DOHA: Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, has condemned the US and other industrial economies, holding them responsible for the phenomenon of climate change.

In an audio tape obtained by Arab television, bin Laden criticised George Bush, the former US president, for rejecting the Kyoto pact and condemned global corporations.

“This is a message to the whole world about those responsible for climate change and its repercussions – whether intentionally or unintentionally – and about the action we must take,” bin Laden said.

“Speaking about climate change is not a matter of intellectual luxury – the phenomenon is an actual fact.”

In the new recording, bin Laden says “all the industrial states” are to blame for climate change, “yet the majority of those states have signed the Kyoto Protocol and agreed to curb the emission of harmful gases”.

He continued: “However, George Bush junior, preceded by [the US] congress, dismissed the agreement to placate giant corporations. And they are themselves standing behind speculation, monopoly and soaring living costs.

“They are also behind ‘globalisation and its tragic implications’. And whenever the perpetrators are found guilty, the heads of state rush to rescue them using public money.”

The Kyoto Protocol, a UN treaty aimed at combating global warming, was adopted in December 1997 and has since been ratified by 187 states, but not by the US congress.

In the new recording, bin Laden said: “Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the US policies to those of the Mafia. They are the true terrorists and therefore we should refrain from dealing in the US dollar and should try to get rid of this currency as early as possible.

While continuing to attack America, bin Laden’s comments mark a shift from his earlier, more regionally focused commentary.

COPENHAGEN: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says “we have a deal” after a climate conference in Copenhagen decided to recognize a political accord brokered by President Barack Obama with China and other emerging powers.

But Ban says he’s “aware that this is just the beginning” of a process to craft a binding pact to rein in greenhouse gas emissions. Still, Ban says the Copenhagen Agreement “will have an immediate operational effect.”

Many poor nations had bitterly protested the deal because it lacks specific targets for reducing carbon emissions

Sri Lanka’s election commissioner on Thursday accepted a record 22 nominations for the January presidential poll, in which economic policies, good governance and corruption are expected to dominate the campaign.

The candidates for the January 26 poll include incumbent President Mahinda Rajapaksa and his former army chief, General Sarath Fonseka, who led the military to victory over Tamil rebels after a 25-year civil war. Successive governments have won national polls promising to end the war with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, while blaming the conflict for any failure to implement economic and political reforms. About 14 milllion of the island nation’s 21 million population are eligible to vote.

Rajapaksa, who called the elections two years before his term expires as he tries to take credit for ending the war, is backed by the United People’s Freedom Alliance, which includes business groups some minority parties. The President has focused on post-war peace and development, without giving any specific policies on how he would achieve that. Analysts expect Rajapaksa to try to woo voters with public-sector wage hikes and subsidies, but he will constrained by the conditions attached to a $2.6 billion dollars loan from the International Monetary Fund.

General Fonseka speaking to journalists talked about ending corruption and abolishing the powerful executive presidency. He said he would establish good governance once he wins the elections. Fonseka is supported by the two main opposition parties, the pro-business United National Party (UNP) and the Marxists Janatha Vimukthi Peremuna (JVP), whose economic policies are at opposite ends of the spectrum. The main Tamil party, which had earlier backed Tamil Tiger rebels before they were wiped out in a May military offensive, has not announced who it would support, though analysts say they would lean to Fonseka over Mahinda as minorities have more confidence in the UNP.

Tamils make up almost 12 percent of Sri Lanka’s population, and unlike past elections where the LTTE discouraged them from going to the polls, they could emerge as a key swing vote. Both the UNP and JVP have said their main aim is to defeat Rajapaksa and then later to focus on other issues. Economists said Rajapaksa’s past populist policies such the provision of subsidies, high government expenditure, and bloated state jobs have created fiscal pressures.

Successive Sri Lankan governments have delayed both economic and political reform, bowing to the pressure of coalition partners aiming to win elections. But the IMF loan comes with conditions aimed at curbing those kinds of pressures. Investor confidence in the $40 billion economy has surged,attracting foreign investments into government debt and both listed and unlisted companies due to investor hopes of a rapid economic recovery after the war. The economy, still struggling to recover from the financial crisis and the civil war, is expected to expand at an eight-year low of 3.5 percent this year, from 6 percent last year, the central bank said.

Heavy Snow Brings Traffic Woes to France, Thick snowfall added to the misery of the daily commute for millions of Parisians on Thursday, causing dangerous driving conditions for motorists heading into the centre of town.
The snowfall, only a week before Christmas, was a rarity for the French capital, which generally does not see snow before the late winter — if at all. The snow was caused by cold air coming from Eastern Europe. A total of 51 departments (counties) in the northern part of the country went onto orange alert as authorities grappled with the climate conditions amid worries that the state electricity distribution network might not hold up in the face of sharply increased demand. Residents in Brittany and the Provence region of southern France have been warned that they may face power cuts lasting up to two hours. Officials at electricity distribution network RTE have said the cuts could affect tens of thousands of people at a time if they come. But with no threat of power cuts in the capital, ordinary Parisians were happy to enjoy the snow. “It would be even nicer if it settled a little and if we had 10 centimetres of snow that we could keep for three or four days,” said Cecile de Tuny, a passer-by at the Arc de Triomphe.
Meteorologist Patrick Galois said snowfall in France just before Christmas was a rare occurrence. “It is true that with global warming, in the last 30 years we have been able to notice a tendency towards less and less snow in the winter time in France. But, even so, there is always some snow. In general, the snow falls more often in January and February than in December. So, it is rather rare to have this kind of snowfall in the middle of December,” he said. But he said that despite global warming, snow and frost would continue to occur. “Climate change goes mostly in the direction of heating, in the direction of reducing the snow, so what we are actually seeing is a climate hazard, which means that the climate can be a little colder or warmer, and it changes day after day. So, even if we have fewer waves of frost and less snowfall, because the climate changes, it does not mean that we will not have them anymore. So it is not directly linked to climate change.”

NEW DELHI : India cannot accept a global warming treaty that would stall its drive to lift millions out of poverty, Premier Manmohan Singh said as he left for the final phase of UN climate talks in Copenhagen.

Singh is among the world leaders descending on the Danish capital for the final two days of a summit blighted by bitter wrangling that could wreck efforts to draw up a sweeping pact to combat global warming.

Singh said he looked forward to “constructive deliberation” but stressed that the developed world needed to address the concerns of poorer nations over the impact of any proposed agreement on their economic growth.

“Climate change cannot be addressed by perpetuating the poverty of the developing countries,” he said in a departure statement released by his office. India went to the Danish capital with an offer to reduce its carbon intensity by 20 to 25 percent by 2020, compared to 2005 levels.

“We are willing to do more provided there are credible arrangements to provide both additional financial support as well as technological transfers from developed to developing countries,” Singh said.

The fraught negotiations in Copenhagen received a shot in the arm Wednesday when wealthy nations pledged some 22 billion dollars to fund the fight against global warming.

India remains steadfastly opposed to binding emission cuts and has refused to adopt a peak year when its emissions would have to stop growing and start falling.

The presence of around 120 world leaders at the end of the summit, including US President Barack Obama, is meant to inject momentum into reaching a deal to stop climate change after the end of 2012, when obligations run out under the landmark Kyoto Protocol.

Copenhagen Climate, Police were on alert in Copenhagen on Wednesday morning as protesters gathered for a mass demonstration. The protesters say they plan to move into the conference area where world leaders are meeting, disrupt the sessions and hold a ‘people’s summit’.

The protest comes after more than a week of talks at the UN Climate Conference, in which world leaders have so far failed to reach a consensus on how to tackle global warming. The world leaders have until a main summit on Friday to agree a deal under a deadline set at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia, in 2007. Negotiations since Bali have been marred by mistrust between rich and poor nations.
As the deadline approaches for a pact that would favour a shift to low-carbon businesses, some politicians are warning of the risks of failure in the 193-nation negotiations, even as they urge compromises to allow a breakthrough.

Protesters gathering on Wednesday morning said they felt their demands for action were not being listened to. The climate conference has been the scene of several protests and demonstrations since it started on December 7. People from all over the world have descended on the Danish capital to urge their governments to come up with a binding climate agreement.
Various lobby groups have been stationed outside the Bella Centre, where the conference is taking place, since the start, while inside, a few smaller protests take place each day.

Protest Demo Against Climate Conference, Above 30,000 people protested in Copenhagen against an ongoing conference on Climate Change.
The protestors hurled stones at buildings, which resulted into clashes between environmental friendly organization’s activists and police. Police nabbed over thousand people during the demonstration.
The representatives of 192 countries are attending a conference in Copenhagen to discuss ways to save the global climate.

Lahore, Pakistan News :- Pakistan will never compromise on nuclear program: FO

Foreign Office spokesman says that Pakistan will never compromise on its nuclear program and will defend it on every forum.

In a weekly briefing of FO in Islamabad its spokesman Abdul Basit said that subjective policies of some international forces for Pakistan and India were putting negative effects on the stability and peace of South Asia. Pakistan doesn’t need any help for operation in its territory, FO added.

Copenhagen Climate Conference updates :- Climate change ‘Plan B’ awaits if diplomacy fails.

COPENHAGEN: Just five years ago, anyone who talked of easing Earth’s climate crisis by fertilising the seas with iron, scattering particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or building a sunshade in space courted ridicule.

Today, such advocates — “geo-engineers” — are getting a respectable hearing.

Their ideas are still beyond the scientific pale, for they remain contested as risky for the environment and laden with unknowns about cost, practicality and legality.

But mainstream scientists who once dismissed these projects are now looking at them closely.

And some grudgingly accept that at least some concepts are worth exploring as a possible “Plan B” — a last-resort option if political efforts to tackle global warming fail and catastrophe looms.

Plan A hangs in the balance at the December 7-18 UN talks in Copenhagen, where 194 nations are called to craft a post-2012 treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. Related article: Copenhagen climate talks

But the negotiations are hideously complex, a Gordian knot of interlinked issues, national interests and economic stakes.

The plodding, consensus-driven process is being far outstripped by the surge of fossil-fuel emissions, placing Earth on course for as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial times, way over a 2.0 C (3.6 F) threshold widely considered safe.

“A lot of people don’t like to say that Plan A is not working,” Jip Lenstra, a senior scientist at the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, told AFP at the Copenhagen talks.

“They know that, but they don’t want to say that aloud because it’s very frustrating and it’s not the right signal at the right time.

“If you are working quite hard to make a success of Plan A, and somebody says that we should look at Plan B if Plan A is not successful, that’s not a good strategy.”

Geo-engineering broke new ground this year with an assessment of its options by Britain’s Royal Society, one of the temples of science.

A 12-member panel found that some geo-engineering techniques could have “serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems.”

But they cautiously said some schemes were technically feasible and could be a useful fallback tool to help the switch to a low-carbon economy provided safety worries and doubts about affordability were answered.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) inveighed against geo-engineering schemes in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, swiping them in a brief aside as charged with potential risk and unquantified cost.

It now intends to do its own evaluation of the mavericks.

The Royal Society said geo-engineering fell into two main categories.

The most promising entails removal of carbon dioxide, such as by planting forests and building towers that would capture CO2 from the air.

Some of these projects could be harnessed alongside conventional methods to reduce emissions once they are demonstrated to be “safe, effective, sustainable and affordable,” said the report.

The other category is called solar radiation management.

Instead of tackling CO2, it would act like a thermostat, turning down the heat that reaches Earth from the Sun.

Concepts in this field include deflecting the Sun’s heat away from the Earth through space mirrors, scattering light-coloured particles in the high atmosphere to reflect the solar rays and using ships to spray water that would create reflective low-altitude clouds.

The advantage would be to lower temperatures quickly and could be tempting if global warming suddenly cranked up a gear, the report said.

But these techniques would not curb CO2 emissions that cause dangerous ocean acidification; their costs are unclear but possibly astronomical; and they may end up generating disasters of their own.

Even so, they should not be dismissed out of hand, given their potential in an emergency, says Ken Caldeira, a professor of climate modelling at Stanford University, California, who took part in the Royal Society report.

“We need to think if Greenland were to be sliding into the sea rapidly, causing rapid sea-level rise, or if methane started to de-gas rapidly from the Siberian permafrost, or if rainfall patterns were to shift in such a way that wide-spread famines were induced,” he said in London in September.

“We would be remiss if we did not do what we could do to understand the potential of these options as well as their uncertainties and risks ahead of time.”

COPENHAGEN: A UN climate conference has opened for two weeks of negotiations among 192 nations to forge a pact to secure the world from calamitous global warming.

Conference president Connie Hedegaard, U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer and the U.N.’s chief climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri were set to address the thousands of delegates in Copenhagen on Monday.

Negotiations have dragged on for two years, only recently showing signs of breakthroughs with new commitments from the U.S., China and India to control greenhouse gas emissions.

President Barack Obama’s decision to attend the conclusion of the two-week conference, after phone consultations with other heads of state, was taken as a signal that an agreement was getting closer. He originally planned to make an hours-long stop in the Danish capital this week.

More than 100 heads of state and government have said they will attend the last day or two, making Copenhagen the largest and most important summit ever held on climate.

Along with roughly 15,000 delegates, officials expect many protesters to descend on Copenhagen for the climate conference. Authorities were beefing up security in preparation.

A study released by the U.N. Environment Program Sunday indicated that pledges by industrial countries and major emerging nations fall just short of the reductions of greenhouse gas emissions that scientists have said are needed.

Environmentalists have warned that emissions commitments were dangerously short of what U.N. scientists have said were needed to keep average temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees C (3.6 F).