"G-8 Historic breakthrough on global warming" OR "G-8 Climate-Change Agreement Falls Short"?

President Obama and other leaders backed historic new targets for tackling global warming last night in an agreement designed to pave the way for a world deal in the autumn.
For the first time, America and the other seven richest economies agreed to the goal of keeping the world’s average temperature from rising more than 2C (3.6F). They also agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050 as they strove for a worldwide deal at Copenhagen in December.

Or

U.S. officials framed the L'Aquila climate-change declarations as progress. Numerical targets for emissions reductions by 2050 are largely meaningless anyway, as the target is so far in the future, they said. "It would be a big mistake to look only at 2050," said Todd Stern, the chief U.S. climate-change negotiator.But it was the failure of the developed nations to set short-term goals that gave the developing countries their reason for torpedoing a broader deal that seemed within reach just a week ago. The G-8 nations also couldn't agree on a pledge to help fund poorer countries' moves toward cleaner energy sources and mitigate the effects of climate change they are already feeling.
A draft declaration had provisionally called for $400 million in this aid -- a figure many nations called too small and others called too large. In the end, they got only theoretical commitments to help with finances and technology.

So, which is which? My opinion is that, despite the Times’ bombastic title, Western leaders have started to realize (as most people) that global warming is a scam, climate change is a naïve attempt to use a nicer term for the same fraud, but all in all it would only bankrupt their countries and probably not even earn them political kudos (not anymore). The agreement to keep world average temperature from increasing more than 2C is as ridiculous as it sounds; in any case – they must have thought – if the world is in fact cooling as it has for the last 10 or 13 years, we will even be able to keep our promises!

It is unfortunate that all the noise about global warming, so clearly in bad faith, has put off both the public and politicians from facing and solving real problems like pollution, energy independence, implementation of cleaner sources of energy (real ones: atom, clean coal, etc.) at a time where all these could be easily and cheaply achieved with existing technologies; instead, we sit on our bums and wait for the wind to spin our turbines.