Kerry joins Paris talks as UN warns of climate doom

It would be the first such planetary-wide fall in a period of economic growth, said the report in the journal Nature Climate Change, explaining that decreased coal use in China was the main factor.

“He’s following this quite closely, he’s getting regular updates from his team in Paris about the status of the negotiations”, Earnest said Tuesday.

He added that the United Nations welcomed every country that was ready to shoulder its share of the climate change efforts, giving any nation from the United States to small island nations a seat at the climate talks. They met a Saturday deadline to draft a blueprint but still need to hammer out vital issues, such as how the United Nations would monitor any given country’s progress in curbing carbon dioxide emissions.

PM Modi has said climate change is a global problem that has not been caused by India. “In Bali, when the US needed to do revising, they needed to call back to Washington D.C.”, said John Coequyt, the Sierra Club’s director of federal and worldwide climate campaign, referring to a 2007 climate conference. “That is an approach that is best suited to broad participation in this agreement, not only by the United States but also by any number of other countries”, Stern said.

The former negotiator says the ramped up business engagement “represents a breakthrough from where we’ve been in recent years”.

The African continent will be one of the hardest hit by climate change, partly because its countries have less money to adapt to changes and its rural agriculture-dependent populations are heavily dependent on the weather.

The top US diplomat made the remark while speaking at a meeting of the U.N. Foundation on the world’s oceans in Paris, where U.N. climate talks are in their second and final week.

“While some countries, such as Canada, are showing real leadership calling for a 1.5 degree limit on temperature increase, New Zealand seems content to sit on the fence waiting to see which way the wind blows”.

An “energy revolution” is needed to change the momentum, U.S. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said today.

Current CO2 reduction pledges from countries, however, aren’t even close to keeping global warming below 2 degrees based on some climate models – which have been consistently wrong about global warming.

In a joint statement, the delegations of China, India, Brazil and South Africa urged rich nations to “progressively and substantially scale up their support” beyond their collective pledge of $100 billion in annual climate financing by 2020.

As a result, a re-reckoning is in order, richer nations argue. “Yet we have also sown the potential seeds of our own destruction”, Ban said.

“However, the administration won’t even come before our committee to explain how they plan to meet these goals of reducing [carbon dioxide] emissions” through a deal the president wants to reach this week, Inhofe said. Cruz dubbed the hearing “Data or Dogma”, and called as witnesses several scientists who are skeptical of mainstream views on climate change.

Kerry told the audience the refusal by doubters to recognize the threat of rising sea levels is “insulting to everything we learned in high school about science”.

Rich countries promised in 2009 to muster $100 billion (92 billion euros) a year from 2020 to help developing nations make the costly shift to clean energy, and to cope with the impacts of global warming.

Organizers offered the installation as a gift to Francis to mark his Holy Year of Mercy, which began Tuesday.