The End or the Beginning?

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies has released its assessment of global temperatures for the 2005 calendar year, concluding that 2005 was the warmest in the instrumental record - but statistically similar to the previous record-holder 1998.

Meanwhile, James Lovelock, responsible for the "Gaia Hypothesis" (i.e., the world is one big self-regulating organism) is set to release a new book, ominously called The Revenge of Gaia, in which he argues that climate change will generally bring about the end of the world as we know it (see his piece here from The Independent).

The Australian on-line magazine Crikey! contacted CSIRO for a response. Due to a few absences, we were unable to turn around an official reply, but a couple of us went freelance as independent, free-thinking citizens (who just happen to coincidentally work in the field) to craft this commentary. Unlike Lovelock, who sees climate change as the end, we argue that, adverse impacts not withstanding, there's reason to be cautiously optimistic that we're starting to see the beginning of a concerted global effort to manage the problem.