note to the world: it’s over

 

I just read an article about the climate change summit that happened in Poland a few weeks back. I have heard disheartening things, like the United States was useless there. But, THIS, takes the cake.

 

IMAGINE that some huge rocky projectile, big enough to destroy most forms of life, was hurtling towards the earth, and it seemed that deep international co-operation offered the only hope of deflecting the lethal object. Presumably, the nations of the world would set aside all jealousies and ideological hangups, knowing that failure to act together meant doom for all.

At least in theory, most of the world’s governments now accept that climate change, if left unchecked, could become the equivalent of a deadly asteroid. But to judge by the latest, tortuous moves in climate-change diplomacy—at a two-week gathering in western Poland, which ended on December 13th—there is little sign of any mind-concentrating effect.

 

To be fair to the 10,000-odd people (diplomats, UN bureaucrats, NGO types) who assembled in Poznan, a semicolon was removed. At a similar meeting in Bali a year earlier, governments had vowed to consider ways of cutting emissions from “deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries; and the role of conservation [and forest management]”. After much haggling, delegates in Poland decided to upgrade conservation by replacing the offending punctuation mark with a comma.

The article is from the Economist and is quite good.

un climate summit

It has been difficult to report on what has been going on with the UN Climate Summit, primarily because it has been a negotiation, with no decisions, and many people looking to the U.S. to lead the way… and, we know how that would go with a Bush Administration representative.

That is why I was so pleased today when Bill McKibben posted an essay on Grist.org. I am a big fan of this man, which you know if you have followed this blog for a while. I admire his work, I think he is extremely well spoken, slightly provocative in his ideas, and definitely innovative.

Please take the time to read the article, which can be found HERE. Below are some excerpts:

In writing about the Ptolemaic Universe:

The Greek astronomers invented all sorts of flourishes to make the orbital calculations work: deferents and epicycles, equants and eccentrics, little wheels within wheels that preserved the theory for a very long time, more than a thousand years — till finally Copernicus came along with some new data and blew the whole thing up….In somewhat the same way, we’ve all agreed to suspend disbelief for a long time and keep pretending that the process to do something about global warming is working.

about the negotiations:

The language of these negotiations is numbers, and so the less obvious but more pragmatically powerful way to state it is: These interminable talks are designed to build a machine that would halt the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide somewhere in the neighborhood of 450 to 550 parts per million. They’re so loaded with loopholes, and the timetables are so slow, that they probably wouldn’t accomplish even that, but that’s the goal. The theory is that the world we need is a 450 world, based on the science from five and 10 and 15 years ago.

and then… the truth:

And then, on the last day of the talks, Al Gore gave his speech, which drew everyone into the main conference hall. It was a good talk, but by far the longest and loudest applause came when he formally announced the new reality. “Even a goal of 450 parts per million, which seems so difficult today, is inadequate,” he said, adding that we “need to toughen that goal to 350 parts per million.” People erupted — probably not the Chinese and American delegations, and definitely not the Saudis and the Russians, but all the people who’d spent the last few years struggling with the idea that their work was getting increasingly off-the-point. It was a way of saying: We’ve been engaged in saving the treaty, not saving the world — and we’d rather save the world

and the conclusion:

They’ve said the world circles the sun. Now we have to proceed on that understanding. It won’t be easy — “political reality” says it’s impossible. But political reality is easier to change than scientific reality. Since we can’t change the laws of physics, we’re going to have to try and change the laws of man.