Cheshire Cat Photo Blog(...said the Cat: 'we're all mad here....')

“Finally we sealed the deal and it is a real deal. Bringing world leaders to the table paid off,” U.N. chief Ban Ki-Moon said, according to CNN affiliate TV2 Denmark. “The Copenhagen Accord may not be everything that everyone hoped for but this decision of the conference of parties is a beginning, an essential beginning.”

Moon said that the deal called for all countries to limit global temperature rise to below two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit). The deal is non-binding. However, up to $30 billion has been pledged for adaptations and mitigation.

Greenpeace, the environmental group, released a statement that criticized the deal:

“Don’t believe the hype, there is nothing fair, ambitious or legally binding about this deal,” Greenpeace said. “The job of world leaders is not done. Today they shamefully failed to save us all from the effects of catastrophic climate change.”

U.S. President, Barack Obama, praised the deal before leaving the United Nations Climate Change Conference, which was held in Copenhagen, Demmark. President Obama, who participated in critical meetings with leaders from India, China, Brazil, and South Africa, said:

“For the first time in history, all major economies have come together to accept their responsibility to take action to confront the threat of climate change.”

The deal calls for countries to submit their “concrete commitments” into an appendix to the agreement. The commitments will be subjected to international consultation and analysis that will help to foster accountability.

CNN offers a companion series of graphs called “Global warming’s biggest jerks” of the “Worst offenders” (China “edges out” the U.S. to be #1), “Individual pigs” (where Australia “edges out” the U.S. to be #1 on a “per person” basis), “Bang for the buck” (in which the U.S. ranks #12 on a “CO₂ per GDP [gross domestic product; the gross domestic product of the U.S. is large] basis), and the utterly amazing “In denial” chart, in which people in the world’s top three polluting countries (U.S., Russia, and China) don’t think that global warming is very serious.

As Forrest Gump said, “Stupid is, as stupid does.”

I DO understand the tendency to try to refute scientific findings with political arguments, but science does not care what you think. It just IS. Perception is NOT reality; get over it!

(Note added December 22, 2009: From childhood, I have appreciated the Scientific Method for looking at the world [and universe] rationally and dispassionately. Scientists are people too, and I have met irrational ones. [The process of “peer review” usually handles their “findings.”] The scientific goal of attempting to discover how the world [and universe] REALLY is, and works [“scientific truth,” which is “approached asymptotically“], is very fundamentally different from business goals and political goals [and methods] to which MOST people are exposed every day. Scientists don’t “make up” stories to boost this quarter’s profits or to get re-elected. Many things in life are matters of “opinion.” Scientific truth is not.)

We shall have to wait to see whether a non-binding deal produces any results, or whether we will have to experience the flooding of coastal communities, first. As for me, I understand a bit about system “tipping points,” and they constitute very real concerns for me.

(Note added December 20, 2009: A CNET article has further details and notes the names of dissenting countries.)

(Note added December 20, 2009: I had two additional thoughts about this entry since I wrote it yesterday. The first is that, we should “think globally,” as in the Copenhagen Conference, and each “act locally,” as in the second Governors’ Global Climate Summit recently held in Los Angeles. The people of California need to continue to elect governors who recognize and act on the problem of global warming. Secondly [as I learned in all of my education as a microbiologist], every culture produces “the seeds of its own destruction.” It struck me as ironic that, of all of the products of human life [from nuclear weapons, to nuclear waste, to “islands” of plastic and debris twice the size of Texas, to DDT] it would be a simple molecule, CO₂, that each of us exhales with each breath, that may ultimately prove to be our undoing.)

(Note added December 26, 2009: “I think that people are justified in being disappointed about the outcome in Copenhagen,” U.S. President Obama said in an interview with PBS Newshour.

“Sweden has labeled the accord Obama helped broker a disaster for the environment, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said the summit was “at best flawed and at worst chaotic,” and climate change advocates have been even more scathing in their criticism.”

If you would like to read how world “leaders” played politics with the short-term future of the planet, read the rest of the article.)

-Bill at

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