Delegates at the UN Conference on climate change last December faced a painful choice. They could specifically mention the necessity of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 percent by 2020 and face the possibility of a U.S. walkout from the negotiations. Or they could drop all mention of targets to keep Washington in the negotiations. The delegates went with the latter to appease Bush.

But now after the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan, it is clear that the delegates made a strategic mistake. The G8's endorsement of a 50 percent reduction in emissions by 2050, which they have presented as a major step forward, is actually, as the South African government put it, a "regression from what is required to make a meaningful contribution to meeting the challenges of climate change."

In fact, "regression" is too polite. The G8 position is a giant step backward. It may have effectively undermined the prospects for an effective global climate strategy

G8 World Leaders Paid "Lip Service" to World Crisis, Groups say

"The planet is burning while the G8 is fiddling"

G8 World Leaders: We've Got Until 2050 to Cut Greenhouse Gas

Even Bush approves of far distant goal

The idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, but last August, the world's oldest association of Earth scientists, unanimously agreed it has come to pass. This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

This coincides with growing scientific controversy over the most recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which has, in effect, bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union's much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use

In the 1960s, a subculture of Americans became obsessed with alien abductions.The aliens were unintelligible, likely harbored designs for taking over the world, and seemed to hover just beyond our line of sight waiting for an opportunity to put us to some unknown use. For roughly 20 years, the case of North Korean abductions seemed to exercise a similar hold on the Japanese imagination. The stories of missing Japanese rumored to have been abducted by North Korean agents belonged to the margins of political and media discourse. No mainstream media outlet would touch the story.

But in 2002, the abduction narrative in Japan swerved suddenly from the margins to the very center of the policy debate. Japanese Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro visited Pyongyang on September 17, 2002 in an attempt to break the logjam of non-recognition in Japan-North Korea relations. In the course of that visit, Koizumi extracted a confession and an apology from North Korean leader Kim Jong Il. North Korea had abducted Japanese citizens. It was as if a UFO had landed in downtown Tokyo and the earth stood still for the Japanese. A narrative nurtured by a relatively small group of Japanese, particularly the families of the disappeared, had turned out to be true.

But that was only the beginning of the story. It turned out that there were several true narratives. And the story of Charles Robert Jenkins and his family was one of them