2010: Is It Too Late?

Twenty-ten has been dubbed an uphill battle in terms of meaningful environmental policy. “We are very disappointed with the outcome of Copenhagen,” said Patrick Hofstetter, head of climate policy at WWF Switzerland. “Copenhagen will probably be remembered as a missed opportunity to put the world on the path of a binding climate agreement. I see a very difficult 2010.”

The northeast of the U.S. has seen record snowfall. El Niño is in full effect, the media explains. How could there possibly be global warming, decried the snowed-in skeptics who mistakened their snow-covered yards and local road-closures earlier this year as an accurate depiction of global climate change.

Still, the doubters press on and the oil and gas executives wait patiently in the sidelines, pressing their hands in sheer delight. The much anticipated Copenhagen climate change conference of 2009 was deemed a meager starting point, if not an outright failure, and global warming has begun its downward slide towards hoax status by the mysterious dissemination of "secret emails." Emails depicting a global-scale conspiracy by the scientific "elite."

Forget the 30-plus years of peer reviewed studies in scientific journals spanning millennia of data-points that conclusively point towards a clear warming trend during the past 100 years. Even the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has concluded:

The Earth's climate has warmed by approximately 0.6 8C over the past 100 years with two main periods of warming, between 1910 and 1945 and from 1976 onwards. The rate of warming during the latter period has been approximately double that of the first and, thus, greater than at any other time during the last 1,000 years.

I now leave you with a couple of examples depicting ecological events in your world; the point is not to place fault but to look ahead to a change in future economic activities that take serious consideration of their effects on the overall environmental health of the region.

Rising seas claimed their first, once inhabited, island in December of 2006. Lohachara island, at one time home to some 10,000, was located in India's Sundarban region in the Bay of Bengal. Many more low-lying islands in the region are following suit, as well as in other parts of the world.

The mountain pine beetle is the culprit behind an outbreak not seen in more than 25 years, claiming millions of acres of trees, mostly the lodgepole pine, in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, Oregon, Idaho, Utah and Washington. Yes, it’s happened before, but this time the pine beetles are moving into higher elevations, where bitter winter temperatures once kept them at bay, and attacking whitebark pines near Yellowstone National Park and jack pine in British Columbia. Robert Mangold, director of Forest Health Protection for the U.S. Forest Service, agrees warmer temperatures are playing a role in the current outbreak.