Tuesday, November 20, 2007

We Get It, It's Serious. So What's The Solution?

The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the other co-winner of the Nobel Prize-- has finally released a long-awaited 2007 report "on the science of climate change and the effects of human-produced greenhouse gases." What's it say? Well-
The document says recent research has heightened concern that the poor and the elderly will suffer most from climate change; that hunger and disease will be more common; that droughts, floods and heat waves will afflict the world's poorest regions; and that more animal and plant species will vanish...

...The report is important because it is adopted by consensus, meaning countries accept the underlying science and cannot disavow its conclusions. While it does not commit governments to a specific course of action, it provides a common scientific baseline for the political talks...

And talk is all we do. The article speaks of leaders gathering next month in Bali to discuss "an agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012," but that Protocol clearly was either not enforced or didn't go far enough, because-- as their own report concludes-- we are "hurtling toward a warmer climate at a quickening pace."

What's the solution? I don't know, but it'd be nice if these people spent more time looking for it, and less time getting together to tell us all how fucked we are.

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