POLITICO: Climate talks put heat on Obama

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By: Darren Samuelsohn
July 5, 2011 10:35 PM EDT

President Barack Obama faces several big green tests over the next year on the international stage.

Environmentalists and foreign allies are clamoring for U.S. leadership from the Nobel Prize winner on a pair of upcoming summits focused on global warming, sustainable development and biodiversity.

But the White House will need to temper expectations on its foreign policy as it fends off Republicans eager to keep Obama from winning a second term.

U.S. officials say a presidential trip to Rio de Janeiro for the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit in June 2012 isn’t on his schedule right now, although they can expect the drumbeat to grow for Obama to change those plans as the U.N.-sponsored conference gets closer.

“The United States of America is a country that people around the world admire for its can-do attitude,” Sha Zukang, a Chinese diplomat and the top U.N. official connected with the Rio summit, said last week during a visit to the National Press Club in Washington. “Here, people believe that no problem is too big for human ingenuity to solve. The world has never needed that ingenuity more than it does today. The world needs your leadership.”

On the other hand, conservatives are giddy at the idea of Obama jetting to a South American seaside capital in the middle of his reelection campaign.

Earlier this year, they mocked the president after he praised Brazilian oil drilling efforts while on a visit to Rio, using his remarks in online ads that questioned his commitment to domestic energy exploration.

Republicans also carry big doubts about the climate science at the center of the international talks and question why a debt-strapped United States should spend any money abroad on environmental issues.

“Having some foreign gala with a bunch of rich people flying in private jets and demanding the United States have a lower standard of living is probably not the way, getting into a presidential election, to speak to a country with 9 percent unemployment,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Obama won’t be the first president to deal with such an international environmental dilemma.

In 1992, amid his own reelection campaign, President George H.W. Bush agreed to make a last-minute trip to Rio’s first Earth Summit as diplomats neared a major agreement that set up the underlying structure for all future global warming negotiations.

Greens cheered Bush for the move, but there was still criticism that he insisted on inserting language to make the pact voluntary and also didn’t sign a separate treaty on biodiversity. That fall, environmentalists went in large numbers for Bill Clinton.

Ten years later, President George W. Bush skipped the next major global sustainable development summit in Johannesburg, South Africa. A local newspaper there published a cartoon of the U.S. leader mooning the world. Secretary of State Colin Powell attended and was heckled.

Environmentalists cheered Obama’s 2009 decision to attend climate change negotiations in frosty Copenhagen, Denmark, which drew a record number of presidents and prime ministers. They hope the Democrat doesn’t cave to conservative pressure now.

“[Republicans are] a powerful political force in the United States, but the world isn’t going to sit still for the United States to go through another election cycle,” said Jacob Scherr, director of global strategy and advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Even if Obama doesn’t go to Rio, the United States will have considerable presence at the conference and in the preliminary legwork leading up to it.

The White House and State Department are already leading an internal working group on the Rio conference with about 15 agencies, including the EPA, the Energy and Commerce departments, the U.S. Trade Representative and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

“We look at Rio as an excellent opportunity to bring the world community together, to give a lot of energy and activity toward promoting sustainable development into the future,” a senior U.S. official said.

Unlike Rio’s 1992 Earth Summit, there will be no treaties or other binding agreements on the docket. Instead, the plan is to produce about three pages of consensus text among the more than 190 countries in attendance.

Roundtable talks will focus on getting individual countries to merge green issues with their economic development. There are also sure to be discussions about ocean acidification, protecting dwindling fisheries and cleaning up manufacturing supply chains.

Private companies, state and local officials, and a large contingent of environmental and nongovernmental organizations are expected at the three-day conference, which U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has said “will be one of the most important meetings in the history of the United Nations.”

The Rio summit comes as the world population nears 7 billion and global food and water shortages cause repeated bouts of political turmoil. Demand for energy keeps growing, with a billion cars on the road and about 1.4 billion people who still lack access to electricity.

Mounting scientific evidence that fossil-fuel emissions are changing the planet’s climate in irreversible ways also poses a big test for world leaders who must deal with immediate demands to restore fiscal order.

“Our test is to green our economies, … to reduce emissions and seek clean-energy growth,” Ban said in May. “How? By connecting the dots among climate, water, energy, food security and other key challenges of the 21st century … by finding solutions to one problem that are solutions to all.”

With such a sweeping agenda, some greens are nervous that conservatives will have little trouble cherry-picking their own meaning from the summit.

“It’s a welcome objective, but if it goes into resurrecting ideas about creating a new world environmental organization or a comprehensive environmental entity, I think it will be very difficult to make progress,” said Jennifer Haverkamp, international climate director at the Environmental Defense Fund and a former Clinton-era U.S. trade official.

Aside from the Rio conference, Obama faces even more demands over the next year connected to the continued struggle for a way forward on U.N.-led climate negotiations.

Two years after the Copenhagen conference fizzled, talks are set to resume in November in Durban, South Africa.

Calls for a new pact to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol have hit a wall as developed and developing countries square off over how big of a commitment each should make, whether it should be mandatory and how to connect financial aid to the whole package.

Environmentalists aren’t thrilled with the slow pace of the negotiations and on occasion have started showing frustration with an administration that has other priorities to address over the next year and a half.

“The only way to address the climate crisis will be with a global agreement that in one way or another puts a price on carbon,” former Vice President Al Gore wrote last month in a Rolling Stone essay. “And whatever approach is eventually chosen, the U.S. simply must provide leadership by changing our own policy.”

Even without passage of a cap-and-trade bill, U.S. officials say Obama stands by his commitment to reduce emissions 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. Obama is also still pledging to help developing countries by contributing to a pair of green technology and adaptation funds, although final figures remain a work in progress.

“It’s always important for us, for the United States, to be seen as taking action,” U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern told POLITICO. “We’ve done a lot under President Obama. We’ve not done as much as we’d liked to had our legislation succeeded.”

Ban's Son in Law Disappears from UNOPS as “Furniture, Parked in New Jersey"

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, March 14 -- From the time Ban Ki-moon began as UN Secretary General, the Press has raised questions about promotions given to his son in law Siddharth Chatterjee, who jumped to being the chief of staff to Staffan de Mistura in Iraq, then made Middle East chief at the UN Office of Project Services in Copenhagen.

The UN at first tried to argue that these were not in fact promotions, and then openly refused to answer questions on the topic from Inner City Press.

Now, sources at UNOPS in Copenhagen and elsewhere say Chatterjee is leaving his UNOPS position, where he was described as “the furniture” for lack of aptitude.

When Human Resources, run for UNOPS by the UN Development Program, asked for basic information from Chatterjee for example about this educational credentials, the information was never given.

Sources long close to Chatterjee say that the military degree in India has has listened is not what it appears to be, and that an earlier marriage in that country was ended and largely erased from the record by extraordinary means. “It's not clear how much the Bans know about it,” says one source, adding that missive have been sent to Mr. Ban himself.

Now, according to the UNOPS sources, as Ban seeks a second terms as Secretary General, Chatterjee has been “parked” out of the way in southern New Jersey, getting basic math education paid for by the UN system. “They're trying to keep him out of sight, after his exposure as 'The Furniture' at UNOPS,” says the source.

Ban and spokesman Nesirky, son in law not shown, questions not answered

It would be nice to have and include Team Ban's response, but his spokesman Martin Nesirky, like Michele Montas before him, openly refused to answer questions about Ban's son in law Chatterjee.

Bali-Hoo: U.N Still Pushing for Global Environmental Control

Thursday , February 25, 2010

By George Russell

Despite the debacle of the failed Copenhagen climate change conference last December, the United Nations is pressing full speed ahead with a plan for a greatly expanded system of global environmental governance and for a multitrillion-dollar economic transfer scheme to ignite the creation of a "global green economy."

In other words: Copenhagen without the authority — yet — of Copenhagen.

The world body even has chosen a time and a place for the culmination of the process: a World Summit on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, the 20th anniversary of the famed "Earth Summit" that gave focus and urgency to the world environmentalist movement.

The 2012 summit date is significant for another reason: It marks the end of the legal term of agreement for the Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse gas emissions, which includes carbon reduction targets, and provided the legal basis for an international cap-and-trade market for carbon, centered in Europe. The U.S. first signed then backed away from the Kyoto deal without ratifying it; until its apparent collapse, the comprehensive Copenhagen deal was intended to include the U.S. and supplant Kyoto with a new, legally binding regime.

The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a "focused political document" presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order.

Just exactly what that environmental order will look like, and the extent of the immense financial commitments needed to produce it, are under discussion this week at a special session in Bali, Indonesia, of the United Nations Environment Program's 58-nation "Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum," which oversees UNEP's operations.

The GC/GMEF, as it is known, is made up of environmental ministers and top-level bureaucrats from a roster of supervising nations — the U.S. is one of them — and its meeting is surrounded by a galaxy of environmentalist non-government organizations (NGOs) and environmental journalists from around the world.

Idyllic Bali is a favored venue for U.N. environmental meetings, in part because of its seclusion from too many outside eyes, and because its Pacific location and small size make it a highly congenial hothouse for environmental enthusiasm. In 2007, it served as a launching pad for the Bali Action Plan, which laid the negotiating basis for the Copenhagen treaty process.

The latest Bali session runs from Feb. 24 to 26, and is accompanied by a welter of other UNEP activity ranging from sessions on international waste management and chemical disposal, to the start of a process aimed at a new international treaty covering the storage and disposal of environmental mercury.

But the major topics are a global system of governance and what amounts to the next stage of a radical transformation of the world economic and social order, in the name of saving the planet.

Alongside that, as always, are discussions of vast sums of money that should flow to developing nations to help them make the transition to the new, greener world. As one of the papers written in advance of the meeting to "stimulate discussion" puts it, "the situation ... presents genuine opportunities for a dramatic shift from what can be termed 'business as usual.'"

For the anonymous bureaucrats who wrote the discussion papers, "business as usual" apparently means the current world economy, which the anonymous authors disparagingly term the "brown economy," or the "current dominant economic model." It is, according to the UNEP documents, a model in crisis, "which currently consumes more biomass than the Earth produces on a sustainable basis," and also "depletes natural capital" and "risks perpetuating and exacerbating persistent poverty and distributional disparities."

The new green economy under discussion at Bali will be something very different: For starters, it is much more vague, and as far as the discussion paper authors are concerned, it will stay that way.

The paper paints the coming green order in nebulous and utopian terms. It "implies the decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts from economic growth." It involves "substantially increased investment in green sectors, supported by enabling policy reforms." The investments will "provide the mechanism for the reconfiguration of businesses, infrastructure and institutions, and for adoption of sustainable consumption and production processes." It will lead to "more green and decent jobs, reduced energy and material intensities in production processes, less waste and pollution, and significantly reduced greenhouse-gas emissions."

But when it comes to measuring the achievement of those goals, the paper says, "it is counter-productive to develop generic green economy indicators applicable to all countries given differences in natural, human and economic resources." In the process of turning brown to green, "a green economy in one country may look quite dissimilar to a green economy in another country."

All of which may make judging the value of investment in the ecological transformation difficult to evaluate, except for insiders. But then, the paper suggests that the world may have an additional governing structure composed of exactly those insiders. As the paper puts it:

"Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities."

The discussion paper, published — but not distributed — on Dec. 14, 2009, assumes that the goal of the green economic transformation is the same as that of the ill-fated Copenhagen conference: a 50 percent reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050. That, the paper says, will require a staggering $45 trillion dollar to accomplish — much of it in transfers from rich nations to poorer ones.

The paper, however, paints that as a bargain — "an average yearly investment of just over $1 trillion." About half of that would go for "replacing conventional technologies with low-carbon, environmentally sound alternatives."

Click here to read the Green Economy paper.

Another major investment target would be "ecosystem-based adaptation and mitigation"—paying people and governments to maintain and expand forests, wetlands, coral reefs and other productive sources of "natural capital," which the current "dominant economic model" — the paper provides no other specifics — abuses.

But that is only the beginning of the transformation. Consumption patterns must change, so that fewer wasteful products are consumed, and more ecologically proper ones are produced — organic food and beverages, for example. The UNEP authors, citing other analytical papers produced by UNEP, claim that "the global market for environmental products and services is projected to double from the present $1.37 trillion per year to $2.74 trillion by 2020."

Beyond the organic food market, however, "environmental products and services" are not defined in much detail. One area would be the management of chemicals and solid and hazardous waste — as the paper puts it, "solid waste management alone consumes on average 20-50 percent of most city budgets."

In social terms, one of the most important goals of the transformation would be jobs, jobs, jobs — all of them green, and many of them, as it happens, already in existence.

The report notes, for example, that the U.S. recycling industry as of 2002 already employed over 1 million people; more investment would thus provide "significant opportunities" for more job creation. The same goes for looking after trees: Citing the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the paper claims that "10 million new green jobs could be created by investing in sustainable forest management."

The report argues that significant amounts of the money developed countries have thrown at the problem of ending their current steep recessions could be counted as the type of green investment it envisages as part of the trillion-a-year future. In the U.S., for example, the document says that 11.6 percent of the economic stimulus as of August 2009 — about $112.8 billion — is the type it sees as vastly increasing in the future.

Where is all the money supposed to come from? The paper is emphatic that government alone doesn't have enough. The paper says that "regulated market mechanisms" are needed to "to promote new and innovative investments in green technology."

But above all, the paper asserts, the focus on ecological transformation must become all-encompassing if it is to succeed. Quoting from UNEP's formal medium-term strategy for 2010 to 2013, it says that "linkages between environmental sustainability and the economy will emerge as a key focus for public policymaking and a determinant of future market opportunities."

In other words, the green economy requires a green-oriented political revolution. As UNEP's medium-term strategy puts it: "The current environmental challenges and opportunities will cause the environment to move from often being considered a marginal issue at the intergovernmental and national levels to the center of political and economic decision-making."

The authors of the UNEP "discussion" papers see that organization — the U.N.'s principal environmental watchdog — and especially its governing "Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum," as the central nexus of that new eco-centric regime — and that strengthening its authority at both the national and international levels will be a growing theme as the 2012 Rio Conference looms nearer.

"It is clear that environmental ministers alone cannot meet today's environmental challenges," asserts yet another Bali discussion paper. "One step towards strengthening their standing vis-à-vis other sectors is to strengthen the national [environmental] governance system."

Meantime, UNEP's GC/GMEF "is mandated to bring all environmental aspects together and to formulate broad policy advice and guidance" in the area of "international environmental governance reform" — with the aim of having it all ratified, eventually, by the U.N. General Assembly.

Click here to read the discussion paper on international environmental governance.

In all of this, it appears, the 2012 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development and the preliminary meetings that will determine its agenda is intended to play an important role in focusing attention on the agenda being discussed at Bali, and in creating the suggested frameworks of future "international governance." Above all, the planned Rio summit will be a framework that welds together the UNEP framework of environmentalism with the U.N.'s traditional anti-poverty agenda — which also involves huge investment transfers to poor countries from rich ones.

The two agendas come together in the rubric for Rio: sustainable development. As the paper on governance turgidly puts it: "eradicating poverty, changing unsustainable patterns of production and consumption and protecting and managing the natural resource base of economic and social development [are] overarching objectives of and essential requirements for sustainable development."

Vast international wealth transfers, crash investments in "green" technologies for energy, food, transportation and virtually everything else, with the aim of making enormous cuts in carbon emissions by 2050 — the sum of all the discussions underway at Bali appears indistinguishable from the Copenhagen agenda that was declared dead in December.

Except the U.N. and many nations — including the U.S. — apparently don't think so. Indeed, a series of new Copenhagen process negotiations have just been set for Bonn in April, with another set for late May to early June.

Their official aim is to bring Copenhagen back from the dead by the end of this year at a final negotiating session in Mexico.

In a press release announcing the negotiating round, Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which manages the Copenhagen negotiating process, declared that "this constitutes a quick return to the negotiations" — and a continuing determination to put a new treaty in place as the capstone of the Green World Order.

But at the same time, he made clear that a deal by the end of the year is unlikely; 2011 is more feasible.

If that happens, de Boer won't be applauding from his current position. He has resigned, effective July 1, to become a consultant.

The first major preparatory meetings for the Rio summit in 2012 will be held at U.N. headquarters in New York City in mid-May.

George Russell is executive editor of Fox News.

The essentials in Copenhagen

Rather than getting every small detail of a new global climate treaty done in Copenhagen, UN climate chief Yvo de Boer hopes the conference will reach agreements on four political essentials.

Michael von Bülow16/03/2009 10:30

The UN climate conference in Copenhagen in December this year may not yield a new global climate treaty with every minor detail in place. But hopefully it will close with agreements on four political essentials, thereby creating a clarity the world – not least the financially struck business world – needs.

The wish for clarity is expressed by Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), in an interview with Environment & Energy Publishing (E&E). According to Yvo de Boer, the four essentials calling for an international agreement in Copenhagen are:

1. How much are the industrialized countries willing to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases?

2. How much are major developing countries such as China and India willing to do to limit the growth of their emissions?

3. How is the help needed by developing countries to engage in reducing their emissions and adapting to the impacts of climate change going to be financed?

4. How is that money going to be managed?

“If Copenhagen can deliver on those four points I’d be happy,” says Yvo de Boer.

He sees a need to get something signed and agreed in Copenhagen, but he thinks it will be very difficult to get every final, small detail of a whole new treaty done. The new climate treaty will be replacing the Kyoto Protocol which was adopted in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997 and entered into force on 16 February 2005.

The Kyoto Protocol which sets binding targets for the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions has been signed and ratified by 184 parties of the UN Climate Convention. One notable exception is the United States, and Yvo de Boer is “really happy” to see the US back in the international climate change process and that the US is also engaging domestically in the process.

“My big lesson from the Kyoto era is that it's really important that the government delegation that represents the United States is in close touch with the Senate, with the elected officials on what's acceptable and what's not,” says de Boer, and he adds:

“I think that a major shortcoming of Kyoto was that the official delegation came back with a treaty they knew was never going to make it through the Senate. And this time I have the feeling that the communication is much stronger, that the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, through John Kerry, is really expressing strongly what they feel needs to be done in Copenhagen.”

Yvo de Boer thinks the Kyoto Protocol was rejected by the US for mainly two reasons. Firstly, because it did not involve action on the part of major developing countries. Secondly, because it was felt by the Bush administration that Kyoto would be harmful to the US economy.

Copenhagen will be a whole different scenario, and de Boer feels confident that President Barack Obama can successfully engage China and India and convince them to sign the next treaty.

“I think that Secretary of State Clinton's visit to Beijing was a really important and encouraging step to get us moving on that road,” says Yvo de Boer.

Asked about the global recession, de Boer thinks it will certainly have an impact on the negotiations in Copenhagen.

“You see already that investments in renewable energy projects are going down, partly because of the oil price going down and partly because of the economic activity going down,” he says.

But even though greenhouse gas emissions are expected to slow down as a result of shrinking industrial activities, de Boer does not believe it will lessen the pressure on countries to act and sign a new treaty.

“I get the impression talking to business people that they still want clarity from Copenhagen. If you're making investments now, for example in the energy sector, in power plants that are going to be around for the next 30 to 50 years, you can't really afford to keep waiting and waiting and waiting for governments to say where they're going to go on this issue.”

Who's to blame for Climategate?

TO READ ARTICLE ON TELEGRAPH.CO.UK CLICK HERE

The publication of damning emails about climate change could literally change the world. Gordon Rayner reports.

By Gordon Rayner
Published: 7:31PM GMT 27 Nov 2009

The drab, drum-shaped home of the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit is an anonymous little outpost, blending seamlessly with its chunky concrete neighbours on a windswept campus just outside Norwich. To the uninitiated, it has the look of a Seventies bus station waiting for the council to pull it down.

Unlikely as it may seem, however, this little corner of East Anglia is now ground zero in a controversy which just might influence the entire future of our planet.

A little over a week ago, hundreds of internal emails written by scientists working at the CRU were obtained by a hacker and posted on the internet, some of which appeared to show that researchers had deliberately faked evidence of global warming by manipulating statistics.

At first, the fallout was restricted to a row between climate change experts, played out in scientific journals and specialist internet blogs, but in the past few days, as the ripples have spread around the globe, "Climategate" has become a white hot political issue which has been seized upon by global warming sceptics and now threatens to overshadow next month's crucial climate change conference in Copenhagen.

In the US, where the CRU emails have been cited as proof of "the greatest act of scientific fraud in history", there are very real fears that hardline Republicans – together with powerful Right-wing media organisations – will use the scandal to scupper President Obama's proposed legislation to cap carbon emissions.

In Australia, the world's worst carbon dioxide polluter per capita, 10 opposition front bench MPs have resigned in protest at a proposed carbon bill, their resolve seemingly strengthened by the emergence of the emails.

And here in the UK, although the main political parties agree that global warming does exist and is man-made, there have been calls for the head of the CRU to resign over the scandal, and demands for a full-scale public inquiry from the former chancellor Lord Lawson who, this week, launched a new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, to challenge the consensus on global warming policy.

Phil Jones, the 57-year-old director of the CRU, is the man who has suddenly found himself the number one target of climate change conspiracy theorists the world over after he sent the most damaging of all the emails exposed by the anonymous hacker.

In one message, dated November 1999, he wrote: "I've just completed Mike's trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 to hide the decline."

Gotcha! say the global warming sceptics who have argued for years that average temperatures on Earth are, in reality, either stable or going down. Professor Jones defended himself by claiming the word "trick" was used out of context and simply referred to a legitimate method of handling data. But there was more.

An email sent by one of Prof Jones's colleagues said: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't."

Prof Jones, whose department has for years refused to release its raw data on temperatures, wrote another email in which he said sceptics "have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than send it to anyone". By chance, he now admits he has "accidentally" deleted some of the raw data.

Another message said the CRU's method of collating data "renders the station counts totally meaningless... so, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!"

Prof Jones, who at first refused to confirm even that the emails were genuine, finally issued a statement on Wednesday, in which he said: "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well." On that point, at least, no one is likely to argue with him.

Although Prof Jones is not what you could call a household name (though he soon might be) he is, without doubt, one of the world's most influential proponents of the theory of man-made global warming.

The CRU has the largest archive of global temperature data in the world, and its research formed the basis of the United Nations' key document on global warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report of 2007.

But Prof Jones has been embroiled in controversy before. Three years ago, a report commissioned by the US House of Representatives energy and commerce committee claimed that a clique of just 43 scientists, including Prof Jones and one of his CRU colleagues, was stifling open debate on climate change.

Little wonder, then, that climate change deniers are hailing the emails as final proof that global warming is nothing more than a hoax which is being covered up by governments who have themselves been duped.

Suddenly, Phil Jones is the name on the lips of every Right-wing commentator in the US, some of whom have warned that President Obama is being tricked into making the most expensive mistake in history by backing emission caps and carbon trading legislation that will cost US taxpayers trillions of dollars.

Rupert Murdoch's Fox News has described the emails as a "game-changer" for Obama cap and trade bills. Fox's climate change commentator, John Lott, suggested that Prof Jones was guilty of an "unprecedented co-ordinated campaign to hide scientific information". Meanwhile Matt Drudge, arguably the most influential reporter on the internet and the man who broke the story of President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky, has helped direct millions of hits to websites reporting on the email scandal by featuring it prominently on his Drudge Report website.

Nor are journalists the only ones predicting Climategate will influence US policy. Senator Peter King suggested the emails would "have some impact in slowing down or stopping the cap and trade bill" while fellow Republican senator James Inhofe has called for an investigation into the emails – some of which were sent to government-funded researchers in the US – and alerted the relevant US government agencies to their content.

President Obama's climate tsar Carol Browner has even been forced to make a public statement on the emails, insisting the science on global warming remains sound.

In Australia, meanwhile, the scandal has helped stoke a growing rift in the opposition Liberal Party, which had been poised to back Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's carbon pollution bill, but which is hopelessly split on the issue after 10 of its most senior politicians resigned, threatening to challenge party leader Malcolm Turnbull if he does not oppose the legislation.

Many critics have expressed incredulity that Prof Jones has not been sacked, but his fate is of little consequence compared with the effect the scandal could have on world climate change policy.

Prof Jones is in little doubt that the timing of the leak – two weeks before the start of the Copenhagen conference – was a "concerted attempt to put a question mark over the science of climate change" at the most sensitive possible time. Next month's Copenhagen conference has been billed as the last chance for world leaders to prevent an irreversible change to the planet's climate. Unless they can reach a binding agreement on reducing global emissions, mankind could face a bleak future, according to the majority of the scientific community.

The hacker who exposed the emails no doubt hopes Climategate will tip the scales decisively against an agreement – an outcome which is likely to be supported by a minority of hardliners in the US, such as Bryan Zumwalt, legislative counsel for Republican senator David Vitter, who said earlier this week that the CRU emails were evidence of what "could well be the greatest act of scientific fraud in history" and suggested that "nearly all of the international data and models supporting the theory of global warming would have been influenced by data corruption and fraud".

However Bob Ward, a climate change expert at the London School of Economics and Political Science, believes world leaders will pay little attention to the scandal surrounding the CRU, arguing that politics, not science, will decide the fate of the Copenhagen summit.

"The politicians won't be swayed by this," he said. "It's basic physics that the world is being warmed by greenhouse gases, and politicians can see through the sceptics' arguments. If Copenhagen fails to produce an agreement, it won't be because of these emails. And in the US, President Obama's cap and trade bills will be decided by 12 or 13 Democratic senators who represent states with large coal and oil reserves."

Mr Ward does not believe the emails reveal any evidence of impropriety, but supported Lord Lawson's calls for an independent investigation so the matter can be cleared up.

He said: "I don't believe there is any evidence here of fraud, but it's regrettable that this has happened and I regret the fact that some members of the research community have dismissed out of hand those who have tried to make a counter-argument."

Whether or not Climategate influences the outcome of the Copenhagen summit, it seems that its long-term legacy will be to make the ongoing war of words between "warmists" and "coolists" more poisonous than ever.

Sha Zukang from Delhi: - We need to accelerate technology diffusion

"....UN Under-Secretary General for economic and social affairs Sha Zukang said a tough issue was in intellectual property and on how to reward innovation while accelerating technology diffusion.

He advocated a big investment push on renewable energy in developing countries. International technology cooperation and knowledge sharing can mobilise mature technologies for developing countries, and make other technologies like renewable energy more affordable to the poor....."

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE AT THE STAR ONLINE

At UN, Sen. Boxer Criticizes Firing of Galbraith, Rates Congo 60% on Rapist Generals, No Goldstone

By Matthew Russell Lee

UNITED NATIONS, October 12 -- Senator Barbara Boxer of California, after meeting UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, was asked on Monday morning by Inner City Press about Mr. Ban's firing of long time U.S. diplomat Peter Galbraith as the UN's deputy in Afghanistan, for alleging the UN is covering up pro-Karzai voting fraud. Video here, from Minute 4:10

"On Mr. Galbraith, t's a very sad day when someone is dismissed for telling the truth, that's how I feel about it," Senator Boxer replied. Video here, from Minute 6:18.

But did she bring up the firing to Ban Ki-moon during their meeting? Apparently not. When Inner City Press asked Sen. Boxer if she had raised to Ban the UN system's handling of the Goldstone report on Gaza, Boxer testily replied that she had come only on two topics: violence against women, which she said took up 75% of the meeting -- and "that you never asked any questions about" -- and climate change. Video here, from Minute 8:59.

In Sen. Boxer's read out of the violence against women portion of the meeting, she spoke of rapes in broad daylight then turned to an aide for the name of the country. Guinea -- Guinea Conakry.

Inner City Press asked Sen. Boxer about charges that the UN Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo works with Congolese army units which are accused of rape. Sen. Boxer gave an answer that may be news: that of the "five generals," three have been relieved of duty, but two continue to serve. The reference is to five names that the UN gave to President Kabila. But is being relieved of duty enough? And is 60% a passing grade?

Sen. Boxer at UN, in the past, Galbraith, Guinea and Goldstone not shown

On climate change, Inner City Press asked Sen. Boxer to respond to chief U.S. negotiator Jonathan Pershing's statement that if the Congress hasn't passed legislation before the Copenhagen meeting, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to make any specific commitment at that meeting.

Boxer's response was that she does not agree that the U.S. is not making progress. She spoke about court decisions and actions of governors and mayors. But what about the Congress? What about the U.S.'s ability to make a commitment in Copenhagen? Watch this site.