Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton injected new life into the Copenhagen summit Thursday as she told delegates that the U.S. would contribute to a fund designed to raise $100 billion by 2020 to help developing nations adapt to climate change. But Clinton said the U.S. offer was contingent on forging a global climate treaty that requires developing nations to slow the growth of their greenhouse gas emissions and to submit to verification of emissions reporting. Later in the day, reporters obtained a confidential UN analysis stating that current emissions-cut pledges now being proposed at Copenhagen would lead to a temperature rise this century of 3 degrees C (5.4 F), surpassing the 2 
degree C (3.6 F) target that negotiators set as an acceptable limit to global warming. The report by the UN Climate Change Secretariat said the current emissions reductions offered by the U.S., the European Union, China, Japan, Australia, and other nations would mean pouring up to 4 billion tons more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by 2020 than the level needed to hold temperature increases to 2 C. That increased amount of CO2, coupled with significant levels of carbon dioxide emitted in later decades, would mean that atmospheric concentrations of CO2 could rise from the current 387 parts per million to roughly 550 parts per million in a century or so. Those concentrations would likely lead to a 3 C rise, the UN report said.
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Hillary Clinton
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