The climate conference begins . . .

Today is the opening of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference sponsored by the United Nations. I have followed at a distance the planning and preparation for this conference and tried to keep abreast of the politics that must be overcome for an agreement to be reached. It is interesting that nearly 100 world leaders will attend and that President Obama has changed the dates of his attendance to the final weekend when the real decision making is expected. The President has also changed his opinion and now believes that a meaningful deal can be reached at the session. It appears that the U.S. may now be willing to pick up its fair share of the $12 billion per year necessary to help developing countries fight global warming.

The conference opens with baggage after hackers released e-mails and other materials from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. This information has been used by skeptics to cast doubt on the data and impact that humans are having on global warming. Since the release, Phil Jones, the head of the unit has stepped aside while an inquiry is conducted and other research universities and organizations have responded such as this from the American Meteorological Society and the Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change. This Time article that was referenced on Climate Change helped me better understand the whole issue of the hacked information and what has happened because of the leaks.

The released information provided an opportunity for doubters to support their argument that scientists have been hiding and manipulating data to support the global warming theory. I didn’t review this information in any detail, but for me there is enough information from multiple sectors of the scientific community to support the need for world leaders to come together around this issue. We need to find solutions for how we use our resources in ways that others in the world view as equitable, to put in place practices to slow the trends and impact on our world, and to embark on creating new and cleaner ways of living in the flat world described by Friedman.

Paul Krugman makes the case for the conference reaching a deal in this New York Times opinion piece that I found on Climate Progress. He believes that this is the right time for agreement on greenhouse gas emissions, that is affordable, and that it may even stimulate the economy.