Originally published February 6 2006
U.S. still refuses to adopt climate change policies despite evidence that global warming is altering the face of our planet
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
Despite evidence presented by the World Meteorological Organization and NASA that shows 2005 to be the hottest year in the past 125 years, the U.S. government has refused to make commitments to measures adopted by the global community at the annual 189-nation U.N. climate conference.
In the high Arctic, deep in the Atlantic, on Africa's sunbaked plains, climate scientists are seeing change unfold before their eyes.
In Geneva on Thursday, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) reported that 2005 thus far is the second warmest year on record, extending a trend climatologists attribute at least partly to heat-trapping "greenhouse gases" accumulating in the atmosphere.
It said warming has accelerated and is now boosting the mercury every decade by more than 0.3 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The observed rapid warming thus gives urgency to discussions about how to slow greenhouse gas emissions," the NASA researchers said.
The Montreal delegates did adopt technical rules for that 1997 agreement, leading Canadian conference president Stephane Dion to declare, "The Kyoto Protocol has been switched on."
Carbon dioxide, most important of six greenhouse gases covered by Kyoto, is a byproduct of automobile engines, power plants and other fossil fuel-burning industries.
The atmosphere now holds more than one-third more carbon dioxide than it did before the Industrial Revolution.
In fact, European scientists reported last month that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today's level is 27 percent higher than any previous peak looking back 650,000 years.
A U.N.-organized network of scientists warns of shifting climate zones, ocean levels rising via heat expansion and glacial melting, and more extreme weather events if emissions are not reined in and average temperatures continue to rise.
--In Vanuatu and Papua New Guinea in the southwest Pacific, rising seas are forcing hundreds of islanders to abandon vulnerable coastal homes for higher ground, according to U.N. and news reports.
Those who ratified Kyoto, meanwhile, decided a working group should develop proposals for emissions reductions by 35 industrialized nations after the current pact expires in 2012.
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