Climate change doubters ‘out of time’: Annan

In his valedictory speech to the annual meeting, the UN secretary-general painted a sombre tableau of the effects of climate change, especially on impoverished countries that were least to blame for it.

And he lacerated the fast-shrinking minority of politicians or scientists who still denied there was any threat as “out of step, out of arguments and out of time.”

Climate change threatens agriculture with drought and coastal habitations with rising sea levels. It helps spread mosquito-born diseases and could lead to billion-dollar weather calamities, he said.

“Climate change is also a threat to peace and security,” he warned. “Changing patterns of rainfall, for example, can heighten competition for resources, setting in motion potentially destabilising tensions and migrations, especially in fragile states or volatile regions.

“There is evidence that some of this already occurring; more could well be in the offing.”

Annan said the message is clear: “Global climate change must take its place alongside those threats —conflict, poverty, the proliferation of deadly weapons —that have traditionally monopolised first-order political attention.”

Ministers or their stand-ins at the 189-nation meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are under pressure to spell out by Friday their commitments for deepening cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions.

The spotlight is being placed on Brazil, China and India— big-population developing countries whose carbon pollution has surged in line with their economic growth.

The European Union hopes these countries will signal they will join rich nations in making binding curbs in their emissions when negotiations start next year to reshape the UNFCCC’s Kyoto Protocol after it expires in 2012.

The United States, which walked away from Kyoto in 2001, is being scrutinised for any gesture towards the pact in the light of last week’s US elections, in which the Democrats wrested control of Congress. The US by itself accounts for a quarter of the world’s greenhouse gas output, although its position as the No. 1 polluter could soon be overtaken by China, a major coal burner.