Why the World Needs the U.S. to Act Now on Climate Change

Why the World Needs the U.S. to Act Now on Climate Change
By Sophie Ragsdale, The Nation
March 17, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/131858/

There are two clocks ticking for the god-fearing climate-conscious among us. The first counts down to Copenhagen, where on December 7 representatives from 192 countries will hammer out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol: a post-2012 global climate deal aimed at curbing greenhouse gases. The second hurtles us toward disaster, a "mankind-threatening juggernaut," the point at which atmospheric carbon dioxide exceeds a concentration of 450 parts per million. To the extent that global warming is contingent on carbon emissions, the tipping point will be determined at the UN Framework Conference for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Copenhagen, the last stop on the Bali Roadmap toward what UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer has called "the most complex international agreement that history has ever seen.

In less than ten months, the Danish capital will host as many as 15,000 ministers and officials whose challenge is to collaborate a shared vision for long-term cooperative climate action. Specifically, they will determine burden-sharing agreements based on "common but differentiated responsibilities," and developed countries must pledge ambitious emissions reduction targets. The alternative business-as-usual approach, which is to do nothing, will shoot CO2 levels up to 900 ppm by 2100, causing worldwide temperatures to increase nearly 7 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels to rise anywhere from 3 to 7 feet, nearly tripling predictions made in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report.

In fact, temperatures are accelerating at such a clip that the IPCC's 2007 report, a gathering and distillation of thousands of peer reviews submitted by hundreds of the world's top climate experts, was outdated upon presentation. Since then, scientists have abandoned the language of numbers and data analysis in favor of urgent calls for immediate action. There are, of course, a few odd deniers, such as William Happer, professor of physics at Princeton University, who announced last week at an Environment and Public Works Committee hearing that we are actually in a "CO2 famine" and that increased levels "will be good for mankind." For the most part, however, the consensus is that if temperatures continue to rise as they are, we will not escape hell and high water within the next decade. And where policy is concerned, Obama is considered our last best chance to get it right. "We have only four years left for Obama to set an example to the rest of the
world," said James Hansen of the NASA Institute. "America must take the lead."


To read the full article: http://www.alternet.org/story/131858/