Year 2, Month 6, Day 19: Bad Earth Rising

The Boise Weekly runs a little squib on the UN Climate Change Conference and all the bad news its delegates are confronting:

When delegates from about 180 countries begin meeting tomorrow at a major global energy conference, they’ll be met with a sobering bit of news: The world’s greenhouse gas emissions are hitting record highs and global warming continues to rise.

The new report issued today by the International Energy Agency indicating high fossil fuel emissions is just one of several studies expected to be released this week at the session in Bonn, Germany. This week’s meeting, dubbed a “framework convention,” is in advance of the annual United Nations conference on global warming, which will be held at the end of the year in South Africa.

Yup. Sent June 5:

The world’s industrialized nations have inadvertently set in motion a cascade of climatic events which will affect not only all of humanity, but all forms of life on Earth. The accumulated carbon resources of millions of years are now being burned and reintroduced into the atmosphere with incredible speed; previous “climate change” events tended to take place over spans of millennia — still rapid in geological time, but long enough to allow adaptive evolution a chance. The climatic transformation of the Anthropocene, by contrast, looks like it’s happening in a frame of centuries — the geological equivalent of hitting a wall at 100 mph. The delegates to the U.N. Climate Change Conference have their work cut out for them; they must develop strategies for coping with unprecedented planetary phenomena, while combating a level of ignorance and denialism in the world’s media and political systems that makes effective action essentially impossible. Uh-oh.

Warren Senders