The Australian - After 13 Major International Climate Meetings, The Earth Is Out Of Time

[hatrack]

ANOTHER week on a changing planet. Australian farmers struggling through the worst drought on record are offered $150,000 by Canberra to walk off their land. Federal police chief Mick Keelty declares climate change - not terrorism - as the greatest threat to national security (a position doused down yesterday to an "equal" threat). Scientists drop a red-hot report forecasting catastrophic wildfires as a regular hazard of Australian summers. Suburbanites spooked by drought-inflated grocery bills contemplate a return to the vegie patch, but how to water it?

And far away, in the melting permafrost of Russia's Arctic, mammoth dung is released in a putridly poetic message - from one long-lost species to another distinctly nervous one - about the vulnerability of all creatures on this merciless earth. The mammoth never got the memo to act, adapt or perish. The same can't be said of humanity. Twenty years after concerns about global warming were first raised in the UN General Assembly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon appealed to 80 heads of state and government gathered in New York on Monday to break through the imbroglio over cutting carbon emissions - the entwined issues of how, and who pays - with the declaration that "inaction now will prove the costliest action of all in the long term".

EDIT

Dr Graeme Pearman - a former chief of CSIRO atmospheric research, and one of Australia's foremost experts on climate change - sees progress, but then he is, despite all he knows, still an optimist. "I think Bali will be a watershed," Pearman says. "There is a real realisation now that we actually have a real problem on our hands, and that we have a shortness of time to deal with it. The optimist in me comes out, saying that maybe at the 11th hour, suddenly human ingenuity will come to the rescue. The other side of me says that well, had it been in 2000 - or even before that, say 1990, when the targets for Kyoto were set - then we would have a chance of actually avoiding significant changes that we are not going to avoid now."

Erwin Jackson, director of policy and research at the Climate Institute, says it is fair to say there is increasing momentum towards Bali in November, but "we really need a strong mandate in Bali to drive negotiations for that forward". Dr John Church, World Climate Research Program chairman and a CSIRO Antarctic expert, was heartened by the strength of concern emerging at APEC. "But the progress is painfully slow. It seems the world can only go as fast as the slowest recalcitrants, and valuable time is being lost."

EDIT

http://www.theage.com.au/news/in-depth/the-earth-is-out-of-time/2007/09/28/1190486562572.html?page=fullpage#contentSwap2

[gateley]

1. K&R Thank you.

[kestrel91316]

2. When THIS becomes a problem:

"......Suburbanites spooked by drought-inflated grocery bills contemplate a return to the vegie patch, but how to water it?....."

.....the party's over.

[XemaSab]

3. That's a stingy payout

Do farmers there get subsidies like ours do? :shrug: