Source:http://www.allgov.com Thursday, November 05, 2009
Source: http://www.sidewaysnews.com
By Channel 4 News
Similarly, he said the vast stretch of coastal lines, Himalayan glaciers in the Northern regions and thick forests in Central India were under threat.
"Without being told by the world what we should do, we have to be very proactive and take a leadership role and show the global communities how to adapt and mitigate the adverse impact of climate change," the minister added.
Appreciating the Delhi Government's effort in becoming the first State to prepare the domestic action plan to tackle global warming caused by green house gas emissions, he said, it is in keeping with the Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's call all the States to come out with such points.
He also appreciated the government's 'green initiatives' such as taking solar energy in the households through power tariffs, preparing a map for carbon footprints of the city and greening the capital by setting up urban forests across the city.
But you don't know what those are going to be on the basis of any history. There's never been a time before when there was six to ten billion people on the Earth, when they're demanding dramatic increases in their standards of living, and when they're using the cheapest available technology - usually coal and oil burning, big cars - to get there. So, before you can forecast how warm it will be in 2100 - and whether it's worth a trillion-dollar investment not to have that outcome - you've got to know a bunch of social factors.
The bad scenario is business as usual. We keep getting richer as fast as we can. We do what we did in the Victorian Industrial Revolution in the rich countries: sweat shops, coal-burning internal combustion engines. Well, what do you think China and India are doing?
The worst of all worlds is an increase of more than seven degrees. That's an astronomically large number, because an ice age is about six degrees cooler than an interglacial that we're now in. And we're talking about a ten-percent chance it's as large a temperature difference as an ice age to an interglacial cycle, but happening in a century; not in five thousand years.
That's an easy prescription for a catastrophic outcome with regard to species extinction, coastal damage, fires, heat waves, droughts, and floods. As Bill Clinton said when I first presented this in the White House in 1997, "all the biblical stuff."
editor: Valdis Wish
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