Placate the Masses

 

I hate to be a 'downer' on the climate change agreement. With lots of world-wide attention, there was a real chance to actually make history and to at ameliorate possible climate change pace and impacts. But, the agreements from the summit are voluntary; the deadlines are way to long, and the money needed to address the issue is not mandatory. The words are nice in the agreement but they are straw men, hollow reeds.

The agreement makes no commitment to abandon fossil fuels. The time period for changes makes not sense. Do we have 30-50 years to meet targets, all of which are not mandated. If there is one thing that is certain, models underestimate change. Year after year since the first IPCC report, NEW factors have emerged that show an ever hastening climate disaster.

The summit and all of the nice talk appears to be more of a ruse to placate the masses and to lull them into thinking all will be okay---that it's all under control. It's not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/william-bradley/global-climate-change-sum_b_8801996.html?utm_hp_ref=climate-change

"But those are targets, not requirements. And the national action plans brandished by all but a few of the 195 nations voting for the Paris accord add up, in the first round of estimates, to fall very short of the target. Indeed, temperatures would rise between 2.7 and 3.5 degrees Celsius under the actual national plans, between five and more than six degrees Fahrenheit. That result would be absolutely disastrous.
President Barack Obama hailed the Paris summit accord as grandly historic. But former NASA scientist James Hansen, a founding father of climate change awareness, declared the summit "a fraud," an event of "no action, just promises."
 
So the agreement, at the insistence of the Obama administration, includes a schedule of regular reviews, every five years, of national action plans, essentially pushing the nations to resubmit new and better plans based upon technological advances and increased political will.
And the Paris accord does not call for an actual phase-out of widespread fossil fuel use.
Instead of "greenhouse gas emissions neutrality" in the draft, which some interpreted to mean an end to emissions, the phrase "global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible" was substituted. This change was made, not surprisingly, at the urgent insistence of Saudi Arabia and some other members of OPEC. The Saudi line is to keep burning oil and make up for it with carbon sinks such as new forest growth and techno-fixes down the line. Meanwhile, they are going to keep on pumping and selling."

CLIMATE CLOCK RUNNING OUT?

Perhaps it has already.
One of the world's foremost experts on climate change is warning that if humans don't moderate their use of fossil fuels, there is a real possibility that we will face the environmental, societal and economic consequences of climate change faster than we can adapt to them.http://www.physorg.com/news/2010-12-climate-scientist-world-widespread-forestalled.html

Thompson list the following as supportive evidence:

• The ice fields atop Mount Kilimanjaro have lost 85 percent of their coverage since 1912;

• The Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru – the largest tropical ice field on Earth, has retreated 25 percent since 1978;
• Ice fields in the Himalayas that have long shown traces of the radioactive bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s have since lost that signal as surface melting has removed the upper layers and thereby reduced the thickness of these glaciers;
• All of the glaciers in Alaska's vast Brooks Range are retreating, as are 98 percent of those in southeastern Alaska. And 99 percent of glaciers in the Alps, 100 percent of those in Peru and 92 percent in the Andes of Chile are likewise retreating;
• Sea levels are rising and the loss of ice coverage in the North Polar region continues to increase annually.

"Everyone will be affected by global warming," Thompson wrote. "But those with the fewest resources for adapting will suffer the most."
Add the above with probable failure of the UN Climate Summit in Mexico it is clear that time is not on our side. People are still talking about carbon reductions years in the future; there has been no major move to alternative energies; there is no concerted effort to deal with climate change impacts and, the issues concerning the economy has center staged climate into a minor concern. People just don't get it and that is a shame because millions of lives are threatened and we just keep sleeping while 'our beds are burning.'