Climate talks defer major challenges

Biodiversity worries over climate talks

could be used to force large and unquantified emission cuts on them in the future. Governments in both Europe and America are now softening their call for a global target of halving emissions by 2050, in an attempt to build a consensus around a less ambitious deal. Todd Stern, the US special envoy for climate change, hinted of the softening stance at a meeting in London last month. " Our view a...

Climate change talks stumble on

At the twelfth hour of the UN climate change meeting in Cancún last month, negotiators from more than 200 countries managed to prevent the collapse of the 20-year-old climatechange-negotiating process but otherwise achieved little in concrete new moves to build on the Kyoto protocol, a legal commitment to reduce carbon emissions by some industrialised countries, which expires next year. But the...

Hypertension: our major challenges.

As the tenure of our 8-year editorship of Hypertension nears its end, a number of scientific issues concerning this very complex multifactorial disease burn in my mind. At the outset of our editorial term, we indicated that a sea change was taking place in our scientific information and clinical thinking about the hypertensive diseases. A virtual upheaval was looming in our fundamental thinking...

Why do we want to defer actions on climate change? A psychological perspective

Negotiating challenges and climate change

The difficulties in negotiating a post-2012 regime of binding targets and timetables and the decisions of the US, Canada, and Russia on the Kyoto Protocol regime have led to pessimism about the future of the climate regime. Negotiation issues for different coalitions and actors are placed in a wider historical context by examining the key challenge facing the evolving longterm climate change ne...