In Diplomacy, No Questioning Manmade Climate Change

John Baez recently went to an Interdisciplinary Climate Change Workshop in Waterloo, Canada, and reported back on some of the interesting things he learned. Among them:

In international diplomacy, there is no questioning the reality and importance of human-caused climate change. The question is just what to do about it.

Governments go through every line of the IPCC reports twice. They cannot add anything the scientists have written, but they can delete things. All governments have veto power. This makes the the IPCC reports more conservative than they otherwise would be: “considerably diluted”.

The climate change negotiations have surprised political scientists in many ways.

(Read his post to find out why -- the reasons will surprise you. The U.S. looks more like a major opponent of climate change action than a proponent.)

The COP 19 meeting has been taking place in Poland. Perhaps there is coverage of it, but nothing much that I've seen. Is anyone paying attention?

I really wish I could be a journalist there, or even here, trying to ask, answer, and investigate hard questions that surround that meeting. But as a freelancer I just can't afford to spend the kind of time it takes to dig in deep and do a good investigative job at that, nor is there much of a market for that anyway. It's frustrating.