The newspapers reported today that G-8 leaders had reached an agreement of sorts on cutting global warming emissions by half by mid-century. But it wasn’t a real agreement, they said\u2014more of a way to put off the argument. Which is a least a little bit of good news\u2014because that level of reductions is so feeble that it will allow the planet to slide right over the brink of disaster. It’s not just us\u2014our friends at AVAAZ called it \u201cmush,\u201d Greenpeace said it was \u201cnothing but flower words,\u201d and Oxfam said it \u201cdid nothing to lower the risk faced by the world’s poor.\u201d The World Wildlife Federation termed it downright pathetic.<\/p>\n
How, you might ask, could the world’s leaders agree on so misguided a set of targets? One answer, of course, is the power of special interests over politics. But another is that they seem to be working off of very old information. According to the Financial Times, which ran a special section on the G-8 meeting Monday, \u201cthe goal was arrived at\u201d by reasoning that \u201ckeeping the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere below 550 parts per million\u201d would be enough to ward off disaster. But that number is two decades old\u2014and if anyone still believed in it, their faith was shaken last fall when the Arctic melted. We’re at 387 ppm now and the Arctic is melting. What does that tell you?<\/p>\n
It tells us that we need badly to get to work\u2014and that if we manage to spread a new, more acccurate number it could have real effects on the international negotiations. We’ve seen what happens when old science and political convenience rule the day; it’s time to bring our leaders up to date.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The newspapers reported today that G-8 leaders had reached an agreement of sorts on cutting global warming emissions by half by mid-century.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10012012,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n