Andrew Simms, Met Office and Sarah Palin

Wonder what the above have in common? They all featured in articles on The Guardian today. All were related to climate change.

The article in The Guardian by Andrew Simms it is related to climate change and the need to avert significant change by doing action now. From the whole article, the following paragraph stuck out:

Considering that it took governments in the UK and US just a week to drop decades of hardened economic practice to save the financial system (a subsidiary of the environment) from meltdown, nationalising banks at great public expense, we should be asking why it takes any longer to act to save the planet from runaway warming.

Very true!

The author goes also about the environmental deficit, ie, the use of resources and disposal of waste at a rate which nature cannot recover from. This complements the article on a Met Office report that urges governments to start reducing emissions now before it is too late:

Professor Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, said..."If we act now, maybe we have got a fighting chance,"

Very sad!

To close it off, a third article on The Guardian identifies Sarah Palin's (running mate of McCain (Republican)) environmental credentials. Actually, she does not have much. She denies man-made climate change:
"I'm not one though who would attribute it to being man-made"
and would rather have oil drilling companies doing their job in Alaska rather than declaring the polar bear as an endangered specie. Luckily, she lost the case. However, she has placed an appeal against the decision!

In May the US department of the interior rejected Palin's objections and listed the bear as a threatened species, saying that two-thirds of the world's polar bears were likely to be extinct by 2050 due to the rapid melting of the sea ice. Palin, governor of Alaska and the Republican nominee for US vice-president, responded last month by suing the federal government, to try to overturn the ruling.

Outrageous!