Getting hot under the collar

This will get 'em to take global climate change seriously:

TURIN, Italy (AP) - Global warming is threatening the world's ski resorts, with melting at lower altitudes forcing the sport to move higher and higher up mountains, according to a United Nations study released Tuesday.

Downhill skiing could disappear altogether at some resorts, while at others, a retreating snow line will cut off base villages from their ski runs as soon as 2030, warned the report by the U.N. Environment Program.

It's not just affecting developing and island nations, it's affecting the tourism industry! "My God, Muriel, if this keeps up, it'll affect our skiing trip to Austria! Something must be done!"

At the moment, it seems, it's the poor nations that are the ones doing it. Joke Waller-Hunter, executive secretary of the UN Climate Change Convention, says

"There are 119 countries which have ratified the protocol, and I get the impression they are committed to implementing it regardless of it entering into force.

"In the developing countries, known in the protocol as non-Annex One countries, we're seeing a keen interest in Kyoto.

"Countries like India, China and Cuba are all waiting for the protocol's clean development mechanism to start working - that will let richer countries invest in projects to cut greenhouse gases in the developing world.

"The rapidly industrialising countries see their environmental and economic interests coinciding. China is really decoupling energy use from GDP."

Meanwhile, the big boys, not only the US but also the European Union and Russia are dancing, delaying, dodging, and denying, using every excuse from ranting about the supposed "unfairness" of Kyoto (which - gasp! - required more of industrialized nations than of developing ones) to wild, unsupported predictions of economic disaster to the false claim that trees will save us by sopping up the excess carbon dioxide. If Russia refuses to ratify the protocol, it may well be dead.

However, an article in the NY Times argues that

Regardless of which way Russia steps, the process of moving the world toward limiting releases of the gases after more than a century of relentless increases has clearly begun, said David B. Sandalow, a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution and an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration who worked on the treaty.

"The standard of success isn't whether the first treaty out of the box sails through," he said. "The standard is whether this puts the world on a path to solving a long-term problem. Other multilateral regimes dealing with huge complex problems, like the World Trade Organization, have taken 45 or 50 years to get established."

But do we have that much time? Probably not. And it's our own damn fault.

New evidence found by teams of climate researchers leaves no doubt that industrial emissions of greenhouse gases are responsible for increasing global temperatures - an ominous trend that has sped up in the past 50 years and threatens to continue for centuries, according to a report by two of the nation's leading atmospheric scientists.

The two government experts said climate change "may prove to be humanity's greatest challenge" and warned that "it is very unlikely to be adequately addressed without greatly improved international cooperation and action." ...

They estimate that by the end of this century there is a 90 percent chance that the world's climate will heat up between 3.1 and 8.9 degrees Fahrenheit because of those human influences.

Among the consequences, they predict, are more frequent heat waves, more widespread droughts in some parts of the world and "extreme precipitation events" in others.

They also predict more wildfires, abrupt changes in vegetation and continued melting of glaciers and of the great Greenland Ice Sheet, causing floods along many continental coastlines.

Footnote from the Huh? Just Exactly What in Hell Does That Mean? Dept.: The Times article includes this quote from Myron Ebell, a climate policy analyst for the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an industry-backed group:

"If global warming turns out to be a problem, which I doubt, it won't be solved by making ourselves poorer through energy rationing," he said. "It will be solved through building resiliency and capability into society and through long-term technological innovation and transformation."