Date published: 2006/03/16
The BBC says:
UN experts are meeting to determine the risks which climate change poses to some of the world's special places.
The UN's cultural and scientific wing Unesco says climate change threatens World Heritage Sites such as the Great Barrier Reef and the Tower of London.
The two-day meeting aims to develop plans of action to mitigate the threat.
Environmental groups want such action to include pledges to reduce emissions, but the US says Unesco has no authority to act on climate change.
In a position paper issued in advance of the Paris meeting, the US says Unesco has no brief to consider anthropogenic climate change as a "threat" to protected sites because it is an unproven theory.
Its position appears very different from that of the British government, which is funding the meeting.
Under the World Heritage Convention, which Unesco oversees, member nations - and just about every country is a member - vow to protect World Heritage Sites wherever they are located.
Over the last 18 months, environmental groups have lodged petitions with Unesco charging that four Sites are threatened by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
It is irrelevant whether or not "anthropogenic climate change" is an "unproven theory". The real point is that a bunch of unelected bureaucrats are somehow claiming that they have the right to tell the world what to do. Of course they are claiming this right because they are incapable of winning this right through the ballot box. The idea that the preservation of World Heritage Sites (an ever expanding list, of course) should somehow be driving decisions about the world is ridiculous.
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