Global Warming: Is It A Scenario Too Scary To Think About?

Experts say scope of the problem makes it hard for people to be optimistic

To Patricia Kremer, climate change is a runaway train carrying Earth toward a forbidding future.

”Just stop the train,” said Kremer, a retiring marine scientist who has witnessed the effects during her studies of the ocean's environments for 30 years. She and her husband, James, who is also about to retire from a career as a marine scientist and professor, work at the University of Connecticut's Avery Point campus.

She is not alone in thinking this. United Nations leader Ban Ki-moon says that whether you call it climate change, global warming or climate disruption, it's “the defining challenge of our age.”

In November, when Ban made his pronouncement, the 2,500 climate scientists from around the world who comprise the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had just issued their strongest alert about the global disaster threatening the future.

”If there is no action before 2012, that's too late,” said Rajendra Pachauri, the scientist and economist who heads the IPCC. “What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future.” More >>>

Commonwealth warns of devastating impact of global warming

GEORGETOWN (AFP) — Global-warming and its devastating environmental effects were to top the agenda of a two-day meeting of finance ministers from more than 50 Commonwealth countries due to open here Monday.

Ransford Smith, deputy secretary general of the 53-nation organization, said the international community needs to balance economic growth with the use of new and clean technologies because climate change would adversely impact on agriculture outputs in many developing countries, as well as employment patters and populations shifts.

"There will be other consequences that you need to be able to cost and be aware of in making the chances," Smith told journalists here Sunday ahead of the October 15-17 meeting whose theme is "Climate Change: The Challenges Facing Finance Ministers."

The Commonwealth nations, sometimes known as the British Commonwealth, is a voluntary association of 53 former British colonies which now are sovereign states, plus the United Kingdom itself and Mozambique. Read More