Yes!

Yesterday, within minutes of President Obama’s Inauguration speech the analysts were dissecting it. Not me. I am not an analyst. I just know that as the President spoke, there were many places where I was silently shouting Yes!

These days my ears and my head are tuned into water words, so one of those yeses came when I heard the phrase clean water for people of poor countries. Yes! In addition, that part of the new agenda is to be mindful of our environment, to protect and defend it, as well as to restore scientific integrity deserves another hearty shout out.

Continuing my thoughts about climate change this morning, I checked out a few more details. There is no lack of reports, charts, graphs, and slide presentations supporting global warming.

I have seen An Inconvenient Truth and read about Al Gore. I know that Gore should have won the 2000 election, but that he was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. What I didn’t know, or had forgotten, was that Gore shared the prize with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The IPCC is a scientific intergovernmental body set up to observe and provide objective information about the causes of climate change, potential consequences to society and the environment and explore ways to respond to it.

An Executive Summary of a recent report by the IPCC on Climate Change and Water begins: Observational records and climate projections provide abundant evidence that freshwater resources are vulnerable and have potential to be strongly impacted by climate change, with wide-ranging consequences for human societies and ecosystems.

I downloaded the entire report (all 214 pages of it), but will probably only read the summary and skim the rest. However, I am confident that people who make and execute environmental policy in our government will read the entire document. Coupling the clean water in President Obama's speech with the fresh air that has swept into our nation, I have many more reasons to shout yes, yes, yes!