Climate Change: The Worst Can Still Be Avoided (IPCC)

[jpak]

http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=40025

MADRID, Nov 12 (IPS) - Climate change is not inexorable, if measures are adopted immediately, said scientists and government officials as the 27th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began Monday in Spain.

The meeting in the Mediterranean city of Valencia, which will end Saturday, has drawn hundreds of experts from some 130 countries. Participants were welcomed by an enormous 400 square metre banner hung up on the outside of the building by international environmental watchdog Greenpeace, reading "Warning: Save the Climate Now".

Javier González, with the Spanish NGO Ecologistas en Acción, told IPS that there is not much to study and discuss, because it is already clear what must be done: "the only solution is to reduce consumption of energy and other resources that are consumed at obscene levels."

"Some segments of society in the countries of the developing South and practically everyone in the industrialised North consume unnecessary things: excessive packaging and advertising mailers for products, excessive gasoline in countries where cars habitually carry just one person, the lights on day and night unnecessarily, homes with several TV sets, etc, etc," he said.

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[Kolesar]

1. We got our consumption down to 400 kW*hour/month

I have a hunch that a lot of the packaging of products is "loss prevention". Shoplifters cannot stuff a giant PETE plastic box that contains a small product into their shirt sleeve. What would be the solution? Put the products behind the counter and hire another sales clerk to retrieve them?

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. This is a message that must be heard

There are those who believe no action is necessary, because "global warming" doesn't exist.

There are also those who believe no action is worth taking, because the effects of "global warming" cannot be tempered.

Neither attitude is reasonable to me.

[tom_paine]

3. First, their report is already a joke for being far too tepid in it's predictions

that were outstripped even before the thing was printed, NOW they want us to believe this.

Sorry, no sale. Not that it could ever happen like that, anyway.

Primates. We are such funny creatures. So hopeful, so able to slip into denial.

[Javaman]

4. "the worst" is kind of relative now, isn't it...

I mean last week, the worst was keeping global temps from going to 3 degrees higher. Now, it's reported that we are going to go to 3 degrees by the end of the century. So is the worst now mean going to 4 degrees?

folks, once the temp hits 3 degrees we get full on positive feed back. It's like the geometric progression of CO2 in the atmosphere. Things begin to really accelerate at that point.

[The2ndWheel]

5. "immediately"

We keep using that word. I don't think it means what we think it means.

All the things going on today are the consequences of what we've been doing for years, decades, not just what we did yesterday.

Who or what is going to A) define what "unnecessary things" are, and B) enforce that definition? We have a global economy that requires growth that has been gathering momentum for...I don't know...at least a few thousand years. Who is going to stop that? Let alone stopping it without anyone getting caught in the net like fish. If we can still remember what fish are.

You have to choose to stop. Nobody can wait for corporations or governments to stop for us. They can't. Everything about those institutions requires growth. Everything. People have to stop on their own, you can't force them. To enable force(militarily, physically, economically, whatever) would require growth. We're not getting out of this easy.