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UN climate summit calls for urgency in reducing emissions

The world must act quickly to cut back on greenhouse gases, experts said in a new report yesterday thrashed out in a week of haggling over Chinese-led efforts to pin rich nations as responsible for the bulk of global warming.

The report, the product of five days of marathon negotiations at a UN conference to find proposals to battle climate change, said emissions need to start declining by 2015 to avoid the worst effects of global warming.

It stressed that international efforts could still have a significant impact in keeping global temperatures down, and that many of the tools to cut greenhouse gases already existed and could be implemented quickly.

But participants in the closed-door talks said a number of sticking points held up the negotiations, including a push by China to highlight that the developed world was behind the vast bulk of greenhouse gases.

Another matter of contention was how much importance to give nuclear energy in the mix of new technologies that the world should depend on as it moves away from fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases, they said.

Despite the disputes, the final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said there was "substantial" potential for the world to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to below current levels.

"Mitigation efforts over the next two to three decades will have a large impact on opportunities to achieve lower stabilization levels" of greenhouse gases, it said. "There is substantial economic potential for the mitigation of global greenhouse gas emissions over the coming decades."

Greenhouse gases fuel global warming by trapping heat from the sun.

The report said nations must get greenhouse gases to start declining by 2015 to avoid the most destructive effects of climate change.

The IPCC, the UN's leading authority on the subject, said greenhouse gas emissions should peak in 2015 and then fall by 50 to 85 percent below 2000 levels.

That would limit global warming to 2oC to 2.4oC, generally recognized by experts as the threshold at which some of the most extreme impacts of climate change will begin.

The report is the third and last from the IPCC this year, after the first two looked into the evidence and looming devastating impacts of global warming.

The text of the report calls for greater use of renewable energies such as solar, wind, and hydro-power, as well as ways to use energy more efficiently.

The cost of reducing greenhouse gases was one of the biggest disputes, with China the leading voice in expressing concern about the economic impact of cutting back, delegates said.
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