UN climate summit kicks off in Bangkok

Leading climate experts gathered in Bangkok on Monday with representatives of 119 countries for a five-day meeting to write recommendations for the United on policies and technologies needed to curb carbon emissions and slow global warming.

"The time is now," said Chartree Chueytrasit, deputy permanent secretary of Thailand's ministry of natural resources and environment in opening remarks at the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Global warming has increasingly become a hot agenda that requires harmonisation of our positions."

The IPCC will meet Monday through Friday in closed-door sessions to discuss its third volume of the IPCC fourth assessment report on climate change and means of mitigating greenhouse gases in an effort to win an international consensus on what needs to be done.

"Science provides a lot of compelling reasons for action, but what action and when is something the governments have to decide," said Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC.

The group is working on a 24-page report, which appraises the current realities of climate change and assesses the policy and technical options for mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, deemed the main cause of global warming.

There are fears that the report, a synthesis of thousands of pages of scientific data, will "be watered down" by country representatives who may not want to highlight some inconvenient truths.

For instance, in the initial draft, the US and China are mentioned as leading carbon dioxide emitters, which is well documented but may be dropped from the final wording of the report due to political pressure.

Coal power, being pursued by much of Asia, is likely to be a controversial issue.

"The report points to the trend towards increasing carbon intensity, particularly as a consequence of coal," said one of the report's authors.

Unlike the Third IPCC Assessment Report, this one is expected to raise more reservations about carbon capture storage, an untried technology that promises to tuck carbon emissions under the earth's crust and is deemed a great hope for the coal industry.

"In the third assessment report it said this technology was the great hope...In this report it lists the potential and the issues that need to resolved before this can be used commercially," said one author.

The nuclear energy option is also analyzed, both as a means of reducing carbon emissions but also in the context of unresolved "issues," such as waste disposal and nuclear proliferation.

The report will also assess the issues involved in renewable energy options, such as the danger of food shortages versus the use of bio-fuels and the soaring prices of wind and solar energy.

Generally the report has an upbeat message on the mitigating technology.

"We need to peak emissions within the next 10 to 15 years and what the report is saying is this is possible. The only thing standing in the way is the lack of government commitment to put in place the policies to do so," said Greenpeace's Bill Hare, one of the key authors of the report.


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