Interview meme: partial answer

EDIT: Finished the first two questions ( Read more... )

wisdom from Phillip Pullman

http://www.philip-pullman.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=119

...What`s more, if we stopped burning fossil fuels right now, completely, everywhere, the earth could continue to warm up for a long time to come, because there`s a momentum involved. Eventually it would slow down and stop, but it`s going to get hotter whatever we do. The Greenland ice cap, for example, is going to melt. It`s done for. Maybe it will take two hundred years, maybe five, maybe a thousand; but eventually it will all go, and as a result, the level of the oceans and seas will rise by about seven metres. Think of what that will mean for people who live around the coasts of the world; think what it will mean for cities like New Orleans.

There isn`t any doubt about this. You`ll hear people like President Bush and his friends say that the facts are not clear at all, and there`s still a lot of debate about global warming, and we shouldn`t act before the science is proved beyond doubt. But they`re lying. There is no doubt about the science. They`re anxious that we shouldn`t know the truth and act on it, because they`re in the oil business, or they`re supported by the coal industry, and the last thing they want is for us to stop using their products and filling their pockets with dollars.

When will we wake up to the fact that we need to do something NOW about the mess we're making? It *will* get worse; the question is: how much?