Climate Change

While we would agree with most of Stern's analysis of the reality of climate change and its dire effects, we believe his market-oriented prescriptions for how to combat climate change are doomed to failure. See Green capitalism: The god that failed, by Richard Smith. --Website editors

The standard climate change predictions said that people in the tropics and the sub-tropics would be badly hurt by global warming long before the people living in the temperate zones, farther away from the equator, were feeling much pain at all. That was unfair, because it was the people of the rich countries in the temperate zone—North America, Europe, and Japan, mainly—who industrialised early and started burning large amounts of fossil fuel as long as two centuries ago. That’s how they got rich.

The world is experiencing extreme weather.  In the US, California’s drought is the worst in 100-years while the East Coast faced a massive snowstorm with freezing temperatures. On the other side of the world, Australia continues to deal with intense summer heat and droughts, causing major bush fires. There has been severe winter flooding in the UK and Europe; extreme cold and snow in the Eastern US and Japan and so on.

“We are seeing more abnormal weather events. Colleagues across the House can argue about whether that is linked to climate change or not. I very much suspect that it is,” David Cameron told MPs last month.

Two recent communications from respected global organizations have underscored the long-term impacts of climate change – and the potential vast effects on business. Communiques from the World Bank and the United Nations both highlighted the complex, long-lasting and extraordinarily costly nature of the problem.

The grim findings of the IPCC last year reiterated what climatologists have long been telling us: the climate is changing at an unprecedented rate, and we're to blame. Despite the clear scientific consensus, a veritable brigade of self-proclaimed, underinformed armchair experts lurk on comment threads the world over, eager to pour scorn on climate science. Barrages of ad hominem attacks all too often await both the scientists working in climate research and journalists who communicate the research findings.

As California sees the future impacts of climate change playing out in the form of epic drought on one side of the globe, across the map in the U.K.

The frozen opalescent lake and thin, gray sky fade together into white light where the horizon should be. Tall, skeletal grasses shiver on the beach in a wind that makes any sliver of exposed skin burn. The Arni J. Richter, an icebreaking ferry, is about to pull away from Northport Pier for its second and final trip of the day to Washington Island. It’s loaded with food and fuel for the more than 700 hardy residents who call the remote island, just north of Door County peninsula in Wisconsin, home.

A new international study showing that pollutants from China are affecting air quality on the west coast of North America is partly payback for western consumers having their goods manufactured there, a University of B.C. professor said Wednesday. “Why are they having these high emissions?” asked Michael Brauer of the school of population and public health. “Part of it is the stuff they’re producing for us. Some of it is coming back to bite us ... through our consumption.”

MANILA-The Philippines is reeling from a barrage of massive natural disasters-three in as many months-that has tested the ability of government responders and aid agencies to help millions of displaced people across the country's central and southern regions. "We're stretched as thin as I've ever seen," said Ned Olney, country director for Save the Children, one of numerous nongovernmental organizations responding to an earthquake on Oct. 15, a typhoon that made landfall on Nov. 8 and then deadly floods from a tropical depression that ended Jan. 20.