Politics and Global Warming

As I was searching the web for an interesting article, I came across an article that was published today in the science section of the New York Times. This article can be found here:

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/science/topics/globalwarming/index.html

I definitely suggest taking a look at it. What I found interesting right off the bat is that the picture to go along with the article was that of a polar bear traversing the melting ice caps. I think it is kind of ironic how we saw this in the background report also. Not only was Al Gore grabbing our emotions, but this writer for the New York Times also feels that this picture can do that too!

As for the meat of the article, there was not a specific piece of data that this writer mentioned. Rather, he stated trends that supported the idea of global warming such as the overall increase in temperatures etc and the increase in greenhouse gases. From this he diverged into the politics of the whole situation and this is what I found to be most interesting.

To start off, recall that the Kyoto Protocol (1997) was basically an agreement between several nations that put binding restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions. (This document the U.S. did not sign) Basically, nothing has happened with this until now, in 2009 country leaders' started to get their shit together and figured out that we need to do something. One of the main things on the g.w. agenda now is the cap and trade system for businesses which helps businesses who meet/exceed expectations and punishes those who don't. However, this won't go into effect until it passes in the congress, which could take a really long time.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that leaders are so caught up on the political aspects of g.w. and don't seem to have a timeline to get bills into congress. The politics are taking so long that this problem could go on for years and years before anything gets done in Washington that can severely impact the g.w. trend. We have all of these big wigs trying to make decisions that 1) aren't getting made, and 2) don't make sense. I think that in order to solve/slow this problem, perhaps a scientist who knows what exactly is going on might be able to help more than world leaders arguing about making their country profitable at the same time.