Junkscience.com is where I picked up on this Reuter's report.
World urged to help poor adapt to climate change.
[The IPCC] Recognizing that climate change may be hard to reverse, experts are now examining "adaptation," or how to deal with potential catastrophes such as rising seas as a result of melting glaciers.
Reading on, in the Australian News;
JOSE Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Council and former prime minister of Portugal, dropped a policy bomb last week. He threatened climate trade war. Europe plans to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by a further 20 per cent by 2020. It would restrict imports from countries that did not do the same thing, specifically the US and China. He called the trade problem the nuclear bomb of the climate change debate.
etc and
The first is that the 20 per cent target spells trouble, and the Europeans know it. Participants at an international conference in Sydney last November, hosted by the Committee for the Economic Development of Australia, heard why.
A German business leader teamed with a researcher from a leading economic institute to explain that the reductions in emissions (about 5 per cent) under the Kyoto Protocol had already led to increases in costs of between 2 per cent and 8 per cent in Germany's cement, steel and aluminium industries. They also reported that German business did not see how it could meet its Government's target to reduce emissions by 30 per cent by 2020 (Germany's contribution to the EU target) and be competitive in global markets.
The EU is anxious. At the UN summit in Bali, it tried to win support not only for the target of 20 per cent cuts in emissions by 2020 but also for the bigger ambition of 60 per cent cuts by 2050. The EU was opposed in all quarters and was not even allowed a passing reference to these targets in the mandate for the new convention to replace the Kyoto Protocol.
etc and
Nobody is quite sure how a system of caps and trade in permits will operate alongside the WTO rules for an open trading system. There is probably a basic philosophical difference. A global cap on emissions is a centrally planned target. Such targets require regulatory controls to secure compliance. WTO rules are specifically designed to prevent the use of such regulation when it controls goods crossing national boundaries.
That's a fundamental point. There is a simpler practicality. Bali demonstrated there is no taste for a global agreement to set global caps. China and India know the caps are a poison pill to their strategies to use growth to eliminate poverty. And you can be certain they would block measures authorising overrides of WTO rules.
The Europeans hope a Hillary Clinton or John McCain administration will see it their way. That is unlikely. Congress will choke on proposals that reduce the competitiveness of US industry. Even if it did not, China, India and other developing countries will not accept global caps in the foreseeable future.
Herein lies the second lesson for Australia. Don't miscalculate along the EU lines. It designed a system to reduce emissions on the assumption the rest of the world would follow suit. Bali showed it won't.
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So the imaginary problem is losing some of its opacity. The emperor's clothes become more visibly transparent by the day.
It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.
IPCC, the first glimmer of truth? Or will it be business as usual? They are still banging on about carbon credits, perhaps they are giving their cohorts time to bail out, Al for one is good at doing that kind of thing.
As a footnote, Icecap highlighted this well engineered document;
Carbon Dioxide in Not the Primary Cause of Global Warming: The Future Can Not Cause the Past.
Exemplifying what has been said by optimists all along.
