Fiddling while the world burns
You might be forgiven for opening your Sunday newspaper and thinking the world was saved. The announcement from Bali that the international community had agreed a roadmap for negotiations on climate change appears to be a momentous event. On the face of it things look like they’re going in the right direction. Unfortunately, however, the agreement has a long way to go. Essentially the 12,000-strong contingent in Bali had a meeting to agree to have another meeting. There was no explicit statement on cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 as the European Union had hoped. Why? The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just won a Nobel Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change” (NobelPrize.org). Larsen B, 2002 (Antarctic Peninsula) Their message couldn’t have been clearer: human activity is having a significant impact on the w