By Adam Satariano and Jeanmarie Todd, Bloomberg

James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said the planet is at a “tipping point” that could lead to rising sea levels, severe droughts and floods, and reduced fresh water supplies if world leaders don’t act to reduce emissions such as carbon dioxide. He criticized the fossil fuel industry for resisting efforts to stop warming.

“It’s just been taken as a God-given fact that we’re going to burn all these fossil fuels and let the CO2 into the atmosphere, and you can’t do that if you’re going to keep this planet resembling the one that we’ve had the last 10,000 years,” Hansen said. Coal is the largest source of electricity in China and the U.S., the world’s two biggest energy consumers and emitters of greenhouse gases. China burns coal to generate 78 percent of its power, and the U.S. gets 52% percent of its power from coal. For more go here. Note how the authors assume Hansen is a spokeman for all scientists. For our Department of Energy views the future of coal go here.

By Shaun Tandon, AFP

World climate negotiators set a 2009 deadline Saturday for a landmark treaty to fight global warming after two weeks of intense haggling led to a climbdown by an isolated United States. Following gruelling all-night talks, the conference of 190 nations finally launched a process to negotiate a new treaty for when the UN Kyoto Protocol’s commitments expire in 2012.

The United States, the only major industrialised nation to reject the Kyoto treaty, reached a compromise with the European Union to avoid mentioning any figures as a target for slashing greenhouse gas emissions. Hans Verolme of conservation group WWF accused the world of bowing to US pressure and removing a scientific punch needed to fight global warming. Read more here.

By Marc Marano, EPW

The UN climate conference met strong opposition Thursday from a team of over 100 prominent international scientists, who warned the UN, that attempting to control the Earth’s climate was “ultimately futile.” The scientists, many of whom are current and former UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) scientists, released an open letter to the UN Secretary-General questioning the scientific basis for climate fears and the UN’s so-called “solutions.” “Attempts to prevent global climate change from occurring are ultimately futile, and constitute a tragic misallocation of resources that would be better spent on humanity’s real and pressing problems,” the letter signed by the scientists read.  The December 13 letter was released to the public late Thursday.

The letter was signed by renowned scientists such as Dr. Antonio Zichichi, president of the World Federation of Scientists; Dr. Reid Bryson, dubbed the “Father of Meteorology”; Atmospheric pioneer Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, formerly of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute; MIT atmospheric scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen; UN scientist Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand; French climatologist Dr. Marcel Leroux of the University Jean Moulin; World authority on sea level Dr. Nils-Axel Morner of Stockholm University; Physicist Dr. Freeman Dyson of Princeton University; Physicist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, chairman of the Scientific Council of Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection in Poland; Paleoclimatologist Dr. Robert M. Carter of Australia; Former UN IPCC reviewer Geologist/Geochemist Dr. Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum in Norway; and Dr. Edward J. Wegman, of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.

“It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages. Geological, archaeological, oral and written histories all attest to the dramatic challenges posed to past societies from unanticipated changes in temperature, precipitation, winds and other climatic variables,” the scientists wrote. “In stark contrast to the often repeated assertion that the science of climate change is ‘settled,’ significant new peer-reviewed research has cast even more doubt on the hypothesis of dangerous human-caused global warming,” the open letter added.