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– Every day we delay taking decisive action against Global Climate Change is a day in which the power of the coming changes increases. Even if all CO2 emissions were utterly ceased today, the experts tell us that the material already in the atmosphere will still produce strong effects in the coming decades as the Earth’s massive and ponderous climate shifts into a new configuration to accommodate them. Someday, the names of those who advocated delay now will be cursed by future generations.
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Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Massachusetts v. EPA. The outcome of the case will “likely determine whether the [Environmental Protection Agency] can regulate [greenhouse gas emissions] from power plants and other industries.”

Deputy Solicitor General Gregory Garre, who argued the case for the administration, admitted to the Justices that he had limited knowledge of climate science. “I am not an expert on global climate change,” Garre said.

Despite being uninformed in this “extraordinarily complex area of science,” Garre tried to introduce an element of doubt into the link between greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. From Slate’s account of the arguments:

Justice Stephen Breyer lights into Garre for some of the agency’s silly reasoning in declining to regulate the emissions. When Garre says that scientific uncertainty alone can justify the EPA’s refusal to regulate, Justice John Paul Stevens asks whether it matters that even the scientists who worked on the National Research Counsel study on global warming felt there was less scientific uncertainty than the EPA claimed. Garre insists that there is a “likely connection” between greenhouse gases and global warming but that “it cannot unequivocally be established.”

There is no doubt among the experts. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a body which involves thousands of scientists from over 120 countries who develop detailed reports on climate change, produced a report in 2001 which was reviewed by more than 1,000 top experts, including so-called “climate skeptics” and representatives from industry. The report stated, “There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities.”

Most recently, the National Academy of Sciences unequivocally concluded that natural causes cannot explain the unprecedented warmth over the last 400 years, and “human activities are responsible for much of the recent warming.”

To the original article: ➡

On a day when British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett was urging India to join the fight against climate change, the country announced that it is throwing its lot in with the industry-oriented Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate (APP).

The anti-Kyoto APP is an international body including Australia, China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S. It has been presented as an alternative to the United Nations-sponsored Framework Convention on Climate Change, albeit one that rejects the notion of enforceable climate change measures such as those negotiated in the Kyoto Accord. Instead, the APP is dedicated to increasing GHG-causing industrial and energy development, promising only to improve the relative environmental cleanliness of those developments

The APP’s apparent devotion to clean development is welcome. There will be a huge amount of energy- and industry-related development, especially in India and China, in the coming decades and it is critical that these be as clean as possible. But it’s still a concern that the APP is being used as an international alternative to the hard choices and enforceable treaties that are necessary – the tiniest first steps of which are evident in Kyoto.

We can only hope that Canada, at least, will stand up and dismiss the APP for what it is, an international PR exercise, intended to make these countries look like they are acting responsibly when, in fact, they are just trying to dodge a difficult issue.

Original article… ➡

The industrialized world’s emissions of greenhouse gases are growing again, despite efforts under the Kyoto Protocol to cap them and stave off global warming, the United Nations reported Monday.

Emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases declined in the 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet bloc and the shutdown of polluting factories and power plants in eastern Europe. But now those economies are rebounding, contributing to a 2.4 percent rise in emissions by 41 industrialized nations between 2000 and 2004.

“This means that industrialized countries will need to intensify their efforts to implement strong policies which reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” said Yvo de Boer, head of the U.N. climate treaty secretariat, referring to taxes on carbon-based fuels, energy-efficiency regulations and other steps.

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