Day 2

It hasn’t taken long for the wheels to start coming loose on the Copenhagen bandwagon, if reports at News.com.au are to be believed. Under the headline “Copenhagen conference in disarray“, it reports that certain documents have been leaked showing wealthier nations would be given more power in future climate change negotiations:

The documents seem to allow a handful of rich countries to have larger emissions and more control over future talks within a “circle of commitment” and have enraged delegates from developing countries.

The US, UK, and Denmark are among the countries included in the so-called “Danish text.”

The document also sets unequal limits on per capita carbon emissions for developed and developing countries in 2050; meaning that people in rich countries would be permitted to emit nearly twice as much under the proposals.

The secret draft agreement worked on by a group of individuals known as “the circle of commitment” – understood to include the UK, US and Denmark – has only been shown to a handful of countries since it was finalised this week, The Guardian reports.

…

The document was described last night by one senior diplomat as “a very dangerous document for developing countries. It is a fundamental reworking of the UN balance of obligations. It is to be superimposed without discussion on the talks”, the paper reports. (source)

The ABC (incredibly) has more:

The document abandons the Kyoto Protocol, sidelines the United Nations in future climate change negotiations, and hands most of the power to rich countries.

The Kyoto Protocol relied on the principle that rich nations – responsible for the bulk of emissions – can and should be compelled to take on the biggest burden when it comes to cutting those emissions.

Under Kyoto, poorer nations were not required to act at all.

The leaked agreement not only brings the developing world into the frame, it allows rich countries to emit twice as much carbon as poor countries. (source)

Ouch. That should really stir things up! See BBC coverage here.

The other big news this morning is that this decade is shaping up to be “the hottest on record”. (They use “hotter” and “hottest” as a cheap trick to make it sound more dramatic – we’re talking tenths of one degree here.) Since the planet is emerging from the Little Ice Age, it’s a bit like saying “spring will be warmer hotter than winter”, and since “on record” means in the last 150 years, it ignores all previous warmings, such as the Medieval Warm Period, which were warmer, sorry, hotter.  In other words, Big Freaking Deal. And even then, none of this proves that the warming is anthropogenic, nor that cutting emissions will make the slightest difference.

But that doesn’t stop the moonbat media latching on to it to claim that it’s even more important that we strike a deal at Copenhagen:

“World’s hottest decade adds to pressure for climate accord”

The UN’s top weather expert warned Tuesday that the world is in its hottest decade on record as climate negotiators plunged into talks seeking a historic deal on cutting carbon emissions.

The prediction by the World Meteorological Organisation underlined the pressure for an agreement at a summit in Copenhagen, which was boosted when the United States said it would start to regulate carbon dioxide as a dangerous pollutant.

“The decade 2000-2009 is very likely to be the warmest on record, warmer than the 1990s, which were in turn warmer than the 1980s,” World Meteorological Organisation Secretary General Michel Jarraud told a press conference.

Jarraud also said that the year 2009 would probably rank as the fifth warmest since accurate records were started in 1850. (source)