Yvo De Boer: "I think 2 degrees is out of reach"; Bob Watson: "We Have To Be Honest W. Each Other"
The UN's former climate chief on Tuesday said the global warming pledge he helped set at the Copenhagen Summit little more than two years ago was already unattainable. "I think two degrees is out of reach," Yvo de Boer, former executive secretary of the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), said on the sidelines of a conference here on June's Rio+20 summit.
The UNFCCC's 195 parties have pledged to limit the rise in global average temperatures to two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The target was set by a core group of countries in the final stormy hours at the Copenhagen Summit in December 2009 and became enshrined by the forum at Cancun, Mexico a year later.
But more and more scientists are warning that the objective is slipping away without radical, early cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Some consider the goal to be a dangerous political mirage, for Earth is now on track for 3C (5.4 F) of warming or more.
"The two degrees is lost but that doesn't mean for me we should forget about it," de Boer said in the interview with AFP.
EDIT
http://news.yahoo.com/2c-warming-target-reach-ex-un-climate-chief-190901437.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
Bastards who are driven by dollar-signs are not trustworthy.
They will obstruct, delay & derail negotiations whilst dragging any limits
to the most innocuous level that they can and then - as soon as they land
back in their own country - throw even that watered-down "goal" straight
into the land-fill whilst quaffing the champagne provided by their sponsors.
Here's hoping that the bad stuff happens *really* *soon* so that the bastards
who guaranteed that it would happen are also affected rather than allowing
their plan - "profit now and leave the bill to the grandchildren" - to succeed.
