Next week President Obama is attending the Copenhagen Climate Change Summit which is to renew the idea of the Kyoto Protocol. It is important, according to scientists that the world decreases greenhouse gases, or the world may cross the 2c mark.
It is debatable which countries should cut down on their carbon footprints, however I believe the major industrialized countries, such as the United States, Britain, and Japan, should reduce their emissions.
One scientists, however, believes that we should eliminate the ideas of the Kyoto Protocol and start our climate change policy from scratch. This scientist, James Hansen, is believed to be "the world's pre-eminent climate scientist" according to an article by The Guardian.
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I am a little confused about the details in all of this and now is not the time to be wishy-washy. We lost 7years in the last administration calling into question data showing melting ice caps...
ReplyDeleteSomething that I don't think people realize is that the heating rates vary geographically so high elevations in the western US for example, will see faster increases in mean temperatures than the south eastern US. Global warming doesn't mean 70F winters!!!
I suspect Dr. Hansen's understanding of the climatic effects, or lack thereof, resulting from a Kyoto-type agreement is dead on. But his view of world politics and history is either woefully uninformed or willfully unrealistic. Abraham Lincoln was not, in fact, an uncompromising moralist, he was a shrewd politician who waited for public opinion to reach critical points where he could harness or guide the support of the country in the right direction. No elected official in the world is going to push through the type of climate policies he's in favor of unless there is first a fundamental shift in public opinion to support them. Sure, world leaders could take more of an initiative, stick their necks out a bit, and try to push public opinion a bit in the right direction, but generally it works the other way around. This isn't something to be decried, it's just how elected governance works. Either accept that, or start calls for a benevolent global dictatorship. I'm game either way.
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