Wonderfully Horrible News

The Good News: Climate models are now so refined, they are accurately predicting results in the real world.
The Bad News: Those predictions suck.

In the decades immediately ahead, the changes will be felt in regional water supplies, including areas impacted by accelerated glacier melting in the South American Andes and in western China, putting millions of people at risk without adequate summertime water.

This leads me to a point I've meant to address for some time - the canard that Canada should abandon Kyoto because "it doesn't solve the problem". This criticism has a veneer of accuracy - the way I have a veneer of being black. In reality, we should support Kyoto, and I'm Whitey McCrackerton.

Kyoto won't solve the problem on it's own. In fact, it won't even come close. However, what it will do is get the governments of the west to do three things:

• Admit the problem exists. This has been difficult enough - read The Carbon Wars by Simon Leggett for more details.
• Assume primary responsibility for a problem we were the primary causes of. Again, admitting reality is often the hardest part.
• De-link the concepts of economic growth (generally a good thing) and energy consumption (useful, but not virtuous.)

Now, like the Montreal Protocols, it's not Kyoto on it's own that's the important part - it's starting the Kyoto process. Once we get the ball rolling, additional changes will come easier. This is, of course, why the US opposes it fiercely. This opposition can sometimes be hillarious however: The US Department of Energy estimated that enforcing the Kyoto protocols would raise the price of gasoline to $1.91. The price of gasoline today, according to the US Department of Energy? $1.90. So thank God Bush wisely avoided the Kyoto protocols!