Climate Progress

“It is too late for avoiding dangerous climate change. We must focus now on avoiding catastrophic climate change.”

This quote comes from John Holdren, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He elaborated in an e-mail:

“The impacts already being experienced — increased incidence of floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires, among other damaging effects — are already dangerous by any reasonable definition of that word.”

More of Holdren’s thoughts can be found in this BBC interview (click on “video and audio news” in the upper right corner), where he warns that sea level rise of 7 feet or more is possible by the end of the century. Holdren is also President and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center, as well as a Harvard professor.

Our leading scientists are ratcheting up the warning based on the growing body of evidence of accelerated climate change. If only anyone inside the White House were listening.

But instead of listening to leading climate scientists, the White House keeps trying to muzzle them. As Nature reported last week (subs. req’d): “A statement on the science behind the politically sensitive issue of hurricane activity and climate change has been blocked by officials at the US Department of Commerce.” And this is on top of ongoing efforts by the administration aimed at “preventing scientists who believe there might be such a link [between global warming and more intense hurricanes] from speaking out.”

The sad thing is that while the administration can stop the public from learning the full truth of how human emissions of greenhouse gases are causing dangerous climate change — they can’t actually stop the dangerous climate change itself with their meaningless climate policies.

Readers of Climate Progress knew that “Bush’s astonishing U-turn on global warming,” predicted by Big Media, would be a Double-U Turn. And indeed Reuters now explains “The Bush administration has no plans to ease its opposition to national limits on greenhouse gas output.” The Wall Street Journal gives more detail (subs. req’d):

The president also damped speculation that his administration is exploring a major shift in global-warming policy and may soon embrace some kind of formal government-imposed limits. Though Mr. Bush did imply that a shift could happen in the unlikely event that the modest voluntary goals set by his administration to reduce so-called greenhouse-gas emissions were failing.

NOTE #1: It is time for the media to stop using the modifier “so-called” for greenhouse-gas emissions. Even scientific journals refer to carbon dioxide, methane, and the like as plain old greenhouse-gas emissions.

NOTE#2: If the WSJ calls an administration goal “modest,” it must be pretty darn modest — and in fact Bush’s voluntary “goals” are so modest that they don’t actually require anybody to do anything but continue the rate of growth of GDP and greenhouse gases that the country experienced before Bush became president — as explained by both World Resources Institute and the Pew Climate Center.

Still, Bush goes on to say:

“I put some targets out there and we’re meeting those targets,” Mr. Bush said. “But should we not meet the targets, then I said that the country ought to consider a cap and trade,” in emissions credits, he said.

Since Bush’s lame targets are virtually unmissable, this is one more reiteration of his opposition to carbon caps, which are the main strategy the rest of the industrialized world has adopted to address the climate problem.