"If the world is going to limit global warming to just a few degrees, it has to slash carbon dioxide pollution much more than now being discussed, two new science studies say."
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/04/29/emissions-cut-warming.html
This is a good article overall, and pretty alarming. However, the person who wrote it doesn't seem to understand what he's reporting on, based on this quote: "World average temperatures going higher than that may be dangerous, some scientists say." Some scientists? How about the vast majority of climate scientists? MAY be dangerous? What an understatement! Calling it an understatement is an understatement!
It's very difficult for people to put this problem into perspective. The U.N. estimated that 300,000 people are dying every year because of the effects of global warming. That is NOW, with less than one degree C of warming so far. So global warming is already much more than "dangerous". Just one degree more, and there will be many more deaths because of famine and disease and severe weather. To want to limit temperature rise to 2 degrees is like saying it is perfectly acceptable to cause the deaths of millions of people, maybe even billions. And since we don't know when the big feedbacks will begin, it could even lead to the extinction of the human species. I wish people who report on this subject would learn more about it and then really tell it like it is, in a language that non-scientists would understand. And I wish the politicians would understand how many people they are killing RIGHT NOW with their policies and how many more will die in the future because they failed to take action.
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