Obama for global action on climate threat:Daily Star

US President Barack Obama yesterday urged all nations including emerging economies to act against climate change, warning that time was running out to prevent further damage. Addressing a UN climate summit hours, Obama said the "urgent and growing threat of climate change" would ultimately "define the contours of this century more dramatically than any other issue.” “We know what we have to do to
avoid irreparable harm. We've to cut carbon pollution in our own countries to prevent the worst effects of climate change,” he mentioned. The world also has to "adapt to the impacts that unfortunately we can no longer avoid," said the president. Obama added: A future climate agreement -- which a 2015 conference in Paris aims to seal - needed to be both "ambitious" and "flexible." The US leader said he met in New York with Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of China, which has surpassed the US as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases blamed for climate change. Obama said he "reiterated my belief that as the two largest economies and emitters in the world, we have a special responsibility to lead. It's what big nations have to do." Advertisement "Today I call on all countries to join us -- not next year or the year after that but right now -- because no nation can meet this global threat alone," he said. However, the president didn't commit himself to hold current rises in global temperatures to 2C, as demanded by experts. Environment experts and campaigners say that 2C is the maximum temperature increase that the world can tolerate without causing environmental mayhem, and they insist that politicians attending the meeting, especially Barack Obama, must agree to that upper limit. "If Obama and the others decide that 2C has to be the limit, then negotiators will subsequently find it so much easier to hammer out a framework for curtailing carbon dioxide emissions over the next year," said Nicholas Stern, the British economist and climate expert who will be attending the meeting. "If they have a specific goal, a 2C limit, then that will make it so much easier to design carbon emission limits for different countries," he told the Observer. Telling the United Nations that “there are interests that will be resistant to action,” Obama insisted that developing nations must also fight climate change -- a key criticism of his political opponents who say that the US should not be put at an economic disadvantage. "We can only succeed in combating climate change if we are joined in this effort by every nation, developed and developing alike. Nobody gets a pass,” he noted.