Global Warming – A New Era of Action (Finally!)

Global Warming - It's for real

If one can find anything positive in the current worldwide economic downturn (crisis might be a better choice of words), it is this;  it might very well be the impetus which gets the world focused on global warming and moves nations to spend billions on research and new sources of renewable energy.  As governments pour  huge sums of money into stagnant economies, there is hope that we have finally arrived at the point where we can move beyond debating the effects of climate change and actually start doing something about it.

At the forefront of this new hope is President Obama who has introduced new energy measures and funding in both the recovery bill and his budget proposal which leads to no uncertainty in how seriously he understand the need for immediate action in combating the effects of global warming.  As the New York Times wrote:

“Mr. Obama has said the United States will lead the effort, but over the next months, he will have to show what exactly that means. A good first step, environmentalists say, would be to commit to trying to limit warming to two degrees centigrade above pre-industrial temperatures, an ambitious goal that the European Union has adopted but that the Bush administration steadfastly avoided. It could also pledge to reduce emissions by 50 or 80 percent by 2050.”

“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said that humans could largely adapt to two degrees of warming, but that a greater temperature increase could cause far more serious consequences, from a dangerous rise in sea levels to mass extinctions.”

After having gone through 8 years of reluctance from the last president to take climate change seriously, we finally have a leader who understands. There have even been congressional hearings on how “US scientists were pressured to tailor their reports on global warming to fit the Bush administration’s climate change skepticism” (New Scientist Jan. 2007).

No doubt the global warming deniers will continue with their illogical arguments in an attempt to make it appear that there exists a a real debate on the issue.  The truth is there is no debate.  What there exists is a true consensus in the scientific community in the belief and understanding that man is the primary cause of global warming.  How deep is that consensus?  Well, all of the following scientific organizations agree on the basic premise of man’s role in global warming.

• Every national academy of science of the G8 – United States, Canada, UK, Germany, France, Japan, Russia and Italy
• The IPCC  (The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change)
• The U.S. National Academy of Sciences
• The American Association for the Advancement of Science
• The American Meteorological Society
• The International Union for Quaternary Research
• The Joint Science Academies of the major industrialized and developing nations.

Anyone with any understanding of the scientific community knows that the above list is the cream of the crop.  It does not get any better than that and yet the deniers will try to tell us that there exists a global conspiracy within the scientific community to alter the data and lay upon us a hoax of  gargantuan proportions.  A conspiracy which would involve tens of thousands of the world’s top scientists from the disciplines of Biology, Geology, Meteorology, Oceanography, Physics and Paleoclimatology all working in concert to lie to us.

And if one was to listen to most Republican politicians or conservative radio or tune in regularly to Fox News, you would walk away thinking that all of the above is nonsense, that man has little or no role in global warming and that, yes, the world is unfolding as it should.

What a bunch of fools…talk about keeping people ignorant!

I’ll end this post with a quote on the IPCC  (Wikipedia)

A joint statement issued by the Australian Academy of Sciences, Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts, Brazilian Academy of Sciences, Royal Society of Canada, Caribbean Academy of Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, French Academy of Sciences, German Academy of Natural Scientists Leopoldina, Indian National Science Academy, Indonesian Academy of Sciences, Royal Irish Academy, Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Italy), Academy of Sciences Malaysia, Academy Council of the Royal Society of New Zealand, Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, and Royal Society (UK) said:

“The work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represents the consensus of the international scientific community on climate change science. We recognise IPCC as the world’s most reliable source of information on climate change and its causes, and we endorse its method of achieving this consensus. Despite increasing consensus on the science underpinning predictions of global climate change, doubts have been expressed recently about the need to mitigate the risks posed by global climate change. We do not consider such doubts justified.”

___

Note: To receive email notifications of new posts from Mario Piperni dot Com, click here or on the Subscribe tab at the top of the page.