COP15 Day 5: Island nations stand tall, ice bear starts to melt

Editor’s note: Greenbang will be providing daily dispatches and ongoing updates from the climate change talks in Copenhagen, and is covering the conference virtually to keep our carbon footprint low.

Following are developments from today’s events at the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen:

• The Alliance of Small Island Nations today proposed a legally binding climate deal that both extends the Kyoto Protocol and sets a carbon emissions reduction goal of 85 per cent by 2050.
• The first official draft from a key working group, on the other hand, leaves unagreed the total emissions cuts that should be made by mid-century; the six-page document offers, in brackets, possible 2050 targets of 50, 80 and 95 per cent reductions compared to 1990 levels.
• The EU on late Thursday pledged to invest €7.2 billion over the next three years to support the UN’s climate change efforts. That amount, which is about one-third of what the UN expects to need, was welcomed by UN climate chief Yvo de Boer as “hugely encouraging.”
• Prime Minister Gordon Brown said he will work with French President Nicolas Sarkozy on an agreement to cut deforestation by 25 per cent over five years. He noted the proposal is both “doable” and will be a key element of any deal that emerges in Copenhagen.
• Sakihito Ozawa, Japan’s Environment Minister, today said his country would not stand by its earlier pledge to cut carbon emissions by 25 per cent by 2020 if the Kyoto Protocol is extended without specifying emissions reductions targets for both the US and China.
• Artist Mark Coreth’s life-sized ice sculpture of a polar bear was unveiled today in Trafalgar Square; over the remainder of the Copenhagen talks, it will melt, leaving behind only a puddle of water and a bronze skeleton.
  
• Finally, is it just us, or has COP15 brought out the crazy in the global denialsphere more than ever before? Consider some of the incidents in past days: Viscount Monckton calling climate activists “Nazis” and “Hitler Youth”; Republican US Rep. James Sensenbrenner sending a letter asking Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to blacklist the UK climate researchers whose emails were hacked and are now being waved about as “evidence” of a “climate hoax”; The Wall Street Journal publishing a bizarre commentary branding climate scientists as intolerant, anti-humanist totalitarians; and US publisher Andrew Breitbart’s Tweet, “Capital punishment for Dr. James Hansen. Climategate is high treason.” (Never mind that Hansen isn’t one of the UK Climatic Research Unit scientists whose emails were hacked.) What’s up with the increasingly rabid fury? Are they afraid something meaningful will actually be agreed to in Copenhagen? Tell us your thoughts in the comments section below.