Due to the importance of this global conference and the information contained in the report I felt it was best to create a separate thread for it rather than allowing it to be lost in the garbage of "that other thread". The report can be found here: Climate Change Congress – University of Copenhagen or directly at http://climatecongress.ku.dk/pdf/synthesisreport Here is a brief preface of the report:
There is a lot to read, but the first page gives a synthesis of where the report is headed. They summarize 6 major points.
I read the summary document. Very scary, once you translate that into the most plausible scenario. Short of a miracle, between the warming and the drying of southern US latitudes, my take on business-as-usual is that we can pretty much write off the US below the Mason-Dixon line, in terms of agricultural production, and perhaps habitability, in the year 2100. I attended a presentation at my church last Sunday by a guy who is in the business of helping businesses calculate carbon footprint and other aspects of the sustainability of their operations. About halfway through, it struck me that he was getting paid by Fortune 500 companies to do pretty much what the Club of Rome was pilloried for doing in Limits to Growth: trying to guesstimate what was going to run out when. Times have changed, some. So the smart money that does not have vested interest seems to have caught on, at least to some degree. But hoi polloi aren't going to get it until gasoline is $10 a gallon. If then. But with oil holding near $70/bbl in the midst of a worldwide recession, we may see that sooner rather than later.
