And in another shocking scientific discovery:

[cyrano]

File this under Water reported to be wet.

Apparently, in the event of dramatic global climate change, the poor will suffer the most.

Selected quotes:

Agreement came after an all-night session during which key sections were deleted from the draft and scientists angrily confronted government negotiators who they feared were watering down their findings.

said Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist who was one of the authors. "Don't be poor in a hot country, don't live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it's a bad idea to be on high mountains with glaciers melting."

Comments

[miss-friday.livejournal.com]

Well, golly gee, why don't we all just shoot ourselves now and save ourselves the trouble. Won't want to live while the Climate Changes, 'cause that might mean that, shudder, we won't be able to predict the weather! Wouldn't want to stop moaning and complaining and actually use our vaunted brains to try and adapt to the situation. Oh no, whining is a much better use of our time.

And gosh, it sucks to be poor. It has always sucked to be poor. It will always suck to be poor. The rich men who invented Religion promising a better after life to the poor were bloody geniuses.

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

I believe that the 'whining' is neccessary at this point because right now the momentum is fully behind the 'pretend nothing is actually wrong and hope our children grow gills and learn to love sunscreen' theory.
Thus those with the vaunted brains 'whine' and those with the vaunted resources to most affect a change 'delete' and 'water down' because a change would be inconvenient.

If we all shot ourselves, at least it would slow down the process a little, and the ecosystem would be less destroyed. (However, if we could use crossbows with recycled quarrels instead of gunpowder that would be even more helpful.)

[miss-friday.livejournal.com]

I believe there's also a lot of momentum behind the "Humanity is to blame, and therefore we must deprive ourselves beyond reason in order to stop this." Problem being, laying blame and enforcing deprivation probably won't help one whit and do all sort of other nasty unintended things.

I also have problems with all the data that's being reported to substantiate the claims. Not that the world is warming, it surely is. But we only have decent records going back 130 years. Older records are coming from secondary sources (tree rings, ice flows, etc.). Climate's been going for what, 4 billion?

[cyranocyrano.livejournal.com]

Whether or not humanity is entirely to blame, humanity is far more likely to be able to ammeliorate this than, say, deermanity or orangutanity. And at this point, even unreasonable deprivation may not be enough--we may be beyond the 'tipping point'--but I'd like to hope we're not. However, as a race, we tend to fall into the 'ignore a problem until it becomes disastrous and then overreact like hell and once Tokyo is in smoking ruins return to our subterranean lair' routine. (Case in point: The War on Terra.)

I guess we're at the point where we decide if we'd rather unreasonably deprive ourselves and hope for a better future or just say Fuck It and let the carbon monoxide fall where it may.