Developing Countries & Climate Change
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The world's wealthiest countries produce the lion's share of the substances that contribute to global warming-namely carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. The United States alone contributes 25% of those gases. Hi. I'm Bryan Yeaton and this is the Weather Notebook.

Now, the US has backed away from a treaty on global warming. One of the reasons President George W. Bush gave was that the agreement demanded emission reductions from rich nations, but not poor ones.

As correspondent Allan Coukell reports, one of the world's top climatologists takes issue with Bush's rationale.

Bob Watson is the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the world's top climate scientist. He says it is unfair to expect developing nations to reduce carbon dioxide emissions when their immediate priority is an improved standard of living for their populations.

Climate change threatens food security, it threatens water security, it threatens human health - but in the longer term. And so a developing country will have its short-term priorities to get more energy to feed its people, to provide clean water. And what is really rather ironic about climate change issue is, although unfortunately most of the climate changes have been caused by industrialised world, it is the developing countries and the poor people in developing countries, who are going to suffer most.

Dr Watson says that to slow down the rate of climate change, the United States and other wealthy nations must concentrate on reducing their own greenhouse gas emissions - and on helping developing countries to increase energy production in a climate-friendly way.

That's correspondent Allan Coukell filing from Auckland, New Zealand. The Weather Notebook is a production of the Mount Washington Observatory. It is supported by Subaru. Thanks today to Assistant Producer Doug Sanborn. For more on weather, go to the web at www.mountwashington.org.