(no subject)

[camrogers]

RE: Copenhagen

This just in: you know that map you've got? Might be time to get it out and colour all those green shapes blue.

Comments

[greylock.livejournal.com]

OTOH, a 2C degree rise is better than a 4C rise, which apparently Rudd's legislation is okay with.

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Putting an Australian perspective on it, it's disgusting that Rudd ran around trying to talk the Pacific nations into accepting a three degree rise. At that level, we hit some ugly point-of-no-return marks, such as a whole lot of Pacific island countries becoming uninhabitable -- islands going entirely underwater, that sort of thing. What the hell was Rudd thinking with his 3 degree figure? The original aim was 1.5 degrees and some were holding-out for 2 degrees.
In effect, they're looking at the map and screaming "Triage!" By arguing for a three degree rise for the sake of business-as-usual, Rudd's saying we can forget about the Great Barrier Reef. As bad as that is for us, we're getting-off lightly. Bangladesh will be obliterated, along with most Pacific island nations.
Just to make things worse, we had binding targets with Kyoto and countries still broke their limits...and as a consequence the worst polluters have made sure the Copenhagen agreement's targets aren't binding.
This is interesting: Changes in carbon emissions from fossil fuels for G-20 countries.
If you look at the Total Emissions tab, Australia doesn't look so bad, and that's the figure our politicians like to talk about. Even though we use a lot of fossil fuels and don't get our industries to clean-up, we still look like small-fry. China and the USA are bad, with India, Russia and Japan up there as well.
But if you look at the Per Capita tab, the data tell a different story. Per person, Australia is the second worst in the world, behind the USA and beating Saudi Arabia, Japan and Russia. No wonder China and India a crying poor...flip back to the absolute numbers and stop trying to hide behind a large population since pollution doesn't recognise borders, and the USA, China and India need a smack-down because they're already off the scale.
Either way you look at the numbers, China's unwilling to risk their industrial boom by advancing past 20th century tech, Rudd is pathetically aping Howard, and Obama copying Bush's pissweak environmental stance.

[hestia.livejournal.com]

It is just shy of criminal the way they have been so irresponsible.

[the-replicant.livejournal.com]

What bugs me is that politicians are arguing over the numbers at all.

It seems so obvious that the numbers should be decided upon by people with good access to and understanding of what they mean (scientists) who should then hand over these numbers to the politicians who's job should be to sort out the implementation of the numbers.










Somehow seems unlikely to ever happen that way though.