report from the UN Convention on Climate Change in Milan

from Tech Central Station comes are report regarding the ninth Conference of the Parties (COP9) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). bq. The delegates and environmental activists had hoped that the COP9 would be the occasion for announcing that the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC had at long last come into force. The Kyoto Protocol has already been ratified by 100 or so countries but is not yet internationally binding. That's because it must be ratified by a set of industrialized countries whose collective emissions add up to 55 percent of their total emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. bq. President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto Protocol in March 2001, which means that the 55 percent limit can only be reached if Russia ratifies the treaty. And that may not happen. Russia has been very coy about whether it will in fact ratify the treaty. Just last week, a prominent advisor to Russian President Vladimir Putin strongly suggested that his country would not ratify the treaty on the grounds that it would harm Russia's economic growth. Drat... bq. What happens if the Kyoto Protocol fails to come into force? Why then the UNFCCC simply launches another round of negotiations in 2005 searching for a way to control future temperature increases. UN processes and bureaucracies never die. (emphasis mine) Talk about capacity for understatement... Sheesh! So if they don't get their way, they are going to keep grinding this into the ground. The Kyoto protocol is based on very limited models, is very flawed and would be very expensive for the more industralised countries to implement. It offers zero zilch nada guarantee that what it outlines will produce the results they are claiming. In fact, the core data has recently been re-examined by two Canadians and they came up with a very different answer...