Pay attention! Today's news is not good news

This site is mainly focused on water issues, of course.  But anything that has to do with climate change and human civilization relates to water and how we will learn to survive as humans in a very changed physical environment.  Yale's School of Forestry has a blog that anyone interested in environment and climate should be subscribing to.  It's called Environment 360: Opinion, Analysis, Reporting and Debate.  The digest has a really important article in it this week that headlines:

Carbon Output Continues to Accelerate, Exceeding Predictions.

Carbon output is rising four times as fast this decade as in the 1990s, and it continued to accelerate through last year’s economic downturn, according to new data from the Global Carbon Project. The report by an international group of scientists confirmed some projected trends: Developing countries now produce the bulk of the chief global-warming gas — led by China, which has surpassed the United States as the top carbon polluter and which single-handedly churned out 21 percent of the total in 2007. But the most significant findings surprised some scientific observers: Emissions rose 3 percent from 2006 to 2007, topping the worst-case scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Meanwhile, forests and oceans absorbed a smaller percentage of CO₂, leaving more in the atmosphere. “Things are happening very, very fast,” said Corinne Le Quere, a British scientist who worked on the report. “It’s scary.”

I know there's a risk that people just turn off when they hear news that is this disturbing.  But the better response than to continually duck one's head into the nearest sandpit is to turn concern into action.  There are so many things we need to work on now, but all of them are underpinned by the tremendous growth in output of carbon from human activity.

We need to slow it down.  And fast.  Else we can pretty much predict that it will be slowed down for us, in a very unorganized and irrational way.