Bitter divisions exposed at Bali climate talks

By Thomas Fuller and Elisabeth Rosenthal

NUSA DUA, Indonesia: With governments at a United Nations meeting here on global warming bitterly divided, Germany's environment minister said Thursday that European Union countries would boycott a separate meeting next month proposed by the Bush administration if a deal was not reached here this week. The United States and the European Union remain at odds on many major points, including whether an agreement signed here should include numerical targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, a move that the United States and a few other countries, including Russia, oppose. In a speech to the conference, Al Gore, the former vice president turned environmental campaigner and businessman, said Thursday the United States was "principally responsible" for blocking progress at the climate conference. "My own country, the United States, is principally responsible for obstructing progress here in Bali," he said, The Associated Press reported.

Meanwhile, the United Nations released fresh data Thursday confirming what it called the planet's continued and alarming rise in temperature. The 10 years ending in 2007 were the warmest on record, said Michel Jarraud, the secretary general of the World Meteorological Organization, a United Nations agency, citing data taken from a global network of weather stations, ships and buoys. "It's very likely the warmest period for at least the last 1,000 or 1,300 years," he told reporters.

In the negotiations here, disagreements exist across a wide range of issues and between numerous blocs of countries, but the United States has come in for especially strong criticism by countries rich and poor and by its own domestic critics. Referring to the United States conference next month, the German environment minister, Sigmar Gabriel, said: "No result in Bali means no Major Economies Meeting."

European governments have been skeptical of the American-hosted climate meeting because they feel it could sidetrack or slow already well-established efforts to reach an agreement at the United Nations. The data published Thursday did not surprise scientists — every recent decade has been warmer than the previous one — but in releasing the numbers here the agency hoped to spur the 190 deadlocked governments into reaching a deal that would set a deadline for a new agreement on global climate change.

"I'm very concerned about the pace of things," Yvo de Boer, the executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which is hosting the meeting on the resort island of Bali, said Thursday. There appears to be broad consensus among governments that a new agreement should be ready by 2009, in time to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the current agreement that limits emissions of all wealthy countries except the United States, which signed the agreement but has refused to adopt it.

But gaping differences remain between countries over how to share the burden of switching away from types of energy that contribute to global warming. "The best we hoped for was that the U.S. would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward," said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit American organization. "Our delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation." Paula Dobriansky, the head of the American delegation, said Thursday she was committed to obtaining an "environmentally effective and economically sustainable" agreement by 2009.

"We are working very hard to achieve consensus," she told reporters. Delegates here have seen two faces of America: the cautious government negotiators who have sought to water down the more ambitious goals of the European Union, and the more activist voices from people like Al Gore, the former vice president who arrived in Bali on Thursday, and Michael Bloomberg, the New York City mayor who gave a speech on the sidelines of the conference.

In an interview Thursday, Bloomberg criticized both the Bush administration and Congress for not being aggressive enough in addressing global warming. "There's a belief that the United States should not do anything until all the other governments are willing to go along and do it at the same time," Bloomberg said. "We should be doing this regardless of whether the world is following or not."

The World Meteorological Organization said Thursday that the world's average surface temperature had risen by .74 degrees Celsius, or 1.33 degrees Fahrenheit, since the start of the 20th century. To laymen that may seem like a modest rise, but scientists consider it alarming in the context of historical shifts in temperature. The difference between temperatures today and an ice age is only 5 or 6 degrees Celsius (9 or 10.8 degrees Fahrenheit), according to Jarraud of the World Meteorological Organization. Several weeks ago, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nation's leading scientific body on the topic, released its gloomy assessment of warming that is being cited by European delegates here as a clarion call. Climate change was "unequivocal," the report concluded. "Average Northern Hemisphere temperatures during the second half of the 20th century were very likely higher than during any other 50-year period in the last 500 years and likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years," the report said. Greenhouse gases were very likely to be behind the trend, it said. The panel, made up of hundreds of scientists, releases its assessment of the data and science on climate change every five years. Temperature rise was likely to be responsible for a wide range of natural phenomena that are already being observed around the world, the panel's report concluded, including rising sea levels, melting ice caps and an increase in the frequency of severe storms.

If temperature rise is not reined in, and particularly if it exceeds 2 to 3 degrees Celsius, the scientists warned, the world could face massive species extinctions, widespread starvation as crops failed in hotter, drier climates, and a huge rise in sea levels that would permanently drown some small island states. "If we do not act now, climate change will increase the number of hungry people in the world," said Jacques Diouf, director general of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, who is in Bali this week. Under varying scenarios, the intergovernmental panel's report said that temperature could rise between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Many climatologists believe that an increase of about 2 degrees is inevitable, even if man-made carbon emissions were controlled quickly, because of the time lag before such actions will have an effect.

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(Jakarta, Kamis 21 February 2008, 07.39 pagi)

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