For several years now there have been some who have noted the consequences of development in the world's large population centers such as China, India and Indonesia. Their spew, especially particulates and aerosols, has been changing the climate and weather patterns in the southern hemisphere. By affecting insolation the rain patterns are changed, and there are global implications.

More than three-quarters of the particulate pollution known as black carbon transported at high altitudes over the West Coast during spring is from Asian sources, according to a research team led by Professor V. Ramanathan at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego.

I poached this link from Randall who sums up.

The Kyoto Accord and similar climate change agreements will not accomplish much as long as the fossil fuels are cheaper than non-fossil fuel energy sources. The Asian economic juggernaut is radically reshaping the old world order where the United States and Europe were the two biggest users of energy and emitters of pollution.

This seems perfectly obvious to me and I've been saying it too for a long time. The effete political approaches being bandied about by politicians representing the declining world are meaningless because the developing world will determine how the scenario plays out. And they do not have the option of pretending to do something about it while stifling development. They aren't already rich. They do not have more money than sense like the Brits and others who laughably think of themselves as leaders.

We have to actually solve the problem, and that means development of energy generation methods that are affordable for the developing world as well as non polluting. The wealth and time that we are squandering on nonsensical political wheezes is a criminal waste.

Update:

How little will Kyoto like agreements accomplish, and how much will they cost? It's a dirty little secret.

even if everyone had participated and continued to stick to Kyoto's ever more stringent commitments, it would have had virtually no environmental effect: The treaty's effect on temperature would not have been measurable by mid-century and would only have postponed warming by five years in the 21st century. Nonetheless, the cost would have been anything but trivial - an estimated $180 billion per year.

With the EU's high-pitched rhetoric, you would be forgiven for believing that it has now single-handedly taken the major step toward solving the problem. Barroso called the agreement "historic." British Prime Minister Tony Blair extolled its "groundbreaking, bold, ambitious targets." German Chancellor Angela Merkel even ventured that Europe's promises could "avoid what could well be a human calamity."

But nobody sees fit to reveal the agreement's dirty little secret: It will do next to no good - and again at very high cost. According to one well-established and peer-reviewed model, the effect of the EU cutting emissions by 20 percent will postpone warming in the 21st century by just two years, yet the cost will be about $90 billion annually. . .

The EU's new global warming agreement may help win elections for leaders faced with voters scared by the prospect of climate change. But it will do virtually no genuine good, at a high cost, and, as with many other lofty promises from the EU, it will carry a high probability of failure. Let us hope that the rest of the world will keep its cool and propose a better, cheaper, and more effective solution for the future.

Politics is a disease, a mental illness that fells great swathes of society and sometimes infects whole nations and regions. If we must pick one catastrophic threat, one problem to obsess about, history has shown us repeatedly, and present reality confirms on a daily basis, that it is politics.