LiveScience: Once the impacts of man-made pollution on global climate became obvious in the late 1980s, the U.N. established a Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the first meeting was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992 to agree upon a process to negotiate global climate treaties such as the Kyoto Protocol. The participating member countries and nation states meet every year in the Conference of Parties (COP) and use the state-of-the-art climate knowledge compiled by the Intergovernmental...