Back in 2007, James Lovelock wrote in Rolling Stone:
By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. "The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia," Lovelock says. "How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable." With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth's population will be culled from today's 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes—Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
He was excoriated as a hyperbolic, gloom-and-doomer with a perception distorted from peering through green-colored glasses.
Now, four years later at the end of yet another international gathering of negotiators from most of the nations on the planet, Andrew Light writes that this nonsense is still going on:
The expected endgame of the international climate talks in Durban is shaping up to be a fierce standoff.
A showdown has emerged between the E.U. and other parties over their conditions for agreeing to a second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol. The first commitment period will expire in 2012. If it is not renewed, the fate of the instruments that support the world's fragile carbon market is uncertain.
Perito-Moreno Glacier, Patagonia, Argentina
(Yellow Magpie)
Japan, Russia, and Canada have all signaled that they are unwilling to continue with a second commitment of binding emissions cuts for the treaty, leaving only the E.U. ready to move forward.
But the conditions the E.U. has asked for at this meeting to preserve the Kyoto Protocol are steep. In exchange for their commitment, they expect everyone else—in particular the other large greenhouse-gas emitters like the U.S., China, and India—to begin a road map for a process that will create a binding agreement on reducing emissions later in the decade. What we now know as the "mandate" debate has pulled everyone into a discussion over the fate of the Kyoto Protocol—including the U.S., which is not a party to it. ...
But so far there is little indication that the U.S., China, India, and several other parties like the idea of signing onto this package. While no serious objections have been voiced about authorizing a road map to come out of this meeting that will continue work on a new agreement in a stipulated amount of time, parties disagree on the idea of agreeing ahead of time to a legally binding outcome for this process. ...
This week several parties, such as the U.S. and India, expressed reservations that they can enter into a process that guarantees an agreement a legally binding outcome when they don't yet know what the content of the agreement would be. The U.S. has also repeatedly demanded an all-inclusive binding target in order to craft a workable climate agreement. According to our lead climate negotiator Todd Stern, the U.S. is not necessarily opposed to a legally binding outcome, but rather to an outcome that, like the Kyoto Protocol, is binding only to some parties and not to others—of the size, scale, and growth of their emissions.
We laugh at the climate-change deniers. But delay is the worst form of denial. Worst, since the delayers agree with the fundamental premise of global warming and still drag their feet. Not the greatest idea since Lovelock doesn't sound all that hyperbolic these days.
Some coverage of the climate-change talks can be found in the Daily Kos group The Daily Durban.
On this date at Daily Kos in 2005:
If the illegality of torture and the immorality of torture and extraordinary rendition are not sufficient for the rejection of these inhuman and barbaric practices, perhaps the American People might consider the fact that the use of torture and extraordinary rendition was a direct cause of the United States making the biggest strategic blunder since Vietnam.
It is mindboggling that, knowing this, the Bush Administration has fought tooth and nail against banning torture by the United States.
The worst Administration in history.
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