Press the panic button: It's much worse than we thought. An emergency review of climate change…

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/comment-porritt-poznan-copenhagen-environment

Press the panic button

It's much worse than we thought. An emergency review of climate change is needed immediately

Jonathon Porritt
The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008

Environmental NGOs in the US had hoped - against the odds - that President-elect Obama might defy convention and turn up at the Poznan conference this week to tell the world in person that the US would soon be doing everything in its power to combat the increasingly dire threat of climate change.

That's not going to happen; but Obama did ask John Kerry, who is leading the US Senate's delegation in Poland, to be his ears and eyes, if not his mouthpiece. Kerry is certainly keen ("We intend to pick up the baton and really run with it here"), and no doubt he'll be doing a lot of behind-the-scenes reassuring. But there's something extra - and hugely important - that he could get sorted too.

All the discussions in Poznan are based on the scientific consensus that emerged at the end of 2007 from the fourth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. That consensus was hammered out between the scientists and the politicians as "the best available deal", reflecting both the political realities of world powers at that time, and the work done by more than 2,500 scientists between 2000 and 2005 - the cut-off year for the IPCC's rigorous peer-review process.

And that's the problem. A lot has been going on out there in the natural world since 2005. There is three years' worth of published peer-reviewed evidence, a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change. Those whose job it is to take account of all that new evidence (universities, thinktanks, government departments and so on) have a common message to pass on: the vast majority of those studies tell us incontrovertibly that the impact of climate change is more severe and materialising much more rapidly than anything reflected in the fourth assessment report. It's much worse out there, and it's getting even worse even faster.

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[globalvillage]

1. I can't wait for the media frenzy

as all the news outlets scramble to cover the talks in Poznan.

Bet we don't hear a peep from the US media. They barely covered it last year.

[Zodiak]

2. Very true

This report makes it official, but the consensus was reached un-offically in the scientific community long ago. We have thrown our planet's balance point way off-kilter.

The problem is...we have no idea how badly we have done it beyond "it's really bad". We'll survive as a species, I suspect, but there will be a few generations of people who will live in more hellish conditions than nowadays. And our planetary diversity is going to undergo a species bottleneck of future geological noteworthiness that may rival the KP event.

We should have generated the political will to get this fixed years ago. We chose otherwise.

[Nihil]

5. Hmmm ...

> ... that may rival the KP event

Was that the one where the earth was hit by a giant peanut somewhere
near Chikennuget?

:yoiks:

[bertman]

3. When Manhattan's under water they'll admit there's a climate crisis. 'Til then, not so much.

[file83]

4. But even then Faux Newz will just say "Manhattan is lowering - the ocean isn't rising!"

"Global Warming has nothing to do with it because Global Warming isn't happening!! It's a natural process of tectonic plates shifting, er, or something....News at 11!"

[bertman]

6. I'm sure you're right, file83.

:rofl:

[Javaman]

7. 30 years from now, the remaining mouth breathing repukes will

be screaming, "no one told us!! why didn't anyone do their jobs, blah blah blah".

we as humans had a good run, we did some really cool things, but it appears as if our day in the sun is beginning to set.

I give us about another 300 years.

[eppur_se_muova]

8. MWTWT joins MFTE as a necessary abbreviation ... nt