UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon urged environment ministers on Wednesday to reject attempts by skeptics to undermine efforts to forge a climate change deal, stressing that global warming poses “a clear and present danger.”
In a message read by a UN official, Ban referred to a still-burning controversy over several mistakes made in a 2007 report issued by the UN-affiliated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that drew widespread criticism and sparked calls for the resignation of its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.
The report’s conclusion that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 was several hundred years off; data indicates the ice could melt by 2350. The error has bolstered arguments from climate skeptics that fears of global warming were overblown.
Despite the failure to forge a binding deal on curbing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions at a UN conference in Copenhagen last December, Ban said the meeting made an important step forward by setting a target to keep global temperature from rising and establishing a program of climate aid to poorer nations.
“To maintain the momentum, I urge you to reject last-ditch attempts by climate skeptics to derail your negotiations by exaggerating shortcomings in the ... report,” Ban said in the statement read at the start of an annual UN meeting of environmental officials from 130 countries on the Indonesian island of Bali.
“Tell the world that you unanimously agree that climate change is a clear and present danger,” Ban said.
Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono said time was running out but expressed confidence that a binding deal could be forged at the next climate change summit later this year in Cancun, Mexico.
“I’m convinced that we’re still not too late,” he said.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa said the government would hold an informal meeting of all environmental ministers and officials today to discuss ways of ensuring that a binding treaty on greenhouse gas cutbacks could be forged in Cancun.
“No sealed deal happened in Copenhagen, so it’s now more urgent than ever for us to work diligently between now and Mexico,” Natalegawa said in an interview.
Kiribati environmental official Kautoa Tonganibeia said his tiny Pacific nation was discussing a long-term mitigation plan that includes the possibility of evacuating areas where a large part of the nation’s 92,000 people live in case rising sea levels and other weather-related problems worsen because of global warming.
“The developed countries need to be more considerate of us,” Tonganibeia said.
The huge climate change aid to poor countries like Kiribati that was pledged in Copenhagen could not be disbursed in the absence of any binding agreement on greenhouse gas emission cuts, said Karl Falkenberg, the EU Commission’s director-general of environment.
Countries set a target in Copenhagen of keeping the Earth’s average temperature from rising more than 2ºC above the levels that existed before nations began industrializing in the late 18th century.
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