Chronology of Global Climate Gatherings

If there was ever any doubt that climate change had gone "mainstream" we present a timeline of this years "climate change" gatherings leading up to the Bali submit in December.

CHRONOLOGY - From LiveEarth To Bali: A Year Of Climate Gatherings [PlanetArk]

Feb 2, PARIS: First of four reports this year by the UN climate panel concludes that mankind is very likely to be to blame for global warming. Subsequent panel reports highlight the risks of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves and that poor nations would bear the brunt of a warmer world. The cost of even the most stringent scenarios to dramatically curb emissions meant a loss of global GDP by 2030 of less than 3 percent.

* July 7, NEW YORK, LONDON, SYDNEY, TOKYO, SHANGHAI, RIO DE JANEIRO, JOHANNESBURG, HAMBURG: former US Vice President Al Gore organises the "Live Earth" global climate change benefit involving 24 hours of music across seven continents beamed to an estimated two billion people.

* Sept 17-21, MONTREAL: Canada hosts week of talks on how to quickly eliminate hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) at the 19th meeting of signatories to the Montreal Protocol. The chemicals, which are powerful greenhouse gases, harm the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. The United States says faster phase-out of HCFCs would be twice as effective as the Kyoto Protocol in fighting climate change.

* Sept 24, NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon convenes one-day conference with top officials from more than 150 countries to build momentum before Bali. Ban says world leaders showed a "major political commitment" to forge a pact on climate change once the Kyoto Protocol runs out.

* Sept 28, WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush holds his first major climate change meeting, inviting the 17 biggest greenhouse gas emitters to a two-day conference. Bush, who has refused to ratify Kyoto, stresses new environmental technology and voluntary measures to tackle the issue.

* Oct 12, OSLO: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore, star of the Oscar-winning climate film "An Inconvenient Truth," are joint-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".

* Nov 20, BONN: The 41 industrialized nations that have signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change submit detailed emissions data for climate experts to assess. The data shows their total greenhouse gas emissions rose to a near all-time high.

* Nov 21, SINGAPORE: The 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and six other attendees Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, pledge collective action to combat climate change in the "Singapore Declaration" but set no targets to curb emissions.