AFP image
Copenhagen:
A crucial UN climate summit opened in Copenhagen on Monday amid calls for "early action" to combat the threat and with the hope that emission reductions promised by key countries had put the world closer to a global warming control pact.
"This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do," conference president Connie Hedegaard said adding, key to an agreement is finding a way to channel public and private funds to poor countries to help them fight the effects of climate change.
At the beginning of the meet, a short film was screened showing children of the future facing an apocalypse if world leaders failed to act today.
"There will be hundreds of millions of refugees," R K Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in the clip.
Addressing the delegates from 192 countries, Pachauri stressed that years of dedicated work by the scientific community showed that "the evidence is now overwhelming that the world would benefit greatly from early action and that delay would only lead to costs in economic and human terms that would become progressively high."
He also slammed the so-called 'climategate', or the theft of some emails from experts at a British university, which were seized on by climate sceptics as evidence that scientists distorted data to dramatise the threat of global warming.
"This is our chance. If we miss it, it could take years before we got a new and better one. If we ever do," conference president Connie Hedegaard said adding, key to an agreement is finding a way to channel public and private funds to poor countries to help them fight the effects of climate change.
At the beginning of the meet, a short film was screened showing children of the future facing an apocalypse if world leaders failed to act today.
"There will be hundreds of millions of refugees," R K Pachauri, the head of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said in the clip.
Addressing the delegates from 192 countries, Pachauri stressed that years of dedicated work by the scientific community showed that "the evidence is now overwhelming that the world would benefit greatly from early action and that delay would only lead to costs in economic and human terms that would become progressively high."
He also slammed the so-called 'climategate', or the theft of some emails from experts at a British university, which were seized on by climate sceptics as evidence that scientists distorted data to dramatise the threat of global warming.
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