Moving Forward

An artists interpretation of Global Warming.
Taken from Cookie Jars page on Tumblr.

This week it seems as if the United States is finally making significant progress in the fight against climate change. The New York Times aired a story this past week about a new program to reduce common pollutants that lead to global climate change.

The program, which was announced to the State Department on February 16th by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, targets three pollutants specifically: soot, methane, and hydrofluorocarbons. Scientists say that drastically reducing these pollutants will not only reduce the global temperature by 0.5 degrees Celsius by 2050, but also prevent millions of cases of heart and lung disease.

While many critics argue that the program completely ignores the threat of CO2 emissions, it seems to be a fairly good first step. At the last United Nations climate summit meeting in South Africa, negotiators agreed to "try" to come up with a climate change treaty by 2015, which would not take effect until after 2020. This however, is far too late, considering how many scientists predict irreversible global damage to the atmosphere long before then.

This program, while not appealing to all, is at least doing something about this worldwide problem right now. It plans to implement many of the new strategies researchers have found to control the amounts of soot and methane being released into the atmosphere.  

It may not be a solution, but I think the program seems like a definite start.  With the 12$ million and 3$ million contributions from the US and Canada, the program can get underway and start to reduce these emissions. Hopefully many more countries will soon show interest, and this can actually have a significant impact on climate change.

Worldwide agreement is important, but waiting around for a treaty that everyone in the United Nations can agree upon is not what needs to happen here.  Climate change is happening now, and this is a program that can start tackling the threat sooner rather than later.

You can find find the article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/16/science/earth/us-pushes-to-cut-emissions-that-speed-climate-change.html?ref=opinion