Well, What a Surprise:

The Americans have adopted their usual, flexible, forward-thinking "No way, Jose" stance at Bali. The only surprise is that it took them a week to get there.

Washington rejected stiff 2020 targets for greenhouse gas cuts by rich nations at U.N. talks in Bali on Monday as part of a "roadmap" to work out a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009.

"We don't want to start out with numbers," [US chief negotiator Harlan] Watson told a news conference, adding that the 25-40 percent range was based on "many uncertainties" and a small number of scientific studies by the U.N. Climate Panel.
[Reuters]

Yes, and a heck of a lot of studies by the science community all around the world, supporting the U.N. findings.

Before the conference in Bali started:

• Professors David King and John Schellnhuber, science advisers to the UK and German governments, said that the world is more than 50% likely to experience dangerous levels of climate change. Also, that politicians have been too slow to cut emissions. Neither scientist believed that the world would achieve the goal of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of stabilising emissions by around 2015.
• A MORI poll conducted in the UK suggested that 66% of the people do not believe World leaders will solve climate change.

On a historical note:

• 1992 - Rio Earth Summit. World leaders signed the non-binding UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Emissions continued to rise.
• 1997 - Kyoto protocol. The USA and Australia pulled out, which undermined the effort to reduce emissions, and corroded the will of other governments. Japan - a signatory to Kyoto - should have cut by 6% but it has increased emissions by 7%. Italy (+7.4%) and Spain (+59.8%) are missing their targets by a mile.

Basically, since World leaders started committing themselves to tackle climate change, the World's CO2 emissions have gone up 22%.

Makes you wonder what the other 33% in the MORI poll were thinking about.