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Members of the international confederation Oxfam hold a banner with a message for representatives meeting at the climate talks that begin Dec. 1, 2014 in Lima. Energized by new targets set by China and the United States, talks resume with unusual optimism despite evidence that human-generated climate change is already happening and getting worse.
 
In Lima, Peru, representatives from 195 countries have gathered for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which starts today and runs for two weeks. The goal is to draft an agreement, to be signed in Paris in 2015, in which each country commits to a national plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
“Lima is a crucial moment to reach a climate agreement in 2015,” Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, Peru’s environment minister and a conference host, said in a news release.
October was the hottest on record, and we’re likely to have record-breaking year overall in terms of heat. Some scientists now say that it will be challenging, if not impossible, to prevent temperatures from rising the 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius) deemed the “tipping point” before our future is filled with “drought, food and water shortages, melting ice sheets, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels and widespread flooding,” The New York Times reports. Temperatures have already risen more than 1 degree Fahrenheit and emissions continue to increase.
Ahead of the conference, the United States, China and the European Union all agreed to limit their emissions, with the U.S. promising to scale back 26 to 28 percent by 2025, to return to 2005 levels. China said its levels would reach their peak in 2030, at which point the country would take additional measures to curb emissions, and the E.U. agreed in October to work to drop emissions levels by 40 percent by that same year.
The hope had been that momentum driven by these three power players could motivate other countries to make concessions of their own. “Ultimately this is not a problem that can be solved by just the U.S., China and the E.U.,” Paul Bledsoe, senior climate fellow with the German Marshall Fund, told BBC News. “There’s a whole series of countries — Canada, Australia, Japan, Russia, South Africa, Brazil and Indonesia — who have not made commitments.”
E.U. Negotiator Elina Bardram told the Associated Press that the rest of the world should move quickly. “We have 12 months,” she said, “and the clock is ticking.”

http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/un-climate-change-talks-emissions