Our first response to climate change: we badly need renewables to combat climate change, but we need ramped-up efficiency measures even more.

AuthorChandler, William

"Time is passing very quickly," Irving Mintzer wrote in his 1987 study A Matter of Degrees, which I reviewed for the very first edition of World Watch. Two decades later, Mintzer's words, like his report on ways to reduce the risk of global warming, seem understated.

It was later than it seemed. Even those of us who have long been alarmed about global warming did not expect the rapid changes we have seen.

We have watched the northern polar ice cap melt over an area the size of Alaska. We have seen glaciers shrink on every continent while the depth of snow in the Swiss Alps fell by half. We have experienced twice as many hurricanes per year as our parents, and measured them growing stronger year by year. We might have known, when World Watch was launched, that New Orleans was vulnerable to flood, but we have all been shocked by the devastating force of Hurricane Katrina.

Scientists now are highly confident--more than 90 percent certain--that the change we have seen is real, anthro-pogenic, here to stay, and growing worse. We know this because, since it was founded in 1988, there have been four sweeping assessments of climate science, impacts, and emissions mitigation by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC this year published its Fourth Assessment Report and the scientists' concern was palpable.

Their consensus view is that warmer days and nights are virtually certain in the coming century, or centuries, and that the cause is the release of greenhouse gases mainly from energy use. Sea levels may rise by meters rather than the meter we expected. The worst impacts will be suffered by the poor, especially those living in low-lying agricultural lands like Bangladesh. As climate scientist Stephen Schneider of Stanford University put it recently in the New York Times, "You don't want to be poor and living on a river delta or the Florida coast."

Policy change, meanwhile, has been glacial (in the now obsolete sense of the word). Positive signs are few. Europe has implemented the Kyoto Protocol, putting into practice important mechanisms to spur emissions reductions at home and to finance them in developing countries. China has announced ambitious plans to cut energy waste in industry and improve automobile fuel economy. The Soviet Union collapsed a few years after the launch of this magazine, ending the world's most egregious forms of energy waste. Even some in the United States seem to be taking action, with almost 20...

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