The world mostly agrees that something needs to be done about global warming and climate change. The first stumbling block, however, has been trying to get an agreement on a framework. In 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meterological Organization (WMO) to assess the scientific knowledge on global warming. The IPCC concluded in 1990 that there was broad international consensus that climate change was human-induced. That report led way to an international convention for climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), signed by over 150 countries at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. This section looks at this Convention and some of the main principles in it.
Reactions to Climate Change Negotiations and Action
The United States plus a few other countries, and many large corporations have been against climate change treaties due to the fear of the threat to their economy and profits if they have to make substantial changes, as well as the fear of realizing that perhaps their methods have been the primary contributors to the problem. This section explores some of those fears to see if they are justified or not.
