Durban and everything that matters - The Economist on climate talks and the long view

"A hundred years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth..."

(link)

How many people do you know, who've been impacted by the past year's floods and other weather disasters? Know anyone with stock in Toyota? ("Toyota Motor Corp., poised to lose its crown as the world's largest carmaker this year, cut its profit forecast 54 percent after Thailand's worst floods in almost 70 years disrupted production.") Insurance companies?
(for those impelled to note that no single event can be laid at the feet of climate change: see fractional risk attribution.)


"We will be judged by those who come after us, both by what we did do and what we didn't do, in the time given to us."