The End Is Near

While a lot of the maladministration thinks that Global Warming is about as serious as the pop culture figure of the sandal-clad prophet with the hand-lettered sign saying The End Is Near, the rest of the world forged ahead to try staving off disaster.

Delegates from 120 countries approved the first roadmap for stemming greenhouse gas emissions Friday, laying out what they said was an affordable arsenal of anti-warming measures that must be rushed into place to avert a disastrous spike in global temperatures.

But a U.S. official raised concern about the economic costs.

The report, a summary of a study by a U.N. network of 2,000 scientists, said the world has to make significant cuts in gas emissions through increasing the energy efficiency of buildings and vehicles, shifting from fossil fuels to renewable fuels, and reforming both the forestry and farming sectors.

The document made clear that nations have the technology and money to decisively act in time to avoid a sharp rise in temperatures that scientists say would wipe out species, raise ocean levels, wreak economic havoc and trigger droughts in some places and flooding in others.

Under the most stringent scenario, the report said the world must stabilize the amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2015 — eight years from now — at 445 parts per million to keep global temperatures from rising more than 3.6 degrees over preindustrial levels.

Delegates said the approval of the report should conclusively debunk arguments by skeptics that combatting global warming was too costly, that it would stifle development in poorer countries, or that the temperature rise had gone too far to change.

"If we continue doing what we are doing now, we are in deep trouble," said Ogunlade Davidson, the co-chair of group responsible for finalizing the report this week.

Delegates hailed the policy statement as a key advance toward battling global warming and setting the stage for an even stronger international agreement to replace the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on greenhouse emissions when it expires in 2012.

"It's stunning in its brilliance and relevance," Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the group responsible for the report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said of the study. "It's a remarkable step forward."

"Clearly, the signs that the IPCC assess will have a direct and profound influence on the discussion that take place and the direction toward (a post-Kyoto) agreement," he said.

The United States was pleased that the report "highlights the importance of a portfolio of clean energy technologies consistent with our approach," said the head of the U.S. delegation, Harlan Watson.

But James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, raised concerns about reaching the lowest emission targets proposed in the report, saying "it would cause a global recession."

"Our goal is reducing emissions and growing the economy," he said.

The opinion of the rest of the world that the U.S. is madly rushing into their future endangering everyone around us seems well justified by our attitude that making dollars is more important than breathing. We are acting the part of the monkey that sticks its hand in a jar of cookies and grabs as many as it can hold, then starves to death because it can't get its hand back out of the jar.