FROM THE FIELD
Despite the overwhelming evidence on climate change, our leaders are not listening. The stories of its human impact from a new Oxfam report may be harder to ignore, writes Diana Liverman. This year has had its fair share of international political and scientific meetings on climate change. Just earlier this month President Obama met other G8 leaders in Italy to discuss the crisis again. But are the politicians really listening to what the science is telling them? Many politicians remain unmoved by increasingly urgent calls for action from the scientific community. Others are taking action, but not at the scale needed.  The Waxman-Markey bill, which has just passed a vote in the US House of Representatives, is an example. Despite being an historic action in the fight against climate change, it is still a long way off what the scientific community recommends in terms of emission reductions. The bill also fails to adequately address the needs of millions of poor people in the US and around the world, who are already struggling to cope with a changing climate or to find low carbon modes of sustainable development. Although scientists tend to point to the authoritative statements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report, the science has not stood still. In the 2007 Report we agreed that the climate system was warming unequivocally. We also agreed that if current rates of greenhouse gas emissions from human activity continue, the world would see further warming, more extreme weather and sea level rising, as well as risks of abrupt and irreversible change.   The International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, held in Copenhagen earlier this year, highlighted new findings suggesting that greenhouse gas emissions are already towards the higher end of the IPCC projections; some climate models are pointing to a greater chance of temperature increases of over 4 °C; and that we may have underestimated the damages from climate change. The findings of major collaborative science projects on carbon, food, water and human security are suggesting worrying shifts in the ability of oceans and land to take up greenhouse gases; an urgent need to adapt the world's food and water systems to climate change; and a complex set of vulnerabilities of the poor to the combined effects of climate change and other stresses. In the face of these gloomy predictions, many scientists are emphasising solutions that include relatively easy emission reductions through behavioural change, renewable energy production, forest protection and efficiency, and confronting the more challenging questions about the technical, economic and ethical feasibility of geo-engineering and other high-tech options. A few scientists argue that more research is needed before we can act with confidence, and some economists continue academic debate about the relative costs and benefits of action. Many politicians are using both uncertainty and cost as reasons not to act. Meanwhile the human face of climate change provides a powerful moral reminder of the effects of inaction. Â![A
water-logged Bangladeshi woman in search of drinking water after Cyclone Aila hit Gabura, Satkhira in Bangladesh on 26 May 2009. [Photo credit: Abir Abdullah]](http://www.oxfam.org.uk/generationwhy/cgi/process_comp/photos/2009/07/aila1.jpg)
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
