Clinton urges China to buy into the climate scam

BEIJING: Declaring that "we hope you won't make the same mistakes we made," Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton invited China to join the United States in an ambitious effort to curb greenhouse gases.

"When we were industrializing and growing, we didn't know any better; neither did Europe," Clinton said as she toured an energy-efficient power plant in Beijing on Saturday. "Now we're smart enough to figure out how to have the right kind of growth."

Newsweek: Raving climate lunacy from Fred Guterl

There is something compelling, in a ghoulish sort of way, about the notion that earth's climate may be headed toward a tipping point. The idea gained broad currency in 2007, when a panel of scientists, including Harvard environmental expert John Holdren—now the White House science adviser—warned that the planet is approaching a threshold beyond which damage to the environment would be irreversible. As policymakers work toward a climate treaty in Copenhagen in December that will include new limits on emissions, the question in the back of everyone's mind is whether an agreement can halt the warming trend, or at least stave off the worst consequences. Or is it already too late? A definitive answer isn't forthcoming, but the signs in recent months have been gloomy.
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(Some scientists believe, for instance, that crop yields decline 10 percent for each degree rise in temperature.)
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.... Arctic sea ice, for instance, is clearly shrinking faster than the climate-change computers predicted. How much is due to carbon and how much would the ice have retreated anyway? There's too little data to know—comprehensive records on Arctic sea ice go back only to 1979. "The most likely bet is that the acceleration is due to greenhouse warming," says David Battisti, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "But I'd be nervous about making that bet. To know for certain we'd want a couple hundred years of data. We have 30 years of really good data."
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What can be done? Can a diplomatic miracle in Copenhagen save the planet from the dreaded tipping point? Sea ice in the Antarctic was supposed to last for 5,000 years until scientists found that the melting was proceeding at a faster pace than expected. Now it will all be gone in a mere 850 years. Bringing it back would require something like 10,000 years of cooler temperatures.

Fred Guterl | Newsweek.com

Guterl joined NEWSWEEK in July 2000 from a brief stint at IBM, where he developed several Web sites. Before that, he was an editor at the magazines Discover and IEEE Spectrum.