Year 2, Month 11, Day 14: Driving The Limo Off The Cliff

The Wall Street Journal reports from the soft white (very white) underbelly of global capitalism, with their perspective on the IEA report:

LONDON—Dangerous climate change will be essentially irreversible within a little over five years, the International Energy Agency said in an annual report urging governments to do what they can to prevent this outcome.

To prevent long-term average global temperatures rising more than two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels—seen as the maximum possible increase without serious climate disruption—immediate, drastic changes to energy and industrial policies are needed, the IEA said in its World Energy Outlook.

Such a shift looks unlikely given current global economic problems and the move away from low-carbon nuclear power in some countries after the …

Well, that was one of the quickest remakes I’ve ever done. Sent November 9:

It’s been almost two hundred years since scientists first discovered the greenhouse effect, and more than fifty years since Arctic ice melt caused by increased atmospheric CO2 was predicted (in a 1953 edition of Popular Mechanics!). During that time an entire scientific discipline has developed, and climatologists have been steadily developing analytical and predictive tools of ever-greater precision and sophistication, as evidenced by their unsettling tendency to be right more and more often.

For five decades these scientists have warned American lawmakers about the looming climate crisis, only to see the problem get shelved for more electorally immediate concerns. No more. The International Energy Agency’s analysis is clear and sobering: we’re out of time. If our descendants are to have a world that’s fit to live in, climate-change denialists must relinquish their improbable conspiracy theories and join the rest of us in effecting a profound restructuring of our planetary energy economy.

Warren Senders