Bali Higher

If you haven't been keeping up with the climate change news, there's a major international conference going on right now in Bali that most people feel is the last hope to do rational things in time. Here's a statement from over 200 of the world's leading climate scientists (so, of course, find one outlier to "balance" it all) on the relevance and immediacy of it all:

The next round of focused negotiations for a new global climate treaty (within the 1992 UNFCCC process) needs to begin in December 2007 and be completed by 2009. The prime goal of this new regime must be to limit global warming to no more than 2 ºC above the pre-industrial temperature, a limit that has already been formally adopted by the European Union and a number of other countries.

Based on current scientific understanding, this requires that global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 50% below their 1990 levels by the year 2050. In the long run, greenhouse gas concentrations need to be stabilised at a level well below 450 ppm (parts per million; measured in CO2-equivalent concentration). In order to stay below 2 ºC, global emissions must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose.

The point of relevancy for corrections sentencing, of course, is that this, not corr sent, will be the essential issue of the next decades, with its friends Energy and Water. There will be pressure that we haven't historically had to ever deal with as a species, and areas that we deal with will have to figure out better ways to get our work done far beyond the pressures we're currently feeling, which are enormous anyway. We stovepipe so much in what we do, but this is one we can't ignore. Oh, yeah, well, we can, like we do to most of reality in corr sent. Which will just make it all harder. Like most of reality in corr sent.