U.N. revs up over global warming

The session Monday may be the largest high-level meeting ever on climate change.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the September 24, 2007 edition

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UNITED NATIONS, N.Y. - The annual summertime retreat of the Arctic icecap, greater this year than perhaps at any time during the 20th century. The nightmare of intensifying storms in some areas and extended drought in others, already taking place in developing countries of South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

It is against this backdrop of almost daily news of what scientists describe as signs of advancing global warming that the United Nations holds Monday what may be the largest high-level international meeting ever on climate change.

The conference, called by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon, kicks off what many experts and officials say will be the high week of a turning-point year in the global political response to the challenge of a warming planet.

More than 80 heads of state or government are expected among the representatives of better than 150 countries attending the UN session. Then on Thursday, President Bush will convene at the White House a gathering of leaders from the world's top emitters of greenhouse gases.

In addition, the Clinton Global Initiative will host a forum in New York Wednesday, drawing business and international political leaders to promote grass-roots responses to global warming.

Over the past weekend, at a UN conference in Montreal, the governments of about 200 countries agreed to accelerate a treaty to phase out hydrochlorofluorocarbons.

Together, the meetings put climate change at the center of the global stage this week – and they will make it harder for leaders to drop the issue in the future, experts say. That may be especially true of Mr. Bush: He may be known internationally as the foot-dragging leader of a top emitter of fossil-fuel pollutants, but by endorsing Mr. Ban's meeting and then calling for his own at the White House, he will be seen as committing to a path of no return on climate-change action.

The Monday UN meeting "is looking to be quite an extraordinary event in what is turning out to be a remarkable year in the international response to climate change," says Richard Kinley, deputy executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.

Typically, such international sessions draw environmental ministers, who may or may not attend with the full-fledged backing of their government. This time, many heads of state are involved, with the meeting coinciding with the opening of the UN General Assembly. Such high-level involvement suggests that the world has turned a corner in perception of the seriousness of the climate-change challenge, Mr. Kinley says.

"Increasingly, leaders are seeing this as an issue of national interest, and not just a question of responsibility. And the fact is that states are more apt to act when they see their interests at stake," he says.

Other factors this year, he says, include what many experts describe as a "conclusive" report from an international group of scientists and officials finding evidence of global warming to be "unequivocal." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded with what it termed near certainty that the warming taking place is the result of human activities.

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