In recent days a follow up of sorts to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report—the Nobel Prize winning report on the most up-to-date climate change science—has been published by a group of leading climatologists, over half of which are from the IPCC. The aptly named Copenhagen Diagnosis is an update to IPCC4 with the most recent numbers, many of which surpass the reports projections.
The update of figures is less than comforting. In short, the new projections spell out death and destruction for us all lest we make actual advances in the areas of climate change legislation and real-world steps to reducing our carbon emissions. For instance, the IPCC4′s prediction of a 13 inch average sea level rise by 2010 has been updated to a 33 inch rise. As Ben Jervey notes in his GOOD article, that new limit is near two metres—that’s going to prompt a redrawing of maps, people.
President Obama has recently decided to attend the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen much to the annoyance of the GOP, which is certainly a step towards fulfilling his campaign promises to make the climate a serious issue for his administration. And on the lighter side of things there are moments like this with Al Gore bringing the issue to wider audiences, via NBC’s “Green Week”:
But this is a serious issue which demands serious discussion by serious people in serious positions. So why does there seem to be so little forward progress in the United States? This isn’t something we can escape from and throwing money at think tanks to think about it isn’t going to help. We need to make real progress on this issue and adopt policy changes that will not only reduce our contribution to global climate change, but save us money and create new jobs. That’s where economic recovery lies, in new infrastructure and green jobs.
Then again, perhaps we should be taping toy guns to trees.