SA Foreign Minister Lowers Climate Talks Bar: Fears "Politics Cannot Deliver W. Science Demands"

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JOHANNESBURG -- South Africa's foreign minister said Monday she is hoping for compromise but expects only incremental progress in climate change talks she's hosting, further lowering hopes the Durban meeting will produce a dramatic agreement to stop global warming.

There are fears that "politics cannot deliver on what science requires," Maite Nkoana-Mashabane told South African business leaders in a speech Monday. She was speaking three months before talks in Durban that follow a failed round in Copenhagen in 2009 that undermined confidence the world could produce a successor to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The Kyoto provisions capping greenhouse gas emissions by industrial countries expire in 2012.

Talks in Mexico last year ended with a sense progress could be made. "I will need to find compromises that will protect the integrity of the process," Nkoana-Mashabane said.

She added that developing countries in Africa and elsewhere also expect her to champion their calls for industrialized nations to deliver money and technology to help them develop clean industries and cope with the droughts, floods and other disruptions associated with global warming. The developing world is seen as suffering disproportionately from climate change because of poverty and other weaknesses.

EDIT

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/22/maite-nkoana-mashabane-south-africa-climate_n_932856.html