Getting teeth (but not brains) into alleged human-caused climate change

What do Bill Clinton, Jet Li and a New Zealand clothing company head have in common?

They all attended a world summit this month - and came out pledging to turn off the taps when they clean their teeth.

Untouched World founder Peri Drysdale won a place at a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in Hong Kong after developing a rapport with the former US President at Apec in 1999.
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While the meeting didn't get everything right - the hotel did not give guests a chance to conserve water, who also received thousands of unnecessary coloured bottles of water - Ms Drysdale said there was an urgency and energy about environmental issues she had not seen before.

She first met Clinton when she supplied luxury clothes for the then-United States President and other Apec leaders in 1999. Mr Clinton later braved driving Auckland rain without a jacket to show off the Untouched World logo on his shirt.

More complete insanity from Obama's Energy Secretary pick

Taipei Times: In your speech, you used the ‘Titanic’ crashing into an iceberg as a metaphor for the problem of climate change. Can you give an estimate as to when the crash would happen?

Steven Chu (朱棣文): It’s a gradual crash. We have already seen a substantial change in climate, sea level rising, the melting of glaciers all over the world … The heat is bleaching coral at a faster rate, the number of forest fires has increased, so you can go down the list of things that are related to increases in heat and melting of polar caps … The Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas actually feed water to many of the major river basins around the world, like the Ganji River, the Yellow River … [Polar caps are] melting at a rate more than 1m in thickness a year now, but because it stretches over millions and millions of square miles [kilometers], it means a lot of water. I’ve heard stories where in India the Ganji water level has risen, it always goes up and down but the average level has risen to the point where it displaces people who live around the water, and they’ve become refugees.

This is predicted to accelerate. Pine forests in the US and Canada are dying. When the forests die we’re very exposed to floods because the mountainsides no longer have trees, and if it rains then there’s a lot of erosion.
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TT: So what are our options?

Chu: We want it to be bad, but not awful. In order to keep it at just “bad,” we have to immediately start decreasing the amount of energy we use. That doesn’t necessarily mean that everybody doesn’t heat their homes or turn on air conditioning.

For example, the lighting in this building doesn’t really have to be as bright as it is.