India has announced it will reduce its carbon emissions intensity by up to 25 per cent over the next decade.

The country is the last major economy to offer a climate target four days before the start of UN talks on fighting global warming.

In a speech to India's parliament, environment minister Ramesh Jairam said his country had not caused climate change, but it had the most to lose from it.

He announced India would reduce its carbon emission intensity up to 25 per cent by 2020.

Mr Jairam outlined a series of measures including legislation for increased transport fuel efficiency and environmentally friendly buildings.

But he said the country remained a low-level carbon emitter compared to developed nations and ruled out signing up to any legally-binding emissions cuts.

Indian environmentalist Chandra Bushan described the move as the right approach.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/sci_tech/2009/copenhagen/8386319.stm

Nepalese ministers hope the world's highest cabinet meeting will attract the same attention as a similar event held underwater in the Maldives in October.

The meeting comes ahead of next week's climate summit in Copenhagen.

Scientific studies show temperatures are rising faster in the Himalayas than the rest of South Asia.

It has led to reduced snowfall and caused glaciers to melt.

Before Friday's meeting, teams ferried in medical equipment, oxygen canisters, soldiers and journalists to Kalipatar - a plateau at 5,200m (17,000ft) next to Everest's base camp.

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see budgie smuggler at top...

A colleague of the UK professor at the centre of the climate e-mails row says "sceptics" have embarked on a "tabloid-style character assassination".

Professor Andrew Watson rallied to the defence of climate scientist Phil Jones, whose e-mail exchanges prompted claims that data had been manipulated.

There was no evidence of attempting to mislead people, Professor Watson added.

The University of East Anglia has commissioned an independent inquiry into the affair.

"Despite the best efforts of the sceptics, there is no instance in these e-mails that anyone has found so far - and there are millions of people looking - that suggests the scientists manipulated their fundamental data," Professor Watson, from the university's School of Environmental Sciences, stated.

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see the scepitc-crapologist at top....

E= MCSQUARED  or E = MC2
Gus: We all — nearly all of us — say, educated informed people accept this equation. It's a relationship. Yet we've got problems accepting another important equation:
Atmosphere + CO2 = global warming....

The first equation, E = MC2, is far more complex... It demands a knowledge and an acceptance of Poincarré's derivatives and conjectures  to the point we could get a headache. This equation also derives from the simple observation that the motion energy of an object is equal to half of its mass multiplied by the square of its velocity... Simple. But beyond that, the relativity theory associated with E = MC2 demands that we understand the not so obvious relationship between matter and energy and that we accept that matter IS energy and vice verso. It also demands that we accept that the value of maximum speed is that of "light"... Thus, It demands a huge leap of faith to compute that time can be elastic, depending of the (light) speed at which we travel and that time is also distorted by gravity. Hum...

Even in one episode, Homer Simpson got trapped in the distortion of time and ended up in an industrial dustbin, in our dull reality... Good one, Homer... Yet these complex relativistic physics that underpin all our nuclear and quantum knowledge, are far more complex than we, the average punter, can realise. Should we believe in god, there is no way we can reconcile these "theories" with el supremo's. But even if we believe in godot, to appear erudite, we would use Einstein's work as if we knew what it meant while sipping champagne at parties... In fact, it means bollocks to our mundane life — apart from providing far down the line such things as the nuclear decay concept, that we have adapted into bombs and nuke power stations...

On the other hand, the "Atmosphere + CO2 = global warming" equation is much simpler and can be proven more readily that E = MC2....
But the "Atmosphere + CO2 = global warming" equation upsets our way of life, BIG TIME...

For donkeys years, we've lived under the premise that we can burn carbon as much as we like — and we really could, since we were mostly tempering with "surface carbon" processing, including resequestration in the seas and vegetation — until we discovered the hidden cache of what I call "entombed carbon past"...

For millions of years, since this carbon was buried, the earth had survived, modified and life on earth had evolved, without this carbon cache being part of the system.

But we, the greedy tomb-raiders, we could not stop. Once we got our hand on the loot (oil, coal and gas), we carried on, burning more and more of the stuff... without realising the curse.

Well, it's not a curse but an equation that, at various moments in the history of this planet — from the time it gelled into a ball of fire with a thin crust — had created various condition for the surface... The CO2 + atmosphere equation is very specific, but due to other factors present in the mix, is not as obvious as we're prepared to see, except for the dedicated scientists. These concepts are way above the heads of our politicians. Politicians are mostly egocentric petty psychopaths who can spruik falsities with great ease, to con us into their herd of habitual sinners...

We can't be complacent. With the world's population of carbon-consumers growing, we are contributing beyond what we can imagine to a rapid change of conditions on this planet...

the Carbon equation is beyond the rise of just a few degrees...

As I have mentioned before, it is not doomsday — even with a world increase of 12 degree C above present temperature average by 2100. It's just a new sets of values — most more difficult — for the survival of life as it exists now.

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That the UN body blames the Russians for the release of the doubting global warming scientists' emails (mostly before 1999) — who presented some frustration and misunderstandings of what was happening — is not surprising. Hard to know who the culprits are, though...
But imagine that, of all people on earth, the Russians have most to gain from global warming. Global warming of say 12 degrees would open up vast tract of land, previously barely inhabitable or unexploitable, in Siberia... It would turn Russia into a lush "garden" land while most of Europe would cook under the sun... By then, in Australia, Sydney's temperature could reach as high as 55 degree on some summer days...

Good for the Danes, too, global warming will open up the Greenland region for more resource exploitation and cultivation... Meanwhile, other lands, including the land of the mighty dollar, will become deserts if they're not already, while others will become swamps and/or shallow seas. Nothing new... Then, more damage will follow on...
E = MC2...? easy...

Scientists believe earlier estimates failed to take into account gaps in the knowledge of how melting ice sheets will affect sea level, as well as technical errors in the calculations which have now been corrected, giving a much higher figure for estimated sea level rise than those published by the IPCC in its 2007 assessment.

see toon at top...