LAT op-ed: If we wait for "proof" of global warming, it will be too late

U.S. foot-dragging fuels global warming
By the time we get proof of climate change, it will be too late to reverse course.
By Elizabeth Kolbert, Elizabeth Kolbert, a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999, is the author of "Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change," published earlier this year by Bloomsbury.
June 11, 2006

ON JUNE 12, 1992, President George H.W. Bush, appearing at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. The convention set the goal of averting "dangerous" human interference with the climate system. After adding his name to it, the president called on world leaders to join him "in translating the words spoken here into concrete action." When he subsequently submitted the treaty to the Senate, it was ratified by unanimous consent.

Tomorrow it will be 14 years since Bush père signed the Framework Convention, and the U.S. remains committed, in theory at least, to avoiding dangerous climate change. Unfortunately, it's hard to square this commitment with what has actually happened in the meantime.

Since 1992, American emissions of carbon dioxide — the chief cause of climate change — have continued to rise more or less at the same rate they were rising previously. Meanwhile, even as the Japanese and the Europeans have pledged to cut their carbon dioxide production, President George W. Bush has blocked all attempts to impose emissions limits in the U.S. In fact, the administration has gone so far as to oppose the efforts of those states, such as California, that are trying to reduce emissions on their own.

To the extent that the administration has offered any explanation for this contradiction — promising to avert dangerous climate change on the one hand, blocking attempts to curb emissions on the other — it's to assert that the uncertainties about climate change make action premature. Thanks to the nature of global warming, this ostensibly cautious approach actually amounts to the worst sort of recklessness.

The climate system is highly inertial; it takes several decades for changes already set in motion to become apparent. Scientists probably won't be able to determine just what level of greenhouse gases will trigger, say, the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet until that level has been exceeded. But as anyone who has ever tried to push a stalled car can attest, systems that are hard to get moving also tend to be hard to stop. Although it sounds reasonable to argue that we ought to wait for certainty before taking action, if we do, effective action almost certainly will become impossible. Once we know for sure that the ice sheet is in danger of disappearing, it will be too late to reverse the process....

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-kolbert11jun11,0,1170783.story?coll=la-home-commentary

it's not too late there's no reason except corporate greed not to clean up the environment.

in to an iceberg before he believes it's there. We are floating around on the good ship Earth and the Bush administration wants to wait until we actually hit something before he springs in to action,man your lifeboats!

Maybe this is why he is cutting NASA's budget to station climate observing satellites around our home planet while pushing going to Mars. It's an Iraq analogy just as he is bringing "democracy" to Iraq, he trashes it here at home, same policy with our home planet as with our nation.

One of these days, Bush is going to come right out and say, "oh well, it's too late, we can't do anything about it now -- so let's not even try".

I'm pleased to see that someone else thought it was apropos enough to put online!




http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~mchinn/noneclink.html

and it is indeed already too late to prevent many of the consequences.