Fresh advice on climate change

Climate change science has had a turbulent year. After the stalled UN negotiations in Copenhagen last December, there are many hopes that things can begin to move forward at the meeting in Cancun, Mexico, next month to help develop a replacement to the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012. But there are certain to be further battles ahead. The United States' chief climate change negotiator Todd Stern was in Beijing last month seeking to narrow rifts over the basis of a new agreement. China is now considered the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases having overtaken the US, the world's second largest emitter and long the world's largest. Stern has led the US push for China to accept firmer international emissions goals and monitoring, while Beijing has countered that Washington has failed to take serious steps Features against climate change and is instead making China a scapegoat. China challenges an internationally binding limit on its greenhouse gas emissions as unfair, because it contributed less to the problem historically, its emissions per capita are still relatively low and it needs leeway to grow its economy. And the backdrop to the Cancun meeting is the vociferous anti-climate change lobby. Researchers have faced a difficult time with criticism of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Britain's Climate Research Unit at the University of Ahead of the key Cancun meeting on global controls on greenhouse gas emissions, Britain's Royal Society has issued its assessment of the scientific evidence underlying the issues. Nigel Williams reports. Threatened: Low-lying countries such as the Maldives are acutely concerned about the threat of global warming that could result in sea-level rise.