Australia, U.N. spar over wildfires and climate change
OSLO (Reuters) – Australia’s prime minister accused the U.N.’s climate change chief on Wednesday of "talking through her hat" when she drew a link between wildfires raging in his country and global warming. Firefighters were battling about 60 fires burning across New South Wales state, with strong winds fanning blazes in the Blue Mountains, a major commuter area of small towns west of Sydney. Christiana Figueres, head of the U.N.’s Bonn-based Climate Change Secretariat, told CNN earlier this week that there was "absolutely" a link between climate change and wildfires. She hinted at a possibility of linking the Australian fires to global warming, saying: "The World Meteorological Organization has not established a direct link between this wildfire and climate change yet." Conservative Prime Minister Tony Abbott rejected any suggestion that the blazes in Australia were the product of rising carbon emissions from the burning of fossil fuels such as […]