http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/dec/10/comment-porritt-poznan-copenhagen-environment Press the panic button
It's much worse than we thought. An emergency review of climate change is needed immediately
Jonathon Porritt
The Guardian, Wednesday December 10 2008
Environmental NGOs in the US had hoped - against the odds - that President-elect Obama might defy convention and turn up at the Poznan conference this week to tell the world in person that the US would soon be doing everything in its power to combat the increasingly dire threat of climate change.
That's not going to happen; but Obama did ask John Kerry, who is leading the US Senate's delegation in Poland, to be his ears and eyes, if not his mouthpiece. Kerry is certainly keen ("We intend to pick up the baton and really run with it here"), and no doubt he'll be doing a lot of behind-the-scenes reassuring. But there's something extra - and hugely important - that he could get sorted too.
All the discussions in Poznan are based on the scientific consensus that emerged at the end of 2007 from the fourth assessment report of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. That consensus was hammered out between the scientists and the politicians as "the best available deal", reflecting both the political realities of world powers at that time, and the work done by more than 2,500 scientists between 2000 and 2005 - the cut-off year for the IPCC's rigorous peer-review process.
And that's the problem. A lot has been going on out there in the natural world since 2005. There is three years' worth of published peer-reviewed evidence, a lot of it from the frontline of the eco-systems most directly affected by climate change. Those whose job it is to take account of all that new evidence (universities, thinktanks, government departments and so on) have a common message to pass on: the vast majority of those studies tell us incontrovertibly that the impact of climate change is more severe and materialising much more rapidly than anything reflected in the fourth assessment report. It's much worse out there, and it's getting even worse even faster.
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