Faced with the reality that many nations are unwilling to commit to an agreement, world leaders said yesterday that a global climate change treaty will not become reality next month. Heads of state, assembled in Singapore for the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation forum (APEC), said the United Nations Climate Conference (COP 15) in Copenhagen, Denmark will instead be used to further the discussion about global warming.
Two years of labor going into the COP 15 conference will be for naught and at best could yield a political agreement but not a legally binding treaty. A large gap between developing nations and richer countries continues to prevent an agreement.
Developing nations including India, Brazil and China have insisted on billions of dollars in international aid and said that any goals should be just that and not requirements. Nations like the United States however have been reluctant to agree to any deal that did not require all nations to legally comply with emissions restrictions.
Manmade climate change is said to present humankind with some of its greatest challenges in the planet’s history, not the least of which is an alarming increase in frequency and intensity of natural disasters. Massive flooding, super-powered hurricanes, endless tornado seasons and more have all been said to be the direst of consequences of global warming.
In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore famously proclaimed that, “Temperature changes are taking place all over the world and that is causing stronger storms.” Standing with Hurricane Katrina as a backdrop, the former vice president issued a cautionary tale of disaster in the making, all due to our irresponsible handling of the atmosphere. As recently as February Mr. Gore was giving a presentation showing flooding, drought and wildfires saying, “This is creating weather-related disasters that are completely unprecedented.”
But what if you predicted global natural disaster catastrophes and they didn’t happen? Does that invalidate your entire message? This is the conundrum faced by climate change alarmists as many of their predictions begin to fall flat.
In an interview with the Associated Press, John Holdren, President Obama’s newly confirmed science advisor, discussed the possibility of ‘climate engineering’ to battle global warming. The radical and somewhat controversial technology would require an extraordinary intervention by man in an attempt to purposely influence the climate.
Mr. Holdren feels however the dangers of climate change could leave Earth with little choice. He is quoted as saying, “It’s got to be looked at. We don’t have the luxury of taking any approach off the table.”
Climate engineering, or geoengineering, could theoretically be accomplished a number of ways. Most currently studied techniques revolve around attempts to counteract greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, which is believe to be responsible for global warming. Technology to remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere called ‘air scrubbing’ is one alternative the administration is supposedly considering. Another extreme option would be to purposely inject pollution into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays.
Prior to his nomination, Holdren was a physicist and professor at Harvard. He has long sounded the alarm of manmade climate change saying global warming is like being “in a car with bad brakes driving toward a cliff in the fog.”