BALI, Indonesia — As the U.N. climate conference entered its last days, the United States encountered — and rejected — fresh demands Wednesday that it accept ambitious guidelines for negotiating future cuts in emissions of global-warming gases.
Pressure came even from a one-time ally on climate, Australia, whose new prime minister urged Washington to “embrace” new binding targets.
But U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, after opening the ministerial-level final segment of the two-week meeting, told reporters he believed suggesting specific emissions guidelines in the “Bali roadmap” for future talks may prove “too ambitious.”
The tenor of the talks pointed, instead, toward a least-common-denominator outcome by week’s end: a vague plan to negotiate by 2009 a new deal on emissions cutbacks, replacing the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.
The warming climate, meanwhile, seemed to pursue its own accelerated timetable.
Through November, the year 2007 ranked as the globe’s second-warmest on record, after 2005, NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies reported Wednesday. The latest NASA satellite data, meanwhile, showed Arctic Ocean ice melted last summer at an even greater rate than found previously.
One NASA scientist said the Arctic might be almost ice-free in the summer of 2012, much sooner than predicted just months ago.
In a series of authoritative reports this year, the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. network of climate scientists warned of severe consequences — rising seas, spreading droughts, extinguished species, intensified heat waves — if the world’s nations don’t sharply reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping emissions from industry, transport and agriculture.
Rising seas a threat
The scientists projected seas could rise as much as 2 feet in this century as they expand from warmth and from the runoff of melting land ice. The rise could be much higher if melt quickens in Greenland and Antarctica.
The growing threat drew emotional appeals from islanders among the more than 180 nations at the Bali talks.
“It is a story of untold human dimensions, of people becoming environmental refugees,” Grenada’s Angus Friday told the assembled delegates. Some islands are already beset by encroaching seas, he said.
The task before the annual U.N. climate treaty conference was to agree on a “Bali roadmap” launching negotiations for an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, a treaty annex requiring 36 industrial nations to cut greenhouse-gas emissions by an average 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.
The United States rejects the Kyoto deal, with President Bush complaining it would harm the U.S. economy and cutbacks should have been imposed on much poorer but fast-developing nations such as China and India. Instead of specific guidelines, the Bush administration promotes a voluntary approach to reducing emissions.
Leaders of Australia, Indonesia and Germany were among those urging the U.S. delegation to change its position.
