Year 2, Month 11, Day 13: This Is Not A Test

The New York Daily News (GAAAH!) reports on the just-released warning from the International Energy Agency:

Time is running out to reverse the effects of global warming, according to a new report.

In a sobering analysis of the planet’s energy future, the International Energy Agency said that governments around the world have five years to reverse the course of climate change before it’s too late.

“The door is closing,” Fatih Birol, the IEA’s chief economist, told the Guardian. “I am very worried – if we don’t change direction now on how we use energy, we will end up beyond what scientists tell us is the minimum [for safety].

“The door will be closed forever.”

The World Energy Outlook report, which looks at the future of the planet’s energy system over the next 25 years, revealed that urgent investment in renewable power and energy efficiency is needed to keep global temperature gains at 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, a crucial ceiling set by climate scientists.

Once that door shuts, that’s it. Writing a historically referenced letter to the NYDN is probably an exercise in futility. I’ll paraphrase it and send tomorrow’s letter to the WSJ in a little while, which will put me five days ahead of the curve. Whee!

Sent November 9:

The greenhouse effect was first described in the early 1800s, and first measured in 1896 by Svante Arrhenius, a Swedish physicist. Arctic ice melt caused by increased atmospheric CO2 was postulated in 1953, and climatologists have been studying the problem ever since. Their analyses have been steadily getting more accurate, and their predictions have been confirmed time and time again.

For fifty years environmental experts have been warning American lawmakers about the consequences of our profligate energy consumption, and for the past fifty years we’ve been kicking it down the road for “the next guy” to deal with — a strategy that just ended with the release of the International Energy Agency’s “five-year warning.” The climate-change denialists need to abandon their improbable conspiracy theories and join the rest of us in making a world that’s safe for our descendants.

We can’t say we weren’t warned. We can only say we didn’t care.

Warren Senders