LONDON, Dec. 5 (UPI) -- World leaders mustn't be deterred by "flat-earth" climate change skeptics, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said Saturday.
Blasting efforts by the U.S. Republican Party and others to discredit scientific findings linking global warming to human activity, Brown called such efforts "dangerous" and "deceitful" as leaders prepared to gather next week in Copenhagen, Denmark, to negotiate a climate change treaty, The Guardian reported.
"With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn't be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate skeptics," Brown told the British newspaper. "We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5 billion-ton gap. That will seal the deal."
The newspaper said Brown was referring to estimates by British science adviser Nicholas Stern that 10 billion tons of greenhouse gas emissions must be taken out of the atmosphere by 2020, with current proposals likely to remove only half of that amount.
Brown made the comments as Republicans in the U.S. Congress seized on intercepted e-mails among climate change scientists at the University of East Anglia they claim demonstrate efforts to suppress data discrediting climate change findings, the newspaper said.
