The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity.Â
New research released by the Australian Conservation Foundation today shows Australia is losing a staggering $3.8 billion per year in investment opportunities as a result of the Government’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. “Australia continues to miss out on business opportunities worth billions of dollars by refusing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, because Australian Continue Reading →
The International Panel on Climate Change is conservative in the standard scientific way of not wanting to make claims that are not strictly defensible. But this runs up against the need in developing climate change policy to adopt the precautionary principle, rather than waiting until impending catastrophe is "beyond reasonable doubt" before acting. Where research produces new or quite different results, generally the area of contention will often be deleted or noted rather than discussed in detail. And the cut-off point for research is often more than a year before a report’s release. This has created deep concern amongst scientists who believe important work is not being canvassed, and IPCC report’s are out-of-date on publication day.
"CLIMATE change is shaping up to be worse than predicted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a CSIRO scientist says. CSIRO honorary fellow Barrie Pittock, speaking yesterday at the launch of the University of Adelaide’s Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability, said the panel’s models had left out many factors." – 14 August 2007.
Draft resolutions being prepared for the APEC summit in September and leaked to the ABC called for avoiding deforestation as a partial solution to climate change. The proposal has been criticised by Greenpeace clean energy campaigner, Ben Pearson, as being a step backward from Kyoto. "It is a return to the aspirational targets of the Continue Reading →
The Agricultural Alliance on Climate Change was formed to provide a focus on the challenges and solutions for securing our rural future in the face of a changing climate.
Seven organisations, from a range of perspectives – Country Women’s Association of Australia, Westpac, South Australian Farmers Federation, AgForce, Visy, Australian Conservation Foundation and The Climate Institute – determined that there is one thing they have in common – a heightened sense of urgency to respond to the challenges and opportunities of climate change and secure a viable, vital and productive future for rural Australia. The organisations recognise that there are significant gains to be made from working on this issue collaboratively and so created the Alliance.
The Alliance supports the recommendations of the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change, in particular that Australia can deliver significant greenhouse gas reductions at an affordable cost; while the longer we delay acting, the more expensive it becomes for business and for the wider Australian economy.
We need to secure our future – decisive action is needed to move us to a clean energy economy now.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2861732.ece
The Bush administration has consistently thwarted efforts by the World Bank
to include global warming in its calculations when considering whether to
approve major investments in industry and infrastructure, according to
documents made public through a watchdog yesterday.
On one occasion, the White House’s pointman at the bank, the now disgraced
Paul Wolfowitz, personally intervened to remove the words "climate change"
from the title of a bank progress report and ordered changes to the text of
the report to shift the focus away from global warming.
But the issue predates Mr Wolfowitz’s appointment as president of the bank
in June 2005. According to the Government Accountability Project (GAP),
which has tracked efforts to censor debate on global warming, environmental
specialists at the World Bank tried unsuccessfully to press for
consideration of greenhouse-gas emissions in a paper written — but never
published — in 2002.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rifkin9aug09,1,5146638.story
Any lingering doubts about how ill-prepared we are to face up to the reality of climate change should have been laid to rest this month when two Russian mini-submarines dove two miles under the Arctic ice to plant a Russian flag made of titanium on the seabed. The government of Vladimir V. Putin claims that the seabed under the North Pole, known as the Lomonosov Ridge, is an extension of Russia’s continental shelf and therefore Russian territory that will be open for oil exploration.
Russia is not alone in making such a claim. Geologists think that 25% of Earth’s undiscovered oil and gas may be embedded in the rock under the Arctic Ocean. No wonder Norway, Canada and Denmark (through its possession of Greenland) are all using the continental-shelf argument to claim the Arctic seabed as an extension of their own sovereign territories. The suddeninterest in Arctic oil and gas has put a fire under U.S. lawmakers to ratifythe 1982 Law of the Sea Treaty, which allows signatory nations to claimexclusive commercial exploitation zones up to 200 miles out from their coastlines.