World Bank: pay up for climate change

Because it's all our fault, you see. Nothing to do with the sun, or clouds or orbital eccentricity or cosmic rays. Our use of evil, capitalist SUVs and 4x4s has damaged the climate for poor developing countries (like China and India) so we'd better cough up, or else:

THE cost of climate change in the developing world will be up to $US470 billion ($547 billion) each year by 2030, and wealthy countries such as Australia should help pay to fix it, the World Bank says.

Calling climate change ''a deeply unfair issue'', the World Development Report 2010 finds that rich countries are responsible for two-thirds of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere. But it concludes that poorer countries in South Asia and Africa are expected to bear the brunt of the impact through drought, sea level rise and extreme weather [evidence, please? - Ed] which could permanently cut up to 5 per cent a year from their annual consumption and slash their food production.

The report's co-director, Rosina Bierbaum, said yesterday that while the costs of coping with climate change were huge, ''we can't afford not to address it. But it absolutely will not be cheap and it will not be easy.''

It's all too convenient to blame climate change on CO2, because then we can punish Western economies for it and extract huge sums of money in a kind of global wealth redistribution. So much harder to do all this if it's just natural climate variation caused by [insert extremely long list of possible causes here].

Read it here.