Climate drama climax looks elusive in Copenhagen
COPENHAGEN, Denmark -- For 20 years, as this crowded planet grew warmer, nations have gathered annually to try to do something about it. History now brings them to this chilly northern capital, and to a crossroads.
The world looks to Copenhagen "to witness what I believe will be an historic turning point in the fight against climate change," says Yd vo de Boer, United Nations organizer of the two weeks of talks opening Monday.
It may witness, instead, history put on hold.
Protests Add Pressure For Copenhagen Climate Deal
Filed at 12:27 p.m. ET
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose country is the world's number four greenhouse gas emitter, announced he would attend a closing summit in Copenhagen, joining 104 other leaders including Obama in a sign of growing momentum for a deal.
In the Danish capital, delegates from 190 nations were gathering for the start of the December 7-18 meeting. The biggest U.N. climate talks in history are aimed at working out a new pact to curb global warming, replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
That Climate Change E-Mail 
The theft of thousands of private e-mail messages and files from computer servers at a leading British climate research center has been a political windfall for skeptics who claim the documents prove that mainstream scientists have conspired to overstate the case for human influence on climate change.
They are using the e-mail to blast the Obama administration’s climate policies. And they clearly hope that the e-mail will undermine negotiations for a new climate change treaty that begin in Copenhagen this week.
No one should be misled by all the noise. The e-mail messages represent years’ worth of exchanges among prominent American and British climatologists. Some are mean-spirited, others intemperate. But they don’t change the underlying scientific facts about climate change.
Apple Has Acquired Lala
Earlier today we covered rumors that Apple was in talks to acquire streaming music service Lala. Now New York Times tech reporter Brad Stone has tweeted that it's a done deal. He writes, "Apple has acquired digital music startup Lala. Now updating our story". You can find the NYT story here.
This could be bad news for Lala users. It's unlikely that the innovative deals negotiated by Lala will survive through the acquisition. For over a year, Lala users have been purchasing the rights to stream their music an unlimited number of times for ten cents per song. If the deals with the music labels go up in smoke, Lala may lose the right to stream those songs. In other words, all the money users have been spending on web songs may go down the drain. If the deals are nullified, hopefully Apple will renegotiate them to at least cover existing purchases until it releases its own streaming music service. We've reached out to Lala but have yet to hear back.
Likewise, this may well affect the Lala music gifts that have been recently offered by Facebook, and it could also harm the Music OneBox service Google recently launched (though Google can still rely on MySpace/iLike for its song streams).
The climate-change travesty
With 20,000 delegates, advocates and journalists jetting to Copenhagen for planet Earth's last chance, the carbon footprint of the global warming summit will be the only impressive consequence of the climate-change meeting. Its organizers had hoped that it would produce binding caps on emissions, global taxation to redistribute trillions of dollars, and micromanagement of everyone's choices.
China, nimble at the politics of pretending that is characteristic of climate-change theater, promises only to reduce its "carbon intensity" -- carbon emissions per unit of production. So China's emissions will rise.
Barack Obama, understanding the histrionics required in climate-change debates, promises that U.S. emissions in 2050 will be 83 percent below 2005 levels. If so, 2050 emissions will equal those in 1910, when there were 92 million Americans. But there will be 420 million Americans in 2050, so Obama's promise means that per capita emissions then will be about what they were in 1875. That. Will. Not. Happen.
Obama Surprises With Copenhagen Summit Decision
Filed at 7:14 p.m. ET
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will attend the end of the Copenhagen climate change summit, a late change of plan the White House attributed on Friday to growing momentum toward a new global accord.
Obama was originally scheduled to attend the December 7-18 summit in Denmark on Wednesday before traveling to nearby Oslo to collect his Nobel Peace Prize.
Apple Reportedly In Talks To Acquire Lala
Bloomberg is reporting that Apple is "in talks to acquire online music service Lala, according to two people familiar with the matter."
The shoe fits. Back when Lala launched I described it as an iTunes in the cloud ? something that we believe Apple will inevitably launch. It is certainly building a lot of data center capacity for something. We've been huge fans of Lala since its launch in October (you can see our extensive coverage here. The site uses an innovative 'web song' model that lets you buy albums for very cheap (10 cents per song) that you can then stream as many times as you'd like.
We are digging for more details.
United Nations to probe climate e-mail leak
LONDON — The United Nations will conduct its own investigation into e-mails leaked from a leading British climate science center in addition to the probe by the University of East Anglia, a senior U.N. climate official said Friday.
E-mails stolen from the climate unit at the University of East Anglia appeared to show some of world's leading scientists discussing ways to shield data from public scrutiny and suppress others' work. Those who deny the influence of man-made climate change have seized on the correspondence to argue that scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence about global warming.
In an interview with BBC radio, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said the issue raised by the e-mails was serious and said "we will look into it in detail,"
Kerry Unveils Foreign Relations' Contribution to Senate Climate Bill
Senate Foreign Relations Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) introduced global warming legislation yesterday that he said will serve as the "foundation" of the U.S. financial package headed into U.N.-sponsored negotiations next week in Copenhagen.
The 81-page bill (pdf) would authorize programs associated with the U.S. contribution to a new global climate change agreement, including adaptation, deployment of clean energy technologies and reducing deforestation and forest degradation.
The bill represents the Foreign Relations Committee's entry to the broader climate proposal being crafted by Kerry and Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.). Five other committees are also expected to contribute ideas to the overall package, including Agriculture, Commerce, Energy and Natural Resources, Environment and Public Works, and Finance.
As Google Backs Away From A Plug-in, Microsoft Rushes Towards One
Today at their Bing Fall Release event, Microsoft showed off some nice updates to their search engine, including further information about how the much anticipated Twitter and Facebook data integration will work. But by far the most interesting thing they showed was the new beta version of Bing Maps. While it looked very nice, the real reason why it was so interesting is what it requires: Silverlight.
This news comes just days after Google's revelation (thanks, in part, to our story on the upcoming Chrome for Mac beta) that they were backing away from supporting Gears in the future, in favor of HTML5. Gears is the software that Google created to allow users to use their applications while not connected to the web. But it's also a plug-in (for all browsers except Google's own Chrome for the PC). This is a big barrier to entry for many users. And it's something that creates problems developing apps around it if say, a user doesn't have Gears installed.
So it's good to see Google step away from a plug-in even if it's no longer proprietary (originally called "Google Gears," they have since open-sourced it). And it makes what Microsoft is doing even more frustrating.
