming to date? Care to explain why the IPCC mysteriously dropped the Hockey Stick graph from its latest report with no explaination? I know the answers. Do you?
Posted by: Woody | November 15, 2009, 12:13 pm 12:13 pm
I don’t think I need buoys to convince me one way or another whether things are getting warmer. It’s the middle of November and it’s practically 70 degrees here and it’s not uncommon anymore. A couple years back people were mowing their lawns on Thanksgiving. When I was a kid we might have been ice-skating in a couple weeks.
Posted by: Skip | November 15, 2009, 2:01 pm 2:01 pm
Y’all may want to see NOAA’s report for October 2009 from their website:
“National Overview:
Temperature Highlights – October
The average October temperature of 50.8°F was 4.0°F below the 20th Century average and ranked as the 3rd coolest based on preliminary data.
For the nation as a whole, it was the third coolest October on record. The month was marked by an active weather pattern that reinforced unseasonably cold air behind a series of cold fronts.
Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.”
Posted by: It's Already a Circus | November 15, 2009, 2:53 pm 2:53 pm
Temperatures were below normal in eight of the nation’s nine climate regions, and of the nine, five were much below normal. Only the Southeast climate region had near normal temperatures for October.”
____________________________________
You’re only looking at United States temperatures, not global?
Posted by: tierra | November 15, 2009, 3:07 pm 3:07 pm
Here’s some positive news for all of the Rasmussen* junkies. Obama’s approval is at 50% today. 49% disapprove. That’s the same as yesterday, which was the first time in over a month that Rasmussen* joined virtually every other major pollster in giving the President a positive job approval spread. Obama haters can take solace in the +1 spread still being way out of range on the current RCP list of pollsters; +9 is the next lowest spread.
*Choice pollster of conservatives
Posted by: Numeros | November 15, 2009, 3:36 pm 3:36 pm
Just a thought numeros, but perhaps its because he’s out of the country…out of sight out of mind. When he starts talking policy numbers go down.
Posted by: wow | November 15, 2009, 3:56 pm 3:56 pm
@Octavia, please enlighten us on how the previous alternating ice ages and warming periods, which occurred thousands of years before the industrial revolution, were manmade? If you agree that those had nothing to do with manmade greenhouse gas emissions, then why must any current warming be manmade?
The fact that the alarmists changed their tune from “global warming” to “climate change” tells alot. It’s all a scam! It’s nothing more than a means to controlling human behavior and implementing new taxes.
Posted by: James Danley | November 15, 2009, 5:33 pm 5:33 pm
So do the “experts” that have the “answers” deny that there have been alternating ice ages and warming periods throughout the history of the Earth? What about the alternating periods on the other planets?
As for “having trouble grappling with the concept of global warming when they’re experiencing cold weather,” now that is really funny! It’s a bit like saying it’s a cow, in spite of looking, smelling, and sounding like a duck!
YES “Climate change” IS REAL. You only have to experience ONE cycle of Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn to understand the concept!
Posted by: James Danley | November 15, 2009, 7:45 pm 7:45 pm
In the 1970′s all the rage was the pending ice age. It didn’t happen. Now the rage is the impending melt down. Who knows what the future will bring. The alarmists say all this nasty stuff will happen by 2050. Yet climatologists aren’t always accurate with their predicting weather 2 weeks in advance–and they have the use of satellites to see the weather coming.
The fact is that the environmentalists have tried for decades to change our lifestyles. Now they have seized the global warming issue with fearmongering to enact legislation that will force the people to change their lifestyles and throw in some extra taxes to boot.
Here is an excerpt–the opening paragraph–from an article (“Proof on Ice: Southern Greenland Was Once Green; Earth Warmer)” written by David Biello which was posted on the Scientific American website on July 5, 2007:
“In 1981 researchers removed a long tube of ice from the center of a glacier in southern Greenland at a site known as Dye 3. More than a mile (two kilometers) long, the deep end of the core sample had been crushed by the pressure of the ice above it and sullied by contact with rock and soil. By destroying the pattern of annual layers, this contamination seemingly made it impossible to assess the region’s ancient climate. But DNA extracted from the previously ignored dirty bottom has revealed that Greenland was not only green, it boasted boreal forests like those found in Canada and Scandinavia today.”
What is to stop Greenland from once again returning to forest lands?
Yes, man is affecting temperatures. But this effect is nowhere near as significant as the effect the cosmos has on the earth and the solar system. In Hawaii, sugar cane fields and pineapple fields have been turned into parking lots and shopping malls. This has caused a dramatic increase in temperatures. Where it was rare to see many 90-degree days and never a 100-degree day, the former is now common during the summer. And the latter has been reached at least one in the last couple of years. BUT just one sun flare can raise the temperature of the earth and other planets several degrees.
Posted by: James Danley | November 15, 2009, 11:00 pm 11:00 pm
@Octavia,
I have no problem with individuals wanting to go “green.” I do have a problem with the government and politicians dictating what we can’t, can or must eat and drink, or what products we can’t, can or must purchase.
Some environmentalists would prefer that we trash the automobile and technology and go back to walking (even the horse or the horse and buggy are out because it is abusing horses) and reading by candlelight. Their motives may be pure and genuine, but unrealistic.
And then there are some Left wing radicals who are anti-Capitalists and want to convert the United States into a Socialist or Communist country. And they will use whatever means–including using the global warming/climate change and healthcare issues–as a means that end.
Now then you wrote: “If the environmentalists you seem to scorn (sorry if I’m misreading that though I don’t really think I am) are right, then the stakes are very high and everybody loses if we don’t implement the changes you resist. And if they’re wrong, but we implement the changes anyway, we lose very little in the long term as many of the changes will benefit us regardless.”
Of course there will be a huge loss both in the short term and in the long term. By enacting mandated changes, instead of allowing the changes to evolve through the free market and the entrepreneurial spirit, families will be forced to pay fees, taxes and higher energy prices. That will further stifle the economy and result in more jobs being lost–exactly what we don’t need. Look at the House energy bill that was recently passed. It will require individuals to upgrade their homes to meet energy efficiency guidelines before they can sell their homes. In some cases that could cost tens of thousands of dollars! In some markets the upgrading could end up costing up to 25% of the original asking price. Try adding on that 25% to the price and see how long it takes to sell the house in this market.
Posted by: James Danley | November 16, 2009, 1:33 am 1:33 am
“We were asked to shop!” Actually, as I recall this was in response to the hit that our economy took following the attacks of 9/11, and the week or so that the airlines were grounded. The main purpose of the attacks was to bring down our economy. President Bush didn’t want to oblige the terrorists so encouraging the people to get back on the spending spree, coupled with the full effect of the 2001 tax cuts–which were just beginning to take effect when the attacks occurred–and the 2003 tax cuts, it spurred tremendous growth between Sept 2003 and Dec 2007. The budget deficit was actually on target to being cut in half.
Tax hikes are not the answer. Just look at how the TALK of raising taxes on the wealthy during the 2008 campaign caused the wealthy to change their spending habits. Layoffs began and that assisted in exposing the looming problems of the flexible subprime mortagages. The layoffs increased and eventually the financial markets collapsed when the flexible subprime mortgage fiasco imploded. And those tax hikes haven’t even been passed into law yet. Should cap and trade and the new taxes on the wealthy to cover healthcare be implemented the wealthy just might pack up their things–including their money–and leave the country. You think things are bad now!!
Posted by: James Danley | November 16, 2009, 7:33 am 7:33 am
And now the American Association for the Advancement of Science says climate change is a fake. And they do have a website.
Posted by: earl | November 16, 2009, 8:18 am 8:18 am
As always you have to follow the money, who gets rich off this scheme certainly Al Gore the inventer of the internet and a few other lies.
Posted by: earl | November 16, 2009, 8:23 am 8:23 am