Klaus Toepfer - Climate Breakdown Will Power Political Destabilization

BERLIN, May 26 (Reuters) - Global warming is hitting the poor the hardest and climate change could cause worldwide destabilisation if solutions are not found, one of the world's leading environmentalists said on Friday.

Klaus Toepfer, a tireless promoter of the Kyoto Protocol as head of the U.N. environment agency for the last eight years, said in an interview he believed its 2012 goals could still be reached even though he said it was still "not enough".

Toepfer, a driving force behind using the World Cup soccer tournament next month to project an environmental message and a former German environment minister, also said he sensed growing support for Kyoto in cities across the United States.

"I know Kyoto is by far not enough," said Toepfer, who last month stepped down from the U.N. agency in Nairobi since 1998. "We have to do more because climate change is not a forecast for the long-term future but it is happening now. "The poorest of the poor are suffering most. Our world will be destabilised if we are not able to solve this problem. It is not something on the margins. Our children and their children will suffer the most and it's our obligation to do it now."

EDIT

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L26423002.htm

It's just something those goofy liberal scientists (who don't believe in Creationism!!!) are making up to scare us. Go by their booth at their OK University campus and get a snow cone instead. :sarcasm:

If I lived in OK, I'd be printing this off and passing out by their little snow cone booth.

stadiums, train rides by the national soccer teams, and reusable cups at soccer games to make a real impact.

The statement about the impact on the poor is certainly real enough, but the effort he actually make sounds pathetically middle class.

If this is all that the people who claim to know about the matter can offer, we are in for some dire times indeed. In fact, these comments kind of sum up why the matter is so intractable, because people substitute almost meaningless gestures for decisve action.

If I drink my starbucks in two nested 10% post-consumer recycled paper cups, we're saved.

Aren't we?

As long as we use scrap land to grow switchgrass, we're all saved.

Buy that H2 Hummer you've always wanted, and start commuting 70 miles per day.

It's all good! :rofl:

I think we're doomed.

Most people, even way too many people here, look at these problems as related to political lifestyle. The Birkenstocks-vs-Beer-Guys paradigm.

It's bogus to say the least.

The situation is slightly more dire than can be solved by calling people who don't agree with your Utopia Republicans. Remember the Roman Empire between the 5th and the 9th centuries? Well, if you compress that into the next fifty years, that's what going to happen to us -- world-wide, not just the big, bad USA.

It doesn't have to be that way, but we have people ranting over the "political correctness" of different forms of power, opposing not just nuclear power but windplants, too, and ready to sue to keep tidal hydro power from even being tested. A burgeoning industry proposes to save us from Them A-Rabbs by converting all of our "excess" food cropland into ethanol-producing cropland, and to heck with the nitrogen cycle.

System-based, large-scale, long-term planning to turn our civilization toward multi-century sustainability and low-power high-tech might as well not even exist.

The red half of us can draw our Hummers into a circle and huddle around the burning tires while the blue half of us can huddle in the shell of the nearby Starbucks, warmed by the sun beating on what's left of the south-facing windows. All of us can complain, depending on our political culture, about Rush, Hillary, Nukes, Granola, the Star-Spangled Banner, Kumbayah, and all those other cultural shibboleths we hold so dear, as we starve to death.

We're entering an era in which those culture markers are going to be the worthless baggage of the past. We will have to get used to seeing the lion laying down with the lamb, and Jackson Browne laying down with Shannen Doherty.

Uh ... okay, maybe that's not the best metaphor I've ever come up with, but I hope it communicates the sense of the scope of the change we are dealing with. We don't have our choice of utopias anymore. We only really have the choice between extinction and survival. Given human gumption, that's more than enough leeway; given a persnickety insistence on our favorite politically aesthetic agendas, we're doomed.

--p!