Rapid Spike in CO2 Emissions Shocks Researchers

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,795978,00.html

When Germany's top climate researcher meets with politicians and average citizens these days, he now starts from the very beginning. Then he delivers a lecture on why the scientific community is so sure that climate change even exists. He speaks of a "purely physical" effect caused by concentrations of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere that heat up the planet by a single degree Celsius. "What's more," says Jochem Marotzke, the head of the German Climate Consortium, "there is the affect of water vapor, which accounts for at least another degree."

Next Friday, Marotzke will travel to Berlin once again for a preparatory meeting at the Environment Ministry ahead of the next World Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa, at the end of November. He almost sounds as if his audience of politicians and ministers had never heard of climate change, as though thousands of them hadn't thronged together at more than a dozen World Climate Conferences over the last two decades.

Marotzke, also the director of the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, has no illusions about the current importance of climate policy. "The interest in Berlin and elsewhere has cooled off palpably," he says. The topic counts as one that doesn't necessarily need to be addressed, he adds, "because citizens are also turning away (and) no great pressure to act is placed on the politicians."

Still, the widespread indifference stands in disturbing contrast to the grim facts. According to the latest calculations of the US Department of Energy, CO2 emissions are rising sharply. Some 512 million more tons of greenhouse gases were emitted from smoke stacks, exhaust pipes and agricultural land.

Only when the effects become a world crisis will our leaders react... but by then it will probably be too late.

its own warnings.

I have been discussing climate with a couple of deniers. The depth of stupidity is astounding. One is a fundy, and the other an atheist Objectivist (Ayn Rand). Their emails cold be the content of a book entitled "Stranger than Fiction."

--imm

We're yacking it up about Herman Cain, and the Euro, and tons of other things that if I mentioned would seem rude. And yet this one is looming over all of it.