Global warming and climate change: the inevitability, the issue, the danger, the scenario, and the crisis.
I may have missed out on analyzing the Stern Review**, but this latest climate change study is totally new to the news.
The Global Carbon Project says that emissions were rising by less than 1% annually up to the year 2000, but are now rising at 2.5% per year.
While I think the carbon emission market set up in Europe is a brilliant idea, it has been hard to implement and there have reportedly been misunderstandings and loopholes in enforcing the principles of the project — which is like a carbon dioxide (CO2 is one of the leading greenhouse emissions) stock market. The United States is by far the number one polluter of greenhouse gasses, and shows no sign of letting up soon.
At the recent United Nations climate summit in Nairobi, a number of delegations, including those of Britain, Australia and the US, pointed out that they had managed to grow their economies without significant increases in carbon emissions.
Proof enough, or just that nasty UN getting on the righteous "freedom"-loving Americans again?
Coming up right behind the US is rising power China, expected to take the number one spot in a while. America has yet to show any promise, with no help to the news media (versus the near-ample coverage British media has given the scientific issue of climate change). Any time that global warming has potentially been tied to something regular people can associate with (e.g. 2005's Hurricane Katrina hitting the US gulf coast), that smidgen of credibility and sensibility is knocked off the table by the media that does talk about global warming and possible implications blowing things like hurricanes out of proportion! Therefore, you have the groups of: sensible educated people who believe in scientific climate change (that's me), those who don't believe it at all [because they are narrow-minded or otherwise], those who believe it because of the hyped version that links global warming to temporary things (unseasonably summer heat, hurricanes — yet to be proven tied to the kind of climate change we are really talking about), and those who don't believe in global warming because of the sensationalized version they get.
The United States may have left the building of realism of impending ecological disaster for now, but at least there are international consortiums — such as the IPCC (see aforelink) — working on this serious matter.
**: From 1 Nov.
Check out the latest global warming report commissioned by the British Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, the Stern Review. It shows that climate change could easily and greatly devistate the economies of the world very fast. The more we wait, the higher the economic, humanitarian, and environmental toll will be.
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