Top UN climate expert faults G-8 goal without deed

UNITED NATIONS — The chairman of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said Monday that the Group of Eight nations had “clearly ignored” taking any concrete action to accomplish its new goal of limiting climate change.

Rajendra Pachauri, whose scientific panel shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former vice president Al Gore in 2007, praised the G-8 summit in Italy this month for taking “a big step forward” by agreeing to limit the planet’s average temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above levels recorded 150 years ago.

He faulted the world’s wealthiest countries, however, because he said they “clearly ignored what the IPCC came up with” to reach that goal.

“It’s interesting that the G-8 leaders agreed on this aspirational goal of (limiting) a temperature increase of (no more than) 2 degrees Celsius, which certainly is a big step forward in my view,” he told reporters at U.N. headquarters. “But what I find as a dichotomy in this position is the fact that they clearly ignored what the IPCC came up with.”

The question of which nations will agree to limit their heat-trapping gases mainly from fossil fuels is taking on increasing urgency at the United Nations, which is sponsoring the key round of talks in December to achieve a climate deal in Copenhagen, Denmark. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made it his No. 1 priority to persuade nations to agree to a successor treaty to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gases, which expires at the end of 2012.

Pachauri said the G-8 leaders also should have accepted the panel’s conclusion that greenhouse gas emissions must peak no later than 2015 and then rich countries must reduce emissions from 2005 levels by between 25 percent and 40 percent by 2020. Doing that, climate scientists say, may help the world avoid the worst effects of warming, which they say will lead to widespread drought, floods, higher sea levels and worsening storms.

“Now if the G-8 leaders agreed on this 2 degree increase as being the limit that could be accepted, then I think they should have also accepted the attendant requirement of global emissions peaking by 2015,” he said. “And if that were to be the case, then they should most categorically have said that … by 2020 there would have to be deep cuts in emissions.”

He said it also would have been helpful “if they had also spelled out what these deep cuts would be, but I’m afraid they haven’t talked either about the deep cuts.”

Pachauri, who also is director-general of India-based TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, praised President Barack Obama for making it a priority of his administration to achieve a climate deal in Copenhagen. The Bush administration had been opposed to the Kyoto climate pact, saying it would harm the U.S. economy and unfairly excluded cuts by developing nations such as India and China — the latter of which is overtaking the U.S. as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter.

On Monday, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said the U.S. and India had at least acknowledged their “different perspectives” on climate change. An Indian official told Clinton that India won’t accept limits on its greenhouse gases.