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COPENHAGEN – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton today said that the US would help create a $100 billion-a-year fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change and transition to greener technologies. The announcement at the UN climate summit could be the trigger in cinching a deal where more than 190 countries are down to the wire to sign a global climate accord by tomorrow, when the conference is scheduled to end. Developing countries are adamant a deal must include billions of dollars to help them deal with the consequences of a warmer world that wealthier countries caused from emissions...

(several paragraphs down, NPR lies about Europe/Kyoto) "It wasn't clear that anything could get done because some group of countries or some country was trying to hold up everything, which is why I think the approach of trying to do an accord with a small number of countries was probably the only way to have anything come out of this at all," she says. Even Europe, which has embraced the Kyoto scheme for emissions reductions, was not part of that small deciding group. "I personally believe that the Kyoto track under the U.N. is done for, nothing is going down...

WASHINGTON (AFP) – US President Barack Obama will Monday meet former vice president and international environmental crusader Al Gore, as he prepares to travel next week to the Copenhagen climate conference. The closed-door meeting is designed to help brief Obama before he meets business and environmental leaders at the White House on Wednesday, the White House said.

US President Barack Obama has changed his plans to attend the UN summit on climate change in Copenhagen next week, the White House has announced. He will arrive later than initially planned, moving his appearance from 9 December to 18 December. The White House said he believed "that continued US leadership can be most productive through his participation at the end of the Copenhagen conference". The summit aims to draw up a treaty to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The president had changed his plans after talks with other leaders and after seeing "the progress that has already been made...

NEW DELHI/LONDON (Reuters) – China and other big developing nations rejected core targets for a climate deal such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 just five days before talks start in Copenhagen, diplomats said on Wednesday. China, the world's top emitter, together with India, Brazil and South Africa demand that richer nations do more and have drawn "red lines" limiting what they themselves would accept, the diplomats told Reuters. The four rejected key targets proposed by the Danish climate talks hosts in a draft text -- halving global greenhouse gases by 2050, setting a 2020 deadline for a...

PARIS (AFP) – The planet could warm by seven degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) and sea levels could rise by more than a metre (3.25 feet) by 2100, scenarios that just two years ago were viewed as improbable, scientists said on Tuesday. In the widest overview on global warming since a landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report in 2007, the authors said manoeuvering room for tackling the carbon crisis was now almost exhausted. The 64-page "Copenhagen Diagnosis" aims at the December 7-18 UN conference in Denmark, tasked with forging a planet-wide deal on greenhouse-gas...

Temperatures haven't risen this decade, as climatologists expected. Is it sunspots? Ocean currents? Secret volcano? At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average. Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopping climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year. Ironically, climate change appears to have...