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The UN Climate Conference in Poznan, Poland, starting today is raising hopes and fears across the green spectrum. As reported in the Christian Science Monitor.

A year-long push to devise a new global climate-change treaty – one that picks up where the Kyoto Protocol leaves off – gets under way Monday in Poland, with delegates from more than 190 nations set to resume grappling with the thorny issues of how much more to cut greenhouse-gas emissions and who will pay.

The talks, in their first round, are focused on reducing human influence on climate from occurring, according to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). More or less, this means keeping global warming to about 2 degrees Celsius above pre industrial levels by the end of the century. Expectations however are low for this meeting.

President-Elect Obama’s pledge to reduce greenhouse gases to pre 1990 levels in the next 12 years notwithstanding, this group has a lot of challenges ahead. This first round of talks is primarily to develop working groups to tackle the various issues surrounding climate change in both developed and developing countries. But, with the global economic crisis on everyone’s mind, it will be hard to keep the conversation on track and work toward lower carbon emissions.

And while they are working to devise ways to reduce carbon emissions, they’ll create quite a few. AFP reports:

Around 13,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) will be added to the Earth’s greenhouse effect from the December 1-12 meeting of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the UNFCCC said.That estimate is based on a turnout of 8,000 people, but as of Sunday 10,657 people had registered for the talks.

Fortunately, the Polish government plans to purchase credits to offset the total emissions generated which are mostly from travel and heating and lighting the conference areas.

Wouldn’t a Webinar have been more carbon neutral?

Update: You can follow conference news on Twitter