BREAKING: 'Draft text' agreed at Paris COP-21

BREAKING NEWS: The world’s rulers have worked out amongst themselves how to collectively pretend that we have not already been thrown under the climate change bus and how to pull the wool over our eyes.

COP21: Climate deal draft text 'agreed' in Paris

Organisers of the climate talks in Paris say a final draft text has been agreed after nearly two weeks of intensive negotiations.

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Image caption

BBC,

12 December, 2015

An official in the office of French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius told the AFP news agency the draft would be presented to ministers at 10:30 GMT.

No details of the proposed agreement have been released so far.

The tentative deal was reached nearly 16 hours after the talks had been scheduled to close.

"We have a text to present," the official said, adding that the draft would be now translated into the UN's six official languages.

Analysts say that this is far from a done deal - ratification will only take place if there are no objections raised at Saturday morning's ministerial meeting, and even is unlikely to come before afternoon in the French capital.

Mr Fabius, who has presided over the talks, had said earlier that the "conditions were never better" for a strong and ambitious agreement.

COP21 Live: Day 12 as it happened.

Significant progress had been reported on a range of issues, with evidence of real compromise between the parties, the BBC's environment correspondent Matt McGrath in Paris reported earlier.

He added that countries supported a temperature goal of 2C but agreed to make their best efforts to keep the warming rise to 1.5C. However, the language on cutting emissions in the long term was criticised for significantly watering down ambition.

The question of different demands on different countries, depending on their wealth and level of development - called "differentiation" at the talks - was said to be the root cause of the difficulties.

Another major difficulty was transparency - richer countries want a single system of measuring, reporting and verifying the commitments countries make as part of this agreement.

It is said to be crucial to the US, which wants to ensure that China is subject to the same sort of oversight as it is. China and India are not keen on this type of oversight.

One positive note came with the announcement that Brazil was willing to join the so-called "high-ambition coalition" of countries including the EU, the US and 79 countries. The alliance said it would push for an ambitious and legally binding deal with a strong review mechanism.

US President Barack Obama spoke to his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping by phone on Friday, with both leaders saying they were committed to an "ambitious" deal.

"Both leaders agreed that the Paris conference presents a crucial opportunity to galvanise global efforts to meet the climate change challenge," a White House statement said.

"They committed that their negotiating teams in Paris would continue to work closely together and with others to realise the vision of an ambitious climate agreement."

I can’t think of anyone better to deliver the message of how things really are than Guy McPherson

'Humans will go extinct soon because of global warming'

An American climate scientist says humans will go extinct soon because of global warming and there is no way global community can turn this around.

To watch the video GO HERE

Press TV,

12 December, 2015

Dr. Guy McPherson, professor emeritus of natural resources - ecology - and evolutionary biology at the University Arizona, made the remarks in a phone interview with Press TV on Friday.

Nearly 200 countries are attending the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which opened on November 30 in France and was scheduled to conclude on December 11.

But international negotiators in Paris missed their self-imposed Friday deadline to reach a comprehensive agreement to counter the threat of global warming before it dooms the planet.

US Secretary of State John Kerry said on Friday advance nations must make tough decisions in order to reach a global climate deal.

“It is inconceivable to me that the negotiators would reach an agreement that will prevent completely destroying the planet,” Professor McPherson said.

“I mean we’re known for a long time based on work published in refereed journals that civilization itself is a heat engine, that if we maintain civilization in any form, whether it is through solar panels, wind turbines or wave powers or fossil fuels, it produces the same effect: the civilization itself is a heat engine,” he stated.

“And I don’t see any negotiators promoting the idea of terminating civilization,” he added.

“We also know now based on abundance of research recently – within last five years or so – on global damming that if we do suddenly terminate civilization that will cause such an abrupt heating of the planet as a result of loss global damming that it will certainly doom humans to extinction,” the scientist said.

“So either we keep the heat engine going and doom our own species and many others or we turn off the heat engine and we deliver our own species and many others to extinction. So it seem that we’re in one of those ‘damned if you do, damned if you don't’ situation,” he pointed out.

“I just don’t see negotiators doing anything that is even moving [toward] the right direction, much last taking a truly radical approach that might harvest carbon from the atmosphere, for example, and reduce emissions along the way. I don’t see that happening,” he observed.

Climate change greater threat than terrorism

“If I were a conspiracy theorist I might be inclined to believe that the focus on terrorism was by design to specifically move attention away from dealing with important issues such as abrupt climate change,” Professor McPherson said.

“It is pretty clear that we are in the midst of abrupt climate change. It is the greatest existentialist threat ever to face our species, and instead the media and the governments have us focusing on the ‘terrorism threat’ that has killed very very very few people in the entire history of the invented war on terror,” he said.

“So I think as a society, as a culture we are just pursuing the wrong priorities, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon,” the American climate change expert said.