Top UN officials kicked off crunch climate change talks in Copenhagen on Monday, telling delegates that they must agree a way to raise and channel funds to developing countries.
The 10-day summit, which gathers members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, aims to hammer out a blueprint for tackling man-made greenhouse gases, blamed for trapping solar heat and disrupting the Earth's climate system.
On December 18, world leaders are scheduled to sign a political deal that sets down the course of action, including a raft of national pledges.
Further negotiations are expected to take place in 2010 to fill in the details, before a legally binding treaty would take effect from the end of 2012.
UN chief climate scientist Rajendra Pachauri declared that the "evidence is now overwhelming" that the world needs early action to combat global warming.
Mr Pachauri defended climate research in the face of a controversy over emails, pilfered from the University of East Anglia, which global warming sceptics say show scientists have been conspiring to hide evidence that doesn't fit their theories.
"The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts, perhaps in an attempt to discredit the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," he told the conference, referring to the leading UN scientific body for assessing climate change.
Conference president Connie Hedegaard said that the key to an agreement was finding a way to raise and channel public and private financing to poor countries for years to come to help them fight the effects of climate change.
In Vienna, another senior UN official warned that the fight against climate change must not "cannibalise" development financing.
Director-general of the UN Industrial Development Organisation Kandeh Yumkella said that developing countries needed "fresh money" to combat global warming not funds diverted from efforts to improve maternal health or fight world hunger.
Chinese state media renewed calls on Monday for rich states to provide adequate funding.
The People's Daily reiterated Beijing's stance that the emissions of Western states were far greater than the vast majority of the world's countries after centuries of industrialisation, putting the onus on the developed countries.
"And of course, this industrialisation process has led to developed nations taking the lead on other nations on the technology front," the newspaper observed, adding that a low-carbon lifestyle was an "unprecedented" issue for mankind.
This decade has been the warmest on record and this year is likely to be the fifth warmest, according to the World Meteorological Organisations’s (WMO) assessment of global average temperatures.
There were sharp differences between regions, with central Africa and parts of southern Asia having their warmest year but the United States and Canada experiencing cooler than average conditions.
The WMO released the preliminary data at the Copenhagen climate summit in what the Met Office, which contributed to the figures, admitted was an attempt to influence the negotiations over cutting greenhouse gases.
The WMO is also anxious to quell doubts about the scientific analysis of temperature records raised by the publication of stolen e-mails in the “Climategate” scandal.
The WMO and the Met Office base their reports partly on data and analysis supplied by the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit.
Phil Jones, the unit’s director, has stood down while an investigation takes place into allegations that he manipulated data, attempted to block publication of alternative scientific views and tried to delete information requested by climate change sceptics.
The WMO, which has data going back to 1850, said that the ten years from 2000 to 2009 were 0.44C warmer than the annual average of 14C between 1961 to 1990.
The Met Office, one of three main sources for the WMO figures, said its records showed that each of the last six decades had been warmer than the previous one.
Since the 18th century, the global temperature has risen just over 0.7C.
The Copenhagen summit is trying to agree global action to prevent the temperature rising more than 2C above the pre-industrial average.
The Met Office said: “These figures highlight that the world continues to see global temperature rise most of which is due to increasing emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and clearly shows that the argument that global warming has stopped is flawed.
Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said the final figures for 2009 would not be available until early next year but the preliminary estimates based on January to November data were being released today to influence the debate at the summit.
The Met Office is more certain about this being the warmest decade than it is about 2009 being the fifth warmest year. The WMO said 2009 might only rank in the top 10 warmest years, depending on temperatures this month. This year has been warmer than last year, which was the eleventh warmest on record. The warmest year was 1998.
The Met Office predicted last month that there was a 50/50 chance that next year would be warmer than 1998.
This is largely because of the natural El Niño cycle, the warming phase in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean which began this summer and is expected to continue for at least another six months.
The WMO said this year had been the third warmest in Australia, which experienced three exceptional heatwaves that contributed to a disastrous bush fire that killed 200 people.
China suffered its worst drought for five decades and the monsoon season in India was one of the weakest since 1972, damaging the harvest in 40 per cent of districts. A drought in East Africa “led to massive food shortages”.
Spain had its third-warmest summer and parts of Germany, Austria and the Czech republic reported the warmest May on record.
The Met Office today responded to criticisms about lack of transparency by releasing land temperature records gathered from more than 1,500 stations around the world.
It said it would release the data from the other 3,500 other stations as soon as it received permission from the national meteorological offices which owned it.
The Met Office said: “We intend that as soon as possible we will also publish the specific computer code that aggregates the individual station temperatures into the global land temperature record.
“The University of East Anglia fully supports the Met Office in making this data publicly available and is continuing to work with the Met Office to seek the necessary permission from national data owners to publish, as soon as possible as much of the data that we can gain permission for.”
Ms Pope said the Met Office analysed land temperature data using a computer code developed by CRU. She said CRU also supplied the Met Office with original data from some remote weather stations which had a significant impact on the global average.
'We Won't Let Sceptics Hijack Climate Talks'
It has been billed as the most important meeting for half a century, and yesterday, with 15,000 people in attendance, the Copenhagen Climate Conference opened with a robust and angry defence of the science of global warming by two of the world's leading climate science figures.
Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Nobel-Prize winning head of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC), and Dr Jonathan Pershing, the head of the US delegation to the conference, both hit out at the theft of emails from the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, which has been used by climate sceptics in Britain, the US and elsewhere to allege that global warming is not man-made.
There has been widespread speculation that the timing of the theft represented a specific attempt to destabilise the conference, in which the world community will attempt to construct a new treaty to cut back on the emissions of carbon dioxide causing the atmosphere to warm.
But yesterday Dr Pershing said that all the incident had done was to "release a barrage of further information which makes clear the robustness of the science." He said it was "shameful" how some of the scientists involved were now being pilloried.
Dr Pachauri told the conference opening ceremony, presided over by the Danish Prime Minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, that some people clearly found it "inconvenient" to accept the inevitability of the changes that would have to be made in the face of the climate change threat.
"The recent incident of stealing the emails of scientists at the University of East Anglia shows that some would go to the extent of carrying out illegal acts perhaps in an attempt to discredit the IPCC," he said. "But the panel has a record of transparent and objective assessment stretching back over 21 years, performed by tens of thousands of dedicated scientists from all corners of the globe."
The conference, being held at the giant Bella Centre in Copenhagen's southern suburbs, is bringing together 192 countries, all of whom accept the verdict of the IPCC's most recent report, published in 2007, that the warming of the climate system is "unequivocal" and that there is a better than nine out of 10 chance that it is being caused by human actions – principally the emissions of carbon dioxide from industry, transport and deforestation, which retain the Sun's heat in the atmosphere.
The 2007 report said that if CO2 emissions continued without being checked, the Earth's temperature would be likely to rise by between 1.8C and 4C over the coming century – with an outside chance that it could hit 6C, which would be disastrous for the natural world and human society. But more recent scientific assessments have suggested that emissions are now rising so fast that the Earth is firmly on track to hit the 6C rise if action is not taken.
Dr Pachauri listed for the conference – and for the world – some of the consequences global warming would lead to if it were left unchecked. They included widespread increases in droughts and floods, greater stress on water resources, increases in tropical cyclone intensity, more extinctions of wild species and the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would cause sea levels around the world to rise by more than 20 feet.
Cutting back on the emissions responsible was now the urgent task of the "historically important meeting", he said. But it will not be a matter just for the thousands of delegates. Mr Rasmussen announced that the number of world leaders who would be attending the finale of the conference at the end of next week had now reached 110. He said: "Their presence reflects an unprecedented mobilisation of political determination to combat climate change. It represents a huge opportunity – an opportunity the world cannot afford to miss."
This morning the negotiations proper get under way, with the aim being an agreement in which the industrialised countries such as the US and Britain make strong commitments to cut back their CO2 by up to 40 per cent by 2020, with the leading developing countries such as China and India making firm pledges to move away from "business as usual" in terms of their emissions growth.
Underpinning the deal will have to be a major new financial agreement which provides the developing nations with billions of dollars from the rich world in new climate aid, to help them cut their emissions and also adapt to climate change which is now probably unavoidable, such as widely increased flooding.
Day One: The highlights
*UN Climate Conference, two years in preparation, opens in Copenhagen with 15,000 delegates, observers and media personnel in attendance.
*United Nations climate chief and head of American delegation attack climate sceptics and defend science behind global warming.
*110 heads of state and government, including US President Barack Obama, now preparing to attend conference finale next week.
*European Union says it wants stronger commitments from the US and China to cut CO2 before raising its own ambitions.
*South Africa is final big developing country to announce a climate target.
*Danish Prime Minister apologises to delegates for lack of Little Mermaid figurine in their conference kits.
