I've lauded the many virtues of the "Financial Times" and its sister publication, "The Economist," on any number of occasions here, and referenced scores of their articles. This series from the FT, for instance, is well worth your time. Here is some more:
In "The Economist" this week is a series on the Sea. Here's a telling quote from the lead article: "Humans could afford to treat the sea as an infinite resource when they were relatively few in number, capable of only rather inefficient exploitation of the vasty deep and without as yet a taste for fossil fuels. A world of 6.7 billion souls, set to become 9 billion by 2050, can no longer do so. The possibility of widespread catastrophe is simply too great."
Included here is The curse of carbon, an article that looks at sea ice melting, ocean acidification and the threat to coral reefs, among other things. (If you want to know more about the ocean and climate change's impact, you couldn't do better than to continue with Betsy Kolbert's article in "The New Yorker" from two years ago, The Darkening Sea. You can also see the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change material on the ocean from its Fourth Assessment Report.)
At the FT today, there's a great overview of the relationship between the incoming Obama administration's views on climate change and the international talks. (From December 2 through 21 here, I covered the Obama team, some of the salient points about Congress, the EU talks and the UN-sponsored talks in Poland.) "As night from day' is the difference that John Kerry identified between the approaches of the Bush and Obama administration.
Let's hope so. As UNSG Ban Ki-moon said in Poland: "Yes, the economic crisis is serious. Yet when it comes to climate change, the stakes are even higher. The climate crisis affects our potential prosperity and our peoples' lives, both now and far into the future."
