Stock up on sandbags!

GENEVA — There’s no longer any doubt: climate change is a reality. That’s the message of the third World Climate Conference, hosted by the World Meteorological Organization here from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4.

Weather disasters like Katrina or the forest fires that recently devastated parts of California and Greece are not isolated events. They are our new reality.  Even if we tried to stop them now, we couldn’t.

Senior Obama officials attending the meeting say that while greenhouse gases must be mitigated to thwart an even greater catastrophe, it’s also time to embrace a new challenge: adapting to the changes. In the U.S. for example, where many major airports are only feet above sea level, people need to learn how to cope before it’s too late, they say.

The Geneva conference, which is being attended by roughly 2,500 delegates and 50 heads of state, is intended to lay out a framework for integrating the world’s weather information systems to give better advanced warning against what lies ahead and how to deal with it.  

“This problem is so complex that no one nation has the intellectual or the financial resources to solve it on their own, ” Jack Hayes, the director of the  U.S. National Weather Service told GlobalPost Passport. “It is going to take an international effort to carve the problem into pieces….”

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