Source: VOA
A panel of scientists has presented the United Nations a detailed plan for combating climate change. VOA’s correspondent at the U.N. Peter Heinlein reports the strategy involves reaching a global agreement on a temperature ceiling. A group of 18 scientists from 11 countries is calling on the international community to act quickly to prevent catastrophic climate change. In a report requested by the United Nations and partially paid for by the privately funded U.N. Foundation, the panel warns that any delay could lead to a dangerous rise in sea levels, increasingly turbulent weather, droughts and disease. The report was issued three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that global warming is real and caused in large part by human activity. But unlike the IPCC report, this latest document makes policy recommendations.

Panel member John Holdren of Harvard University says the world must be mobilized immediately to avoid catastrophe. “Climate change is real, it’s already happening, it’s already causing harm, it’s accelerating and we need to do something about it, and we need to do something about it seriously, starting now. Our specific conclusions are that if the world were to go past the point of an increase above pre-industrial temperatures greater than 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius, we would be in a regime where the danger of intolerable and unmanageable impacts on well-being would rise very rapidly,” he said.

The panel’s recommendations include a series of steps to cut the rate at which temperatures are rising. Chief among them are a global agreement on an acceptable ceiling for temperature rise and finding ways of adapting to cope with the damage already done. Holdren, however, says even these measure will achieve very little unless they are accompanied by a global tax on greenhouse gas emissions. “We don’t think ultimately society will get it right in terms of the full range and scope of activities needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, until there is an additional incentive in the form of a price on greenhouse gas emissions, either through a carbon tax or a cap and trade approach,” he said.

In other words TAX the living sh*t out of people. Now, history shows that people do not like to be taxed and protest heavily in various forms when a tax is clearly going into the wrong pockets for the wrong purposes. People will need to become believers in Global Warming and are supposed to feel guilty for being part of the problem and believe they are personally responsible. That would make it easier for people to swallow new and increased taxation.