I keep telling all my friends, I don’t make this stuff up. It has deadly serious implications for global society and the continuance of Earth’s environment, and lately, it seems to be coming at us from all sides – just as the popular media has seemingly lost nearly 100% of its attention span.
The above quote was made today by the European Union Environmental Commissioner Stavros Dimas. He was speaking to a climate change conference in Budapest about The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in December whose purpose is to agree upon a replacement framework for the Kyoto Protocol.
More and more of our leaders are beginning to understand the immense gravity of the situation we find ourselves in. We are already experiencing unstoppable and irreversible effects of climate change. Because of the climate lag, the longer we wait to make a move, the harder it will be to keep from progressing past additional thresholds. Most of these thresholds are irreversible and unstoppable in time frames that matter. The only way to keep from experiencing them is to keep from passing through them.
With a climate lag that measures decades (30 years is a good average for the "warming already in the pipeline") we will not know which thresholds we will pass through for years or decades yet. This makes the problem exceedingly hard to manage.
Reuters http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE51Q22X20090227