Thank God We Now Have a "Climate Roadmap" or We Might Not Know How to Find Our Climate
Bali Forum Backs Climate 'Road Map' U.S. Accedes on Aid Pledges, Wins Fight to Drop Specific Targets for Emissions Cuts
By Juliet Eilperin Washington Post Staff Writer Sunday, December 16, 2007; A01
NUSA DUA, Indonesia, Dec. 15 -- Delegates from nearly 190 countries emerged from a final 24 hours of bruising negotiations Saturday with an agreement on a new framework for tackling global warming, one that for the first time calls on both the industrialized world and rapidly developing nations to commit to measurable, verifiable steps.
The deal, which will form the basis for a two-year, U.N.-sponsored process aimed at forging a binding international climate pact by the end of 2009, could transform the way rich and poor nations work together to preserve a rapidly warming Earth, observers said. But it also postpones many tough decisions and provides more incentives than penalties when it comes to addressing global warming.
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Well, everyone's just absolutely smiley and giddy with positive vibes and wet ankles as the tides rise in Bali.
"Bali has delivered what it needed to do," U.N. climate chief Yvo de Boer said in a final news conference Saturday night. "That road forward is ambitious, it is transparent, and it is flexible."
Ambitious--Having a strong desire for success or achievement
Transparent--Easily understood or seen through (because of a lack of subtlety)
Flexible--Capable of being changed
Now that we finally have a 'map,' which is everyone's current hot-button word for not doing anything, we can get ready to have a strong desire for something that's easily enough understood to be changed if the water isn't yet up to our knees by 2009. And we actually sent people all the way to Bali to write up this crock of unintelligible meanderings and Al Gore actually went there with his shiny new Peace Prize and smiled for the cameras. Meanwhile, glaciers are falling kerplop into the seas as the world agrees to "guide negotiators in their quest to produce an accord outlining how deeply the industrialized countries should cut their emissions between 2012 and 2016, after commitments made under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol expire." How many additional species or agricultural areas, ski resorts or animal habitats, islands or coastal cities will have expired in the meantime is not known. But we have a roadmap. xx