Over to You

“Policy makers paid us to do good science, and now we have very high scientific confidence in this work — this is real, this is real, this is real. So now act, the ball’s back in your court.”

That's Dr. Richard Alley, Professor of Geosciences at Pennsylvania State University and author of The Two-Mile Time Machine, speaking at a news conference in Paris about the release of the IPCC Fourth Assessment, of which he is an author.

The panel concluded that global warming is "unequivocal" and that humans have "very likely" causing most of the rise in temperatures since 1950. In this context, "very likely" equates to a certainty of greater than 90 percent.

The White House was quick to point out that the US had played a leading role in studying climate change by dint of pouring billions into research. And yet the Bush administration seemed unimpressed by the results of that research or the urgency of the latest report. The New York Times quoted Secretary of Energy Samuel Bodman who dismissed the idea of of unilateral limits on emissions, saying, "We are a small contributor to the overall, when you look at the rest of the world (?????????!!!!!!!!!!), so it’s really got to be a global solution." (Parenthetical emphasis obviously mine.)

The second part of that statement is reasonable enough, but the first part is just absolutely incredible. As the reporters duly point out in the next paragraph, we are in fact a very large contributor. The single largest contributor, in fact. At roughly five percent of the world’s population, we account for a quarter of all anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. I know this, you know this, anyone who has been paying attention knows this, yet somehow, the Secretary of Energy doesn't know this?????????!!!!!!!!!! Of course he does. He just chooses to pretend otherwise.