Tuesday, December 06, 2005

Clean Up Your Act!
Here is the first of the four articles that I lost in cyberspace during one of Blogger's haywire moments.

From the NYT comes an article about the failures of Kyoto, and what may lie in the future. The US' and Australia's failure to sign on, as well as exemptions to the two countries that have both the the largest populations, and rapid industrial growth rates - India and China - foretell of something more dramatic in the offing.

The only options open to us as a species at the present are to dramatically cut greenhouse emissions now. The technological challenges of geological carbon sequestration are not insoluble, but are not ready for use on the scale necessary to halt global climate change at present.

Kyoto was a terrific first mis-step. Most peoples around the globe realized that the time was nigh for a planet wide policy for reducing greenhouse emissions. But it was a mis-step.

Let us hope that by the end of 2006, we will have supplanted it with something with much more teeth(no, not like the entire Osmond family ;)

If we do not take care of our planet, then our planet will surely take care of us.

The gun is at our collective heads, a round is in the chamber and the hammer is cocked - what we do at this juncture will determine if we are seen as saviors, or there will be no one left to read our history.

I know it's a bit heavy on the drama, but climate change is not isolated to changes in the oft-cited things like rise in sea level, desertification, etc. It will have dramatic consequences for things as widely disparate as diseases of global reach to geo-political upheaval as hot, dry countries covet the resources of those experiencing less effect.

Don't take a tree-hugging lefty's word for it, here's the DoD's observations.

Go gentle reader, now go, and reduce your carbon footprint!

UPDATE: Because of time..well, essentially sleep issues, I can rewrite no more than one of these per day. Hence I'll be re-releasing one per day over the next four days.

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