U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer says, "The current economic uncertainty makes it all the more important for governments to provide clarity on where they intend to go on this issue."
In spite of all its anti-pollution and carbon-emission reduction policies and regulations that are in place, the European Union’s industrial “greenhouse gas” emissions rose by 1.1% last year, with the business sectors covered by Europe's Emission Trading Scheme increasing their carbon dioxide emissions rates to 1.914 billion metric tons last year.
The new statistics illustrate the great difficulty nations face in sharply reducing the emission of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse gasses” in efforts to cause climate change to fade away.
The data have been released at a time when, more and more, the costs of attempts to fight AGW (anthropocentric or man-made global warming) are being counted.
According to a Canadian economist and two U.S. experts on climate change, the UN's IPCC has severely underestimated that cost.
McGill University economist Christopher Green, University of Colorado climate policy expert Roger Pielke Jr., and U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research climatologist Tom Wigley
write, "The IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies. We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations."
The trio says that the IPCC models that are used to project future technological advancements and human carbon dioxide emissions should assume a “frozen technology” baseline, instead of assuming, as they presently do, constant advancement in human technology.
As the global economy endures sharp oscillations up and down in the wake of increasing oil and energy demands, the troubled U.S. housing and lending industry, and the weakened U.S. Dollar, the fear that it is just not affordable to fight AGW is looming larger.
But the Union of Concerned Scientists argues that now is not the time to let fear stop vitally necessary progress.
"If you start having water supply problems in Peru, Chile and, a little further down the road, India and China, what are the global economic implications of that?"
says the Union’s Alden Meyer.
U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer says, "The current economic uncertainty makes it all the more important for governments to provide clarity on where they intend to go on this issue," arguing that swift action to curtail "greenhouse gas" emissions would actually stimulate the economy as companies expanded or formed to create new technologies and energy supply means.
But as I’ve written
elsewhere, other scientists are already coming up with what they feel are vastly cheaper, more immediate, and more realistic means of fighting global warming because “mass action” is just too costly, too slow, and too demanding of sacrifice—and for too little effect at that.
