Greenhouse gases have yet again reached a new record high leading perhaps to the hottest January on record. With the outlines of the climate science firmly established, there are long past due initiatives emergin to accelerate international processes which have until now only yielded the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the IPCC processes and the much maligned and underperforming Kyoto processes. There are emerging from multiple channels initatives to accelerate talks - a so called climate summit and a new UN environmental body - to move forward with proposals that will avert global climate disaster by bringing the United States and China into a regime of mandatory emissions caps, as well as establish a global cap and trade system. The so called G8+5 Climate Change Dialogue recently met [more | more2] and agreed in DC that developing countries are going to have to face some sort of caps as well, and that a global carbon market to cap and trade emissions is needed.

Clearly Kyoto is defective in a number of regards, but it represents twenty years of effort to establish the first mechanisms to cap and trade emissions. It must be strengthened and made universal and equitable, not jettisoned to start over down some other track. All of the pieces are in place to begin the process of reducing emissions ultimately by some 80% by 2050 - the science rock solid, evidence of looming catastrophe all around, the Hollywood ecorazzi are posing (the only people that really deserve or get any media attention on the matter), and Al Gore is now a concert promoter for the Earth. Now we need the poliitical will to act to achieve universal carbon emission caps weighed in favor of developing nations initially, with eventual convergence and contraction of overall national rates of carbon emitted, and a global carbon trading [search] to set the right price on carbon. Ecological Internet will be supporting an accelerated timetable for a climate summit to jumpstart international negotations and “turn positive words into positive actions“.