10 years ahead of a scary schedule
Australia’s The Sydney Morning Herald ran a story the other day, buried deep in the paper, Greenhouse gas levels ‘dangerously high’.
Acclaimed author and scientist Tim Flannery said results of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) synthesis report, due for release next month, show that since 2005 Australia has already been producing the amount of greenhouse gases expected a decade away.
“What (the report) says is we already stand a risk of unacceptable climate change and that the need for action is ever more urgent,” Professor Flannery told ABC television.
“We thought we would be at that threshold within about a decade … but the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold.”
Prof Flannery said the report should drive political debate on climate change and further highlight environmental scientific research.
“We are already at great risk of dangerous climate change - that’s what the new figures say,” Prof Flannery said.
“It’s not next year, or next decade; it’s now.”
Every climate scientist I have spoken to personally about this tells me the same story. The real facts are simply too frightening to be palatable to the general public. They tell me that they’ve been warned by their departmental heads that to go public with their actual knowledge would be to make them look like crazed doom-sayers. But every few days the news leaks out that the facts are much worse than we are publicly being told. But then, by now, we the public are getting used to being treated like mushrooms; kept in the dark and fed nothing but shicompost. Like Winnie said, “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.” — DS
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