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COPENHAGEN – Delegates converged Sunday for the grand finale of two years of tough, sometimes bitter negotiations on a climate change treaty, as U.N. officials calculated that pledges offered in the last few weeks to reduce greenhouse gases put the world within reach of keeping global warming under control. Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official, said on the eve of the 192-nation conference that despite unprecedented unity and concessions, industrial countries and emerging nations need to dig deeper. Finance — billions of dollars immediately and hundreds of billions of dollars annually within a decade — was emerging as...

UN officials likened the Climategate controversy to Watergate today, claiming that computer hackers who stole thousands of e-mails sent by a senior climate scientist were probably paid to do it by people intent on undermining the Copenhagen summit. Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said the theft from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was not the work of amateur climate sceptics but a sophisticated and well-funded attempt to destroy public confidence in the science of man-made climate change. He said the fact that the e-mails were first uploaded to a...

Snow will fall and accumulate in Sacramento on Monday, the National Weather Service is predicting. Temperatures in the capital will fall into the 20s. A storm predicted to bring rain to Northern California this evening will cool dramatically and bring snow by Monday. Chances of precipitation are 100 percent, experts predict, and between two and four inches of snow will cover the valley floor. Northwest winds will blow about 10 mph.

The UN's official panel on climate change has hit back at sceptics' claims that the case for human influence on global warming has been exaggerated. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said it was "firmly" standing by findings that a rise in the use of greenhouse gases was a factor. It was responding to a row over the reliability of data from East Anglia University's Climatic Research Unit Leaked e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated. Last month, hundreds of messages between scientists at the unit and their peers around the world were put on the internet...

Governments should increase borrowing to tackle global warming despite the dire state of public balance sheets, according to Lord Stern of Brentford, the former chief economist of the World Bank. The author of the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling climate change said he was an expert in dealing with tough budgetary constraints and acknowledged that the current public debt was "worrying". But he believes that the irreversible nature of climate change means that extra pressures on the public balance sheet are justified. "What I'm saying is that we should be prudent with public finances, but if we...

Hot air and high-minded speeches might be the most obvious emissions from the Copenhagen climate talks, skeptics say. But behind the scenes Russia will play an old card from communism's fall that could tip the odds even higher against ever meeting the summit's goals. Russia's greenhouse gas emissions plunged in the 1990s as its economy collapsed. Moscow now sits on a potential treasure trove of unused carbon emission permits it could sell to other countries. Those permits expire in 2012 along with the original Kyoto Treaty. Russia has signaled that it wants them rolled forward if it is going to...

The fight over global warming science is about to cross the Atlantic with a U.S. researcher poised to sue NASA, demanding release of the same kind of climate data that has landed a leading British center in hot water over charges it skewed its data. Chris Horner, a senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, said NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as...

Behind the scenes, large financial houses are moving in stealthily. In 2008, carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion and is projected to grow to become a $2-$10 trillion dollar market, or “The largest commodity traded world wide”. The largest. That’s bigger than oil, coal, gas, or iron.Banks want us to trade carbonJP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, BNP Paribas, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, Citigroup, Credit Suisse are just a few financial houses calling for emissions trading schemes. (None of them seem to be calling for a tax?) Those who broker the trades are guaranteed to make money.Journalists who repeat IPCC press releases...

Hacked climate e-mail rebutted by scientistsPeter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer Saturday, December 5, 2009 A group of the nation's top scientists defended research on global climate change Friday against what they called a politically motivated smear campaign designed to foster public doubt about irrefutable scientific facts. The allegations came after skeptics seized upon a series of hacked e-mails at England's University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit as evidence of a climate change hoax. **SNIP** Drumbeat of skepticism Despite this, the drumbeat of skepticism about global warming has never been louder. The Internet and conservative news programs have been flooded...

<p>The Washington Post put ClimateGate on the front page, top left in Saturday’s edition. It’s also the top story at washingtonpost.com. The headline is "In e-mails, science of warming is hot debate." The website summary: "E-mails stolen from British research center show climate-change leaders noting flaws in their own data and seemingly scheming to muzzle critics."</p>

The words “We interrupt this broadcast,” was repeatedly followed by dramatic accounts of Martians invading America, were heard by 6 million radio listeners one infamous Halloween night in 1938. Millions of panic-stricken Americans, first relieved then furious, found out they’d been hoaxed. They had just heard the radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds, by H.G. Wells, produced and narrated by Orson Welles. Accounts of the hoax’s impact and motivation vary widely, but all agree the broadcast launched Orson Welles into infamy as America’s Greatest Hoaxer – a title that is now in jeopardy from a much bigger hoaxer:...

Even the BBC didn't let this scoop get away. A segment on the Dec. 3 broadcast of BBC's "Newsnight," showed the implications of the story behind the so-called "ClimateGate" scandal are more than just e-mails concealing data, but an incompetence analyzing the data by way of faulty computer code. John Graham-Cumming, a British programmer known for the open source "POPFile email filtering program" explained how the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit (CRU) had wholesale problems with its computer programming analyzing climate change data, with billion, if not even trillions of dollars, on the line. ...more (w/video)...

The scandal has prompted calls for Obama from global warming skeptics to skip this month's climate summit in Copenhagen -- instead, the White House is doubling down on its commitment The controversy swirling around the leaked e-mails of climate scientists apparently trying to downplay data and exclude dissenting opinions has led to calls for President Obama to skip this month's climate summit in Denmark until the e-mails can be investigated. Instead, the White House announced Friday that Obama was doubling down on his commitment to the summit's goals and moving his visit later in the month, hoping it will secure...

Few of us would escape with reputations intact if our e-mail were made public, and the scientists ensnared in "climategate" are no exception. Writing "I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years … to hide the decline" makes Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, who typed that in 1999, look as if he is pulling a fast one to conceal a trend toward global cooling. And when another scientist wrote that "I can't see either of these papers being in the next I.P.C.C. report. Kevin and...

1750 - Before Industrial Revolution, atmosphere holds 280 parts per million of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2).1898 - Swedish scientist Svante Ahrrenius calculates that CO2 from coal and oil burning will warm the planet.1955 - U.S. scientist Charles Keeling finds atmospheric CO2 has risen to 315 parts per million.1971 - First international conference on climate change is held in Sweden. 1986 - Atmospheric CO2 reaches 350 ppm.1988 - NASA scientist James Hansen tells U.S. Congress global warming "is already happening now."1988 - U.N. creates the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a clearinghouse for climate science.1990 - IPCC issues its First...

Nasa's James Hansen was the first to point out the perils of climate change to the US Congress. Here, he begins a heated debate with experts from around the world, from China to the threatened Maldives, and argues that our leaders must be shaken out of their complacency. But will they show enough courage at next week's Copenhagen summit to take the first steps to saving the planet?Absolutely. It is possible – if we give politicians a cold, hard slap in the face. The fraudulence of the Copenhagen approach – "goals" for emission reductions, "offsets" that render ironclad goals almost...

'Dangerous, deceitful' attempts to derail Copenhagen summit condemned Gordon Brown tonight led a chorus of condemnation against "flat-earth" climate change sceptics who have tried to derail the Copenhagen summit by casting doubt on the evidence for global warming. Sceptics in the UK and the US have moved to capitalise on a series of hacked emails from climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia, claiming they show attempts to hide information that does not support the case for human activity causing rising temperatures. On the eve of the Copenhagen summit, Saudi Arabia and Republican members of the US Congress...

The U.N.'s decision this week to investigate whether some of its climate change research had been manipulated constitutes a "direct rebuke" of the Obama administration, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said Friday. The White House's unwillingness to open a similar inquiry could now only be characterized as "a sad abdication of their responsibility to ensure that U.S. policies are not driven by corrupted science and data," the congressman added. “The very integrity of the report that the Obama administration has predicated much of its climate change policy has been called into question and it is unconscionable that this administration and Congress...

WASHINGTON--The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will early next week, possibly as soon as Monday, officially declare carbon dioxide a public danger, a trigger that could mean regulation for emitters across the economy, according to several people close to the matter.Such an "endangerment" decision is necessary for the EPA to move ahead early next year with new emission standards for cars. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has said it could also mean large emitters such as power stations, cement kilns, crude-oil refineries and chemical plants would have to curb their greenhouse gas output.The announcement would also give President Barack Obama and his...

Consider the Brits on the sideline until 2012 on global warming.  The Met Office will need three years to rebuild ground-based climate models while recompiling raw data from the past 160 years to replace the data that the University of East Anglia’s CRU destroyed years ago.  They want to create an open and transparent full data set, but until then have to back down from any of the conclusions that relied on UEA-CRU’s models (via QandO): The Met Office plans to re-examine 160 years of temperature data after admitting that public confidence in the science on man-made global warming has...