Canada, US, Australia - Fiddling While the Planet Burns

Today, the 17th of November, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change met in Valencia, Spain, to adopt and approve the fourth and final report that makes up Climate Change 2007.

The draft report (without final copy editing) is found at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf. The IPCC site is http://www.ipcc.ch/.

Are the governments of the United States, Canada and Australia unaware of the human and environmental and financial consequences of dealing with increasing climate change losses? No.

Each country has scientists and researchers who have been involved for many years in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2007 report, which includes scientific research, andvinformation on adapation and mitigation. The report is easily available online to anyone, even politicians, in full or in a shorter policy version, to anyone who can type IPCC in Google.

So why are the leaders allowing themselves to be led by the nose - by multinationals, their lawyers and lobbyists, trade agreements favouring corporations, corporate contributions to election campaigns, insteading of leading the campaign to slow global warming?

The U.S., Canada, and Australia are three of the largest historic polluters and have a moral obligation, being wealthy, developed nations, to clean up the mess they have caused in the past, without any strings being attached to poorer and less developed nations, who did not create the historic mess.

Forget the next election, gentlemen, your own self-interest or those of your political parties or corporate pals or their lobbyists, needless spending on needless wars instead of the environment, or whatever useless and lame excuse is stopping action. The costs of not doing anything will far outweigh the worth of anything we are spending money on now and they will continue to increase.

The writer of the Global Issues section of the Toronto Star, called the three heads of state the Three Climate Stooges.

Leaders, you have all the information you need to act now. Get out of Iraq (US) and Afghanistan (Canada), don't start a needless war on Iran (US), and the billions saved can be used to solve not only climate change issues, but poverty and other humanitarian issues at home and in the world.

Anything less is not a joke, but a crime against humanity.