I have made the heroic decision: I will avoid writing about Sarah Palin in today's blog post. I will instead write about how the world is ending. You're welcome.
As all of the leaders of the developed world have decided to treat the Copenhagen Climate meeting as a nice junket amongst the beautiful Danes, rather than a chance to press forward with meaningful coordinated action, this seems like a good time to find out that climate change is quickening. Scientists have been concerned about a feedback loop for some time, realizing that as the ice at the Poles and elsewhere melted, more dark surface area of the Earth would be exposed, absorbing rather than reflecting heat. This would in turn mean more of the sun's heat was retained, melting more of the ice, which would again decrease reflective surfaces, which would make the Earth warmer, and so on, and so on. As this happened, the time in between each of these things would get shorter, causing everything to cycle more rapidly, increasing the pace of climate change. Elizabeth Kolbert wrote a series of wrist-slitting articles about this in New Yorker a while back, in case you're interested, but your time might be better spent building a boat/moving to high ground/deciding to believe in Jesus, just in case.
So anyway, yeah, that worst case scenario is now the actual scenario. But what's cool about this is it's not like voters in 2100, as they paddle to the polls, can rectroactively punish politicians from 2009 who failed to act by unelecting them...unless that large hadron collider in Bern has some more interesting applications than we currently know.
Update 11/25: Obama will, after all, be traveling to Copenhagen and will be offering a specific commitment to reduce carbon emissions.
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