No easy solutions to global warming

This week in Accra, Ghana, a United Nations international panel released the last of its three massive studies suggesting ways to lessen the impacts of climate change.

The most recent International Panel on Climate Change report, intended to guide policy-makers around the world, calls climate change “a problem with unique characteristics,” and says reducing the emission of so-called greenhouse gasses won’t be simple to achieve.

“There is no path to a low emission future, and countries and regions will have to chose their own path,” the report says.

These choices will be difficult because the stakes are high, and, as the report says, decision making will take place “under risk.”

Among other strategies, the report recommends reforestation and investing in alternative technology to counteract or reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses.

Last Sunday the world’s top industrialized nations also renewed their pledge to fight global warming. Environment ministers promised to work towards ratification of the 1997 Kyoto agreement, which calls for the industrialized countries to cut their emissions of carbon dioxide — one of the main greenhouse gases — below 1990 levels within the next 10 years.