The Wonk Room is reporting and tweeting live from the international climate talks in Cancun, Mexico.

At the beginning of the Cancun climate talks, Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) and other Republican senators questioned the threat to the developing world from climate change, telling President Obama to kill the global climate impacts fund he helped establish last year. Inhofe’s letter argued that the scientific findings about “eventual impacts of climate change in developing countries were found to be exaggerated or simply not true.” In an exclusive interview, Dr. Hasan Mahmud, Bangladesh’s State Minister for Environment and Forests and a PhD environmental scientist, told the Wonk Room that the Republican view of the world was dangerously false:

According to our findings, and according to the reality — what we are observing, what we are encountering, we are facing — that is, we are struggling with the impacts of climate change in Bangladesh. There is salinity intrusion, increased natural calamities that is a symptom of desertification in the northern part of Bangladesh, there is more frequent and more devastating flood, and erratic rainfall. All of these are negative impacts of climate change. In Bangladesh, this is very much visible, and we are encountering and facing the problem. I don’t know about the United States and how — In Bangladesh, this is the reality.

Watch it:

The crowded, poor, and low-lying nation of Bangladesh has long been recognized as one of the most vulnerable nations on the planet to global warming pollution. Independent consultancy Maplecroft rates Bangladesh as “the country most at risk due to extreme levels of poverty and a high dependency on agriculture, whilst its government has the lowest capacity of all countries to adapt to predicted changes in the climate.” Dara International’s Climate Vulnerability Monitor finds that Bangladesh is acutely vulnerable to the health impact, economic stress, habitat loss, and weather disasters caused by global warming pollution. The most vulnerable nations are already suffering and trying desperately to adapt to a more dangerous reality, no matter what Inhofe believes. But their fate does rest, at least in part, in his hands.

Reefs are the ocean’s canaries and we must hear their call. This call is not just for themselves, for the other great ecosystems of the ocean stand behind reefs like a row of dominoes. If coral reefs fail, the rest will follow in rapid succession, and the Sixth Mass Extinction will be upon us “” and will be of our making.

When J.E.N. Veron speaks, we all should listen.  Veron is the former chief scientist of the Australian Institute of Marine Science.  He is principal author of 8 monographs and more than 70 scientific articles on the taxonomy, systematics, biogeography, and the fossil record of corals.  His books include the three-volume Corals of the World and A Reef in Time: The Great Barrier Reef from Beginning to End (2008).  His research has taken him to all the major coral reef regions of the world during 66 expeditions.

In a Yale e360 piece reprinted below, Veron explains that “the science is clear: Unless we change the way we live, the Earth’s coral reefs will be utterly destroyed within our children’s lifetimes.”

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Halliburton Worker on Smoke Break Missed BP Well Data

A Halliburton Co. technician missed key signals that BP Plc’s doomed Macondo well was on the verge of blowing out because he was taking a smoking break, a federal investigative panel heard.

We’ve long known that the three underlying causes of BP’s Titanic oil disaster were Recklessness, Arrogance, and Hubris.  Now you can add smoking to the list of causes.  Bloomberg has the sad story:

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Japan announced last week that it would not sign on for a second commitment period for the Kyoto Protocol after the first period expires in 2012 unless China and the U.S. join the agreement.  Environmentalists and developing countries condemn the Japanese but can we really blame them? Andrew Light, CAP’s Coordinator of International Climate Policy, reports live from Cancun.

CANCUN – The UN climate summit here has been consumed this past week over Japan’s announcement at one of the earlier plenary sessions that they would not renew their emission reduction pledges under the Kyoto Protocol once the first commitment period expires in 2012.  While no one should celebrate the potential demise of the world’s only climate treaty with binding emission cuts the reasoning of the Japanese leadership on this issue is practically unassailable.

What’s more, by taking this position Japan may also help to settle an issue that has been haunting these talks for a decade – the standoff between those who want to hold onto the protocol’s crude division of the world between developed and developing countries and those who want to move to a framework which may be more in line with the realty of solving the problem.

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By CAP’s Richard Caperton.

Yesterday, a group of multilateral development banks – including the World Bank Group – made the case for their role in managing climate finance.  These banks clearly have the appropriate tools to move the significant amounts of capital called for in the Copenhagen Accord, but there are still questions about their ability to direct that capital to climate change mitigation and adaptation.

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Climate Progress just (barely) passed ‘Grist’ this week to recapture the ranking we held a year ago — Technorati’s top-ranked ‘Green’ website.

Technorati ranks sites by their “standing & influence in the blogosphere.”  It has been known for a fairly objective and slow-changing measure of influence “” links from other sites over the past 6 months.  But I suppose in a desire to be more timely (and, no doubt purely incidentally, boost their own traffic), they have jazzed up this ranking system, and then added a breakdown by category:

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China’s Cap and Trade to Come Within Five Years

China will have a cap-and-trade system to limit its emissions by about 2015 as the world’s biggest polluter takes a lead role in developing clean energy, London School of Economics professor Nicholas Stern said.

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This is an excerpt from Skeptical Science by John Cook about the inimitable Professor Richard Alley, who was grilled last month by Dana “dinosaur flatulence” Rohrabacher (R-CA).  Alley was asked to explain in 15 seconds why climate has changed in the past and how we know humans are causing it now when they didn’t back then.

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This is a re-post by WRI’s John Larsen is part of CP’s series on EPA’s highly cost-effective, science-based efforts to preserve clean air, clean water, and a livable climate for our kids.

After years of delay, EPA gets back on track in issuing rules that provide a path to a cleaner power fleet.

After years of delay, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to reduce dangerous and toxic pollutants released to the air and water by electric power plants, as required by the Clean Air Act and other statutes. Four key points about EPA’s actions are clear:

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