Kyoto perspectives

A fascinating juxtaposition of worldviews in yesterday’s SF Chronicle (New Global Warming Evidence Presented):

1. ‘We were stunned by the similarities between the observations
   that have been recorded at sea worldwide and the models that
   climatologists made,’ said Tim Barnett of the University of
   California’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. ‘The debate is over,
   at least for rational people. And for those who insist that the
   uncertainties remain too great, their argument is no longer tenable.
   We’ve nailed it.’
2. ‘Our position has been the same for a long time,’ said Bill
   Holbrook, spokesman for the White House Council on Environmental
   Quality. ‘The science of global climate change is uncertain.’

I’m very Old School, I guess. I always thought science was supposed to
be about testing hypotheses against evidence, not about having
‘positions’ about the evidence. So it goes.

Meanwhile the rest of the world isn’t sitting still. I built this chart
(based on data from Carbon Down, Profits Up and other sources — click on the image for a larger one) and find the differences — between countries, and between
companies — quite striking.

The question, as always, is not ‘How well
is my company doing in relation to its own expectations?’ but also ‘How
well are we doing in relation to our most innovative competitors?’ and
‘How well are we doing in relation to what needs to be done?’

(You can see more in my biweekly ‘Sustainability Sundays’ post on WorldChanging.com, find prior blog entries using the search function in the right column, and consider the inescapable simplicity of the underlying physics of climate change here.)

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