The poor and climate change

I heard about this on the radio today. Take a look at this excerpt from a CNN article entitled "U.N. report: Poor hit hardest by climate change":

UNITED NATIONS (AP) -- Floods, droughts and other climate disasters will rob millions of children of the decent meals and schools they need unless rich nations pony up $86 billion by 2015 to help the poor adapt to global warming, an expert panel has warned.

The U.S. government needs to cover $40 billion of that spending, which will "strengthen the capacity of vulnerable people" to cope with climate-related risks, according to the report commissioned by the U.N. Development Program.

The nearly 400-page Human Development Report comes just a week before the world's nations convene in Indonesia to negotiate a new climate treaty. It adds a dire economic perspective to previous U.N. scientific findings that carbon and other heat-trapping "greenhouse gas" emissions must stabilize by 2015 and then decline.

Without the money, the panel found, a warmer world "could stall and then reverse human development" in the countries where 2.6 billion people live on $2 a day or less.

Scientists have reported that temperatures rose an average 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit over the past 100 years, bringing the prospect of a century of extreme weather, rising seas, widening drought and disease and harm to fisheries, forests and farmland.

The irony is, of course, that it is the rich who have CAUSED climate change and they are the ones who will be protected from it. For a while at any rate. Eventually, we will all perish unless something is done soon.