Message from the President

As I write this, the international climate change meetings are going on in Copenhagen. Predictably, the meetings’ two central tenets, the reality of climate change and the need for international collaboration to address what may be the defining crisis of our time, (and perhaps all time), is under attack by a small and vocal minority of deniers.

The truth is that there is no longer a meaningful debate about the reality of climate change, its nature, or its causes. As the meetings opened, the World Meteorological Organization, backed by the United States National Climatic Data Center and NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, announced that the past ten years are the warmest on record over the 160 years that such records have been kept. It is clear that human-generated greenhouse gases are in large measure responsible for the warming.

It is also clear that we face a radically different world in the coming decades; how different is hard to know. Global oceanic and atmospheric modeling is a vastly complex and confounding enterprise.

What is certain is that the process is underway. Sea-level rise, the result of melting polar icecaps and the thermal expansion of ocean waters, is already a well-documented fact. Droughts, shifting rain patterns, species extinctions, agricultural and economic dislocations, and the disruption of essential ocean currents responsible for global climate regulation and equilibrium remain very real possibilities.

That is, of course, unless we talk openly and honestly, and set real and meaningful goals and measures we intend to meet. I hope Copenhagen is that beginning.

                                                                                             Jeff Benoit, President and CEO