WASHINGTON, D.C.–Climate change has been around in the public consciousness since the 1980s, but lately, the issue of global warming has taken on a new urgency. Perhaps nowhere on the planet is the problem of climate change and the urgency for constructive climate action felt more than by the scientists and thinkers at the Worldwatch Institute, which just released its annual report, State of the World 2009: Into a Warming World.
At a press conference on Jan. 13, to mark the occasion of the book’s release, Worldwatch President Christopher Flavin spoke of how rapidly the climate change issue is developing—“unfolding at lightning speed,” as he put it.
“Unfortunately, many of the developments point to the increased urgency of the problem and the need to act even faster than was thought,” said Flavin.
Global emissions increased 37 percent since 1992 when the first actions were taken international to address climate change. We are moving “dangerously close to the so-called threshold of dangerous interference of the climate system.”
“I was struck by the increasing level of alarm [among] scientists and the really painfully slow process of negotiations among nations,” which have “used arguments they have been using continuously for more than a decade.”
Planet Earth’s Equilibrium Out of Balance
Into a Warming World begins in Chapter 1 with the telling of a new development in the coldest northern regions of the earth: In the past three summers, for a few weeks, water instead of ice appears in a large section of the Arctic enabling ship passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which is normally only possible through the Panama Canal or around the Cape of Good Hope.
