COPENHAGEN — “Climategate” has muddied the good green message that was supposed to come out of the United Nations climate change talks here, forcing leaders to spend time justifying the science behind global warming when they want to focus on ending it.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the “agenda-driven science” it exposed.
Obama will surely ignore the call. And the Environmental Defense Fund’s Peter Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday that climategate isn’t coming up in private meetings among nongovernmental organizations in Copenhagen and is not an issue for negotiators.
But again and again this week, U.N. officials and government leaders have felt the need to defend climate science in public — something few of them would have thought necessary just a few weeks ago.
“Now, we know that skeptics have and will continue to try and sow doubts about the science of climate change,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a briefing to an overflow crowd at the U.S. center here Wednesday. “These are the same tactics that have been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics only serve to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and finding innovative, cost-effective ways to reduce harmful” greenhouse gases.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took a similar tack in New York Tuesday, telling journalists that nothing made public from the private e-mail accounts of prominent climate scientists casts doubt on the causes or effects of climate change. In fact, he said, climate change is occurring “much, much faster than we realized, and we human beings are the primary cause.”
And in Copenhagen Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization and the British Meteorological Office teamed up on offense, releasing new figures showing that the current decade is the warmest on record.
“These figures highlight that the world continues to see global temperature rise, most of which is due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and [they] clearly show that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed,” they said in a statement.
Former Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin stirred the pot Wednesday with a Washington Post op-ed calling on President Barack Obama to boycott the Copenhagen talks over climategate and the “agenda-driven science” it exposed.
Obama will surely ignore the call. And the Environmental Defense Fund’s Peter Goldmark told POLITICO Wednesday that climategate isn’t coming up in private meetings among nongovernmental organizations in Copenhagen and is not an issue for negotiators.
But again and again this week, U.N. officials and government leaders have felt the need to defend climate science in public — something few of them would have thought necessary just a few weeks ago.
“Now, we know that skeptics have and will continue to try and sow doubts about the science of climate change,” U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a briefing to an overflow crowd at the U.S. center here Wednesday. “These are the same tactics that have been used by defenders of the status quo for years. Those tactics only serve to delay and distract from the real work ahead, namely, growing our clean energy economy and finding innovative, cost-effective ways to reduce harmful” greenhouse gases.
U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon took a similar tack in New York Tuesday, telling journalists that nothing made public from the private e-mail accounts of prominent climate scientists casts doubt on the causes or effects of climate change. In fact, he said, climate change is occurring “much, much faster than we realized, and we human beings are the primary cause.”
And in Copenhagen Tuesday, the World Meteorological Organization and the British Meteorological Office teamed up on offense, releasing new figures showing that the current decade is the warmest on record.
“These figures highlight that the world continues to see global temperature rise, most of which is due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and [they] clearly show that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed,” they said in a statement.
