The United States argues that emissions trading is the most cost-effective way to meet the global target of reducing greenhouse gases by 5.2 percent from 1990 levels, and would give a breathing space for the transition to cleaner energy and expensive new technologies.
----------------
What is fascinating to me is how easily we have been brought along to accept as completely normal that there is indeed global warming, that polar ice caps are melting, sea levels are rising, and nobody cares. That is pretty astonishing, if you really consider it.
All those issues are now routinely dismissed and the only question is managing responses that are cost effective and as painless as possible, regardless of whether such responses are adequate. In other words, the question is how far can we allow global climate to deteriorate and still live with it? This kind of reduced expectations mentality assumes that climatic conditions are a smooth continuum. In other words we can post-pone going to hell with the installment plan.
I suspect, but don't know, that climate is a balanced set of dynamic interdependencies that do not behave smoothly under perturbations. The implication is simply that managed responses that do not absolutely stop and then reverse CO2 increases, will be completely ineffective. The idea is that balanced cycles can reach un-recoverable perturbations, after which there is no return to previous optimal states, no matter what is done. In a sense this is an implicit prerequisite of evolution.
Chuck Grimes