Do the world leaders have the balls to do what's needed in Copenhagen?

The world leaders that we know are going to commit themselves are ones who are currently suffering the most and the ones who have the highest potential for future devastation. These countries are ironically the countries who have not caused the problem and emit very low or next to zero greenhouse gas emissions; they are the countries that face the possibility of being completely covered by floods from the coast and the sea. The main problem countries are the wealthy nations and they need to do their part...AMerican, UK, Australia, Canada, INdia, China etc which will cost a lot financially, but in comparison to a sustainable planet for human life, the cost is less than a piece of candy! The value of a human life sustaining planet is worth more than the entire world economy put together over the span of all of human history... to even gamble on the welfare of our planet is not only financial suicide, but just clear insanity!

Your so right, I feel right now as though I am choking, I cannot breath, it is just like the pea soupers of the nineteen fifties, pre the clean air act, I am stifled for my next breath ...help me! ...help me!...Do get real,and seek facts that stand up in the face of good science, you've never had it so good.

Man is but a midge on the planet and within our universe, the Solar Sun is the developer of climate change NOT politicians or Rupert Murdocks reporters.

Fill a glass with water, place an ice cube upon it and view the ice and water levels as the ice melts into it's own volume that simple act will give even the most sceptical a reason to change tack.

Okay you say what of the southern ice caps that are on land.

I say this land is afloat on tectonic plates and will self right as did the ice, all land mass height would not alter in the least... now come back with some more truths and I'll find the answers to those also.

It is unfortunate that those scientists whose views fail to follow the mantra of global warming are dismissed as heretics. Climate models are horrendously complex and still can only approximate to certain limited sub-sets of reality. What is needed from Copenhagen is an urgent commitment to better modelling and the integration of data that has previously been dismissed as 'divergent'.

If there is a problem, there is a balance to be struck between the economic activity that sustains our infrastructure and the far reaching constraints on human activity that will, in any case, never enable us to return the equilibrium that prevailed when we were uneducated, sparsely populated hunter-gathers. The genie is out of the bottle and cannot go back. Now we need to understand with some certainty whether our tenancy of this planet is sustainable and, if not, whether it can be made sustainable at a price we are willing to pay. If world leaders at Copenhagen do anything useful, it needs to be to mobilise resources to urgently answer those questions in a way that is seen to be open and honest.

Wow, boy you are filled with doom and gloom, do you realize that it was warming during all three of the past warming periods? Including the one that lasted for 1500 years? Do you know that the atmosphere is not dying nor are the seas.

Do you realize that the climate is ever changing? I guess not especially if you don't follow the news enough to know that 3 out of the top 4 greenhouse gas emitters have refused to do anything let alone reduce the rate of increase in their emissions?

Nope, I don't think they will reach any form of promising targets. There is still a horrendous amount of short-termist thinking so that governments are not prepared to plan for the future; they'd rather make their cash soon by continuing their use of fossil fuel-powered industry.

Starbucks' words are interesting:

"There is no place on this earth for troublemakers like yourself, those who would destroy others for your own religion."

This can be applied equally, if not more so, to climate change deniers. Moving towards a low-carbon economy will not "destroy" anyone; moreover, using more renewable sources of energy will create cleaner local environments as we will not be pumping unburnt hydrocarbons into the local atmosphere. However, if people to continue with the "religion" of denying climate change and they are wrong, that will certainly destroy others.

Since the climategate scandal has exposed man made global warming as a fraud, the Copenhagen conference is just an elaborate tax scam. The politicians are very reluctant to give up all their taxes and controls, but they won't make a scrap of difference to global temperatures.

Evidence that the climate is changing is not evidence that it is caused by man. The climate is always in a state of change, always was, always will be, with or without man

They have no intention of taking any action.

Why?...because they realize that the scam of AGW climate change has been exposed and support for this misguided "religion' has evaporated.

No developing nation is willing to risk their economies by supporting it, and the developed nations are not willing to cede any financial advantage to them.

So the status quo will remain.

Little has changed since Kyoto in 1997 and nothing is likely to change in the future.

The world will survive AGW climate change and 50 years from now our children will be bemused by the naivety of their parents in presuming they had some influence over climate

Hopefully they will have balls enough to see it for the scam that it is. They can finish partying, go back home and see what they can do to get the world economy back on track. There are far more important issues to deal with than this, being one of the biggest scams in world history.

I HOPE SO THEY SHOULD BRING IN A ONE CHILD POLICY WORLD WIDE,

THERES WAY TO MANY PEOPLE ON THE EARTH ESPECIALLY POOR PEOPLE THAT DONT NEED TO BE!!! HOPE FOR A NEW WORLD ORDER

You have been duped lady. You should be ashamed of yourself promoting doomsday when that is not even close to reality. By your rhetoric, you will hurt many people, many will lose their jobs. Are you happy now?

There is no place on this earth for troublemakers like yourself, those who would destroy others for your own religion.