UN Environmental Chief: Climate Change Now Being Addressed at Local Level

In a statement, the alliance said a Paris agreement must be “legally binding, inclusive and fair” and backed five-year reviews. “We need to have an agreement somewhat in shape by Thursday, really, if we are going to meet the needs of Friday, and I think everybody wants to try to get this done”. “You can buy the keys to open them from any hardware store for very little money, and it is easy to open them and reclaim them for creative expression”, explains Bill Posters, a member of the art protest, interacting with us over email.

The post Column: We are the last generations able to stop climate change appeared first on PBS NewsHour. It remains a centrepiece of their Paris negotiating position.

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.

De Brum, however, says “it has to fly… there has to be commitment from everyone”.

President Barack Obama and Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff are calling for cooperation between their countries to successfully conclude global climate talks.

It doesn’t resolve the question of the long-term goal of the accord – whether it is to remove carbon emissions from the economy altogether, or just reduce them.

The goal is to limit global warming to under two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels. There would be a final draft to distribute by Thursday, to complete on Friday. He said it’s down to 29 pages, from a 48-page version released Saturday.

The last version of the text had 939 brackets.

Star Wars heroes are trying to save Earth from getting too hot.

“As you know”, the organization wrote, “the scientific evidence is overwhelming that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are changing our climate”. Now more than ever, people everywhere understand that we must do something about the rise in global temperatures and the havoc it is wreaking on the environment, on economies, and on peace and stability around the world.

The U.S.is likely to find a willingness to compromise on the mandates within any agreement, if only because the question may determine whether the deal has to be approved by a U.S. Congress dominated by Republicans resistant to acting on climate change-something that would be dead on arrival in Washington.

One potential deal-buster is money.

One of the NGOs, CARE International, was on that passage giving away small papier mache ducks to the delegates from more than 150 countries that have gathered here for the UN Climate summit to seal a legally-binding global deal that would make the world decarbonized by the end of this century.

The rich nations are also encouraging some major developing nations including China to join the donors. Island nations and countries with weak infrastructure are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change.

It said that while the 2°C target had helped anchor discussions, including the United Nations climate-change talks now under way in Paris, it had been ineffective in triggering emission reductions.

Where the U.S.is arguably most eager to convince other nations to follow its lead is on the contractual terms of the agreement.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change formally decided in 2012 to pursue actions in line with a 2°C target. One victor was Farkhunda Ateel Siddiqi from Kabul, who described her work to reduce poverty and malnutrition after a remote province in northeastern Afghanistan had run out of traditional resources.

Living with disasters and adapting to sufferings has become the new norm side-by-side with old norms of negotiating the same issues at annual United Nations climate meetings. There is still much to do and the stakes are high. Greenpeace brought out a huge mechanical polar bear. It’s among many scattered protest actions around the two weeks of talks. Now we need to utilize the positive global momentum and ensure that we do not squander this significant opportunity. In New Jersey, for example, Marshall talked with survivors shoveling out after Hurricane Sandy who knew the extreme weather event was related to global warming, but as he explained, “They couldn’t imagine that something like this could happen again”.