What should be accomplished at the UN climate talks?

There are some grim faces at the UN international climate meeting taking place now in Poland.

Rich, poor in dispute over rainforest cash

POZNAN, Poland, Dec 4 (Reuters) - Brazil ruled out on Thursday letting rich countries offset their greenhouse gas emissions by helping to save the Amazon rain forest, an idea under active discussion by the European Union.

Indigenous peoples attending United Nations-led climate talks in Poznan protested that they had no chance of seeing such carbon cash, and appealed instead for money first to root out corruption and cement their land rights.

What if we spent a few trillion dollars burying CO2, only to find that the real "problem" was soot?

Evidence continues to pile up indicting atmospheric particulate matter in global warming, extreme weather, respiratory disease, threats to the world's food supply and the melting of Himalayan glaciers and Arctic ice. That's the bad news.

The good news is that we know what to do about it at a reasonable cost. It ought to put reducing air-borne soot at the top of the international environmental agenda. [Via Benny Peiser]