Industrialized Nations Unveil Plans to Rein in Emissions

Thursday, the New York Times published a piece that discussed the ways, and more specifically, the percentage that specific nations aim to reduce emissions in response to climate change.

The discussions will take place among the world's leaders who will meet in Copenhagen, Germany Dec. 7-18.

The piece goes on to discuss how individual countries--the United States, Korea and so forth will go about making these reductions; it also lists the percentages that these nations will reduce their emissions by: 17, 30 percent etc.

The trouble, is that the author of the piece doesn't really place these numbers in context. Thirty percent is a fairly large number, but how does Korea's 30 percent compare to other countries?

To illustrate in further detail, here is a quote: "This week, South Korea said it would cut emissions by 30 percent from “business as usual” by 2020. Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, said his country would try to reduce emissions by 25 percent by then, instead of 15 percent as announced earlier. Last week, Brazil promised reductions of about 40 percent below current projections by 2020."

So I have a laundry list that sounds good; helping the earth, reducing greenhouse emissions, but supplementary context should really be used if the reporter really wants these numbers to mean something to his readers.

Additionally, the paper fails to report how they came up with the numbers. While the piece does quote the number given by each country, the reader has no idea how these readers were computed, and whether they are really reliable.