U.N. negotiations are going nowhere, and greenhouse-gas emissions are soaring. It’s time to move on.
In 2007, just before he accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Pachauri, the organization’s leader, declared that the world was running out of time to prevent catastrophic global warming. “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late,” Pachauri told the New York Times. “What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”
This April, the IPCC released a long-awaited report assessing just how far we’ve come since Pachauri’s stark pronouncement. The news was grim. There has yet to be any sign of the global action that Pachauri and others had desperately sought. In 2007, the IPCC called for emissions to level off by 2015, but the world is emitting greenhouse gases faster than ever. Even now, Pachauri and some other IPCC leaders remain publicly optimistic, saying it’s still possible to avoid catastrophic climate change if we act “very soon.” But delve into the new IPCC report itself and you’ll find a much less hopeful picture.
See full Article: http://www.technologyreview.com/review/528106/a-plan-b-for-climate-agreements/
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