Global warming is either a fact or it isn’t. There is no room for negotiation or politics. First there is the question of truth.
If the expected effects of climate change, such as among other implications the shrinking of the northern ice cap, the drying up of the Amazon and the potential release of methane from the sea bed and the tundra, the human race with enormous suffering will have change imposed on it. What will then be the price of vanity and hubris, and who will pay for the cruel effects? The imposition of death, suffering and cruelty on others is by definition immoral. So we should understand, if climate change is a fact it is primarily a political but more fundamentally a moral question.
Those who would argue that the increase in greenhouse gases caused by human activities does not affect climate cannot make specious or solipsist arguments. Here is the case that convinced David Attenborough:
If the increase of carbon dioxide is not causing the observed changes in the earth’s weather patterns, the increase in the ocean levels and the melting of the ice caps, then they have to provide alternative explanations that fit the patterns of temperature change over time. If they believe that the increase of carbon dioxide, and potentially of methane, is benign they have to prove it by establishing or suggesting a set of independent observations that would support the hypothesis.
“Great World and Moral Leader” Obama is currently attending the Group of Eight Meeting in L’aquila, Italy. Peter Baker in The New York Times is agog with his herculean struggle. Obama after all with his powers of bipartisanship can game the United States political system, much like the global corporations, should be having no problems at all. Not so. It seems:
The world’s biggest developing nations, led by China and India, refused Wednesday to commit to specific goals for slashing heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting the drive to build a global consensus by the end of this year to reverse the threat of climate change.
. . . With Europe pressing for more aggressive action and Congress favoring a more restrained approach, Mr. Obama finds himself navigating complicated political currents at home and abroad.
If he cannot ultimately bring along developing countries, no climate deal will be effective.
The empire for which Obama is the willing figurehead is perhaps killing more people than global warming, but the later may be gaining. It is an interesting question as to which will crash first: the empire or the earth.
Without the empire, and the corporate stranglehold on what is laughingly called US democracy, the leader of that political system might have the moral standing to be a world leader, and one that leads by example. Obama politics can be more accurately guaged in Norway than in Washington. India and China wisely observe the rules of the game as set by global polluters is that it is everybody for themselves. Unremarked by the hometown paper of record for Wall Street, local dignitary, the Secretary-General of the UN, seems to stepping into the vacuum of world leadership.
So who cares for Earth? Is it not the emotional and intellectual responsibility of every person, regardless of where they live, to protect the planet and the future, not for a few, but for as many as practical? There are no teams, only human beings, and their are no goal posts since by definition(mine) climate is a function of the planetary solar system mediated through a dynamic atmosphere. It may make more sense to seek to reduce temperature change if it were possible than to set limits of 2 degree rise over pre-industrial levels.
ELSEWHERE:
Brian at Larvatus Prodeo is on the case of Methane, which I note Tim Flannery said has 21 times the effect as a similar amount of carbon dioxide.