Much ado about climate change

A week, ago, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published part-two of its mega new assessment on climate change, this time focusing on the impacts (part one was on the science, and part three, published in a couple of months time, will be on mitigating and adaptation strategies).

Hundreds of million, the vast majority of them already living in poorer, less wealthy countries will bear the brunt of a changing climate - drought, flooding, rising sea levels, biodiversity and ecological balances tipped onto the wrong side, and so forth. And it's not just a case of 'will' or 'might' - these changes are already happening, and the hotspots for change are the Arctic (melting ice), sub-Saharan Africa (drought), small island-states (sea level rises) and mega-populated Asian river deltas (flooding).

This is not just a case of balancing the economic books and figuring out a cost-benefit analysis, but a profoundly moral choice. Do we have responsibilities to people living elsewhere in the world who are and will continue to suffer because of the high-energy lifestyles that have become the norm here in the West?

It was good to read of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stepping in and using his profile to push the issue higher up the global agenda to do the hard work for a new international treaty, as we are confronted with ever more evidence of the change happening around us - a new report illustrates the change that we could expect to see in global landmarks such as the Great Barrier Reef, Mt. Kilimanjaro, and Venice. See pictures here.