Acerbic lede from Dino Grandoni in the Atlantic Wire:
In case, you know, you haven't been outside in the past three months, it's about to become official: unless a freak blizzard blankets the country by Thursday, the spring of 2012 will go down as the warmest for the U.S. in 117 years of record-keeping.
Meanwhile CO2 emissions resume their upward rise, after a brief hiatus, according to the latest report from the International Energy Agency.
John Cook says in The Conversation (from Australia) that we are at the crossroads, and if we as a species reduce global emissions dramatically starting now, as we are attempting to do in California, we can barely avoid the agreed-to be "dangerous level" of 2C warming by 2050.
Currently, by the way, we are closest to the A2 trend-line, which is one of the higher emissions scenarios that the IPCC has been charting for years.
The good news is that we are making some progress. Despite its rapid development, China’s per capita emissions are still just 63% of the OECD average. This is thanks in large part to its efforts to improve energy efficiency and deploy clean energy. OECD emissions declined in 2011, albeit by a small amount. And there is still time to reduce our emissions sufficiently to avoid dangerous global warming.
The bad news is that time is running out, and the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it will be to achieve the necessary emissions cuts. The elusive binding international agreement to reduce global CO₂ emissions approximately 80% by 2050 must be signed, and soon, or the necessary emissions cuts will become too steep to be practically achievable.
John Cook, the writer, is a story in his own right: He's come out of nowhere and done wonders in climate change communicaiton.
Kit Stolz 