The climate change war is over. Global warming won! Those that fought tooth and nail against the reality of mankind's adverse impact our environment have either conceded defeat or are hiding in advanced states of denial.
How do I know? The old Al Gore gang staged a victory lap at the
These people were prepared to acknowledge what had been denied for years – that climate changes will happen regardless of what Americans or anybody else does in the near future. They were ready to state publicly what Europeans and others already accept: “the globe is warming and we don’t know what to do about it”.
For some 18 years, the US Climate Change Program has poured billions into studying the physics and chemistry of the dynamic atmosphere -- awkwardly ignoring the real problem of why modern society emits more and more greenhouse gasses. To placate happy-talk politicians of both the Clinton and Bush administrations, they argued that climate change could be arrested if we just reduced our consumption of fossil fuels – which everyone knew wouldn’t happen. Reducing emissions was a non-starter because (a) the politically-connected the captains of American industry were not about to cut their windfall profits from mining and distributing fossil fuels, and (b) the physical scientists, who controlled the agenda, relished a reliable river of research funds. The rocket engineers and climatologists were not about to give up their research largess to social scientists who might actually have something useful to say about how society should or should not confront climate change.
All of this is to say, today we’re a day late and a dollar short. The National Summit should have come 10 years ago – as was acknowledged by one of it principal speakers.
