Seed just published my take on the State of the Union speech, and the role of global warming therein. In essence, it's a very pessimistic outlook. I really doubt we can expect strong action on the issue until a new administration comes in. The current Congress may pass a few bills outlining various forms of emission capping programs, but I doubt they'll become law. In short, look for global warming to become a campaign issue in '08....
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Chris,
I hope you're right about its becoming a campaign issue. But I suspect science will take a beating from both sides when that happens, especially if another high-profile extreme event happens (like Katrina or the entire 2005 North Atlantic hurricane season).
I'll be looking for candidates who know how to put the issue into proper context, not attributing single events to climate change and not focusing on extreme scenarios. Even the most plausible business-as-usual scenarios ought to be enough to provoke action.
Business-as-usual scenarios predict changes that will lead to massive displacement of populations, disruption of agricultural patterns, increases in the number and/or intensity of severe-weather events, and the spread of tropical diseases. It won't take a genius to figure out that the result would be economic catastrophes and wars far worse than what we saw in the mid-twentieth century.
In other words, we don't have to talk about the total melting of the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets or the shutdown of the Gulf Stream. The most likely consequences of doing nothing are scary enough, thank you.
(Clicking my name will get to my review of two important climate change books from 2006.)
That's always been the trouble with crystal balls. Sometimes, when one looks into the future, one is blinded by the egg that gets on one's face when one's predictions are wrong ...
There are no repercussions when people make predictions that are wrong (not even when they were outlandish to begin with), so the pundits, bloggers and "journalists" continue to do it ...until they get one prediction right, in which case everyone holds them up as a soothsayer (and they bask in the idiotic glory of it all).
Perhaps someone should start a website to keep track of who predicted what and what the actual outcome was. Keep a tally of how many times people are right and wrong. That way we can all tell who the real psychics are.
I'd include predictions made by animals, by the way, since I bet they are as likely to be correct as most of the ones made by the pundits and bloggers.
Frankly, I think even you're too optimistic. Bush said he would increase the fuel economy standards by 20% in the next ten years, but they were already expected to increase by that much by 2015. He just gave auto companies two extra years, quite frankly. He announced a step backward disguised as a step forward.
Despite all the speculation we have seen to the contrary, it doesn't look to me like Bush's "policy" has changed one iota. It's more of the same "smoke and mirrors" (quite literally):
http://environment.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/story/0,,1999968,00.html