Climate Change continued

Here is the problem summed up by one of the foremost environmental groups 12 Policies to save the climate & our planet Greenpeace

If you are still sceptical about climate change please read on.

Let's consider the consequences of failure in Copenhagen.........

1) A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences
2) A hodgepodge of uncoordinated local efforts to only trim emissions - none of which will deliver the necessary cuts of emissions
3) A drastically and negatively altered climate.

Climate experts, scientists and negotiators say that an absent international agreement now means the children and grandchildren of all of us living today will negotiate a world where planetary geo-engineering is a part of daily life, sea-walls defend coastal cities, the world's poor are hammered by drought, floods and famine and our planet heads toward conditions unseen for the last 100 million years.

The December talks are, in other words, the last best chance to change course before chaos descends.

"The choice facing the present generation is an awesome one," said former Vice President Al Gore during a speech before the Society of Environmental Journalists last month. "Never before has a single generation been asked to make such difficult and consequential decisions that will have implications for all succeeding generations." Failure, Gore added, would be "catastrophic" - not only given the urgency of changes already under way, but because it challenges the efficacy of the rule of law as "an instrument of redemption."

Collapse in Copenhagen could not just become an obstacle to further progress however. It might also force society to confront choices and decisions few in the scientific and policy world want to face. "Copenhagen is mitigation," said Guy Brasseur, director of the Climate Service Centre in Hamburg, Germany. "If it fails, we move to adaptation and geo-engineering."

Adaptation will require hundreds of billions of dollars at the low end. It will force a vast transfer of wealth, technology and aid from industrialised counties to developing ones. That buys no more than a Band-aid for those most at risk, said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development. "We've failed our primary task of preventing harm," said Huq, lead author of the adaptation and mitigation chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth assessment report. "Now we are going to be tasked with protecting those most vulnerable to harm. And soon we are going to be confronted with globally catastrophic harm." "There really is nothing to do but adapt today."

That's where Copenhagen comes in. The diplomatic gathering, from Dec. 7 to 18 has one goal: create an "ambitious global agreement incorporating all the countries of the world" to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. It will be the 16th in a line of negotiations extending back 20 years, some more successful than others, all aimed at curbing humanity's appetite for fossil fuel.

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