My Belief System & Profile
Belief System Use
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.
.gif)
RSS Feeds Rock!
"No Al Gore Drama: Climate Change Is Real"
U.N. synthesis climate report ready to publish
'Warming ... is unequivocal," is among wording agreed to by delegates
 | Rajendra Pachauri, who leads the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, examines a seafood paella dish cooked by Greenpeace activists using a solar-powered oven in Valencia, Spain, on Friday. Pachauri and others at the conference have called on governments to adopt low-carbon energy like solar power to reduce greenhouse gas emissions |
VALENCIA, Spain - Working until dawn, negotiators on Friday concluded a policy guide for governments on global warming that declares climate change is here and is getting worse, one of its authors said.
Provisional agreement on the text — which is about 20 pages and summarizes thousands of pages of data and projections — required compromises among the more than 140 delegations, but resulted in a "good and balanced document," said Bert Metz, a Dutch scientist who helped draft the report.
A brief summary and a longer version of about 70 pages that was approved later Friday still need to be printed out and formally adopted.
They will be released Saturday by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Until then, the texts are supposed to remain confidential.
The shorter, 20-page paper will be an "instant guide" to policymakers at a critical meeting next month in Indonesia, which could launch a round of complex talks on a new international accord for controlling carbon emissions and other human activity that is heating the planet.
Though it contains no previously unpublished material, the summary pulls together the central elements of three lengthy reports released earlier this year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
'Unequivocal' warming
They describe observations of the changing climate, the potentially disastrous impacts of global warming and the tools available to slow the warming trend.
"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the summary begins, in a statement meant to dispel any skepticism about the reality of climate change.
The document "is a clear message to policymakers," said Hans Verolme, of the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the environmental groups acting as observers. "The scientists have done their job. They certainly deserved the Nobel Prize. Now the question is, what are the policymakers going to do with it?"
The meeting in the Indonesian resort of Bali starting Dec. 3 will discuss the next step in combating climate change after the measures adopted in the Kyoto Protocol expire in 2012.
The Kyoto accord, negotiated in 1997, obliges 36 industrial countries to radically reduce their carbon emissions by 2012, but has no clear plan for what happens after that date. Though the United States rejected the Kyoto accord, it will attend the Bali meeting.
Participants in the Valencia meeting said the U.S. delegation questioned the most hard-hitting statements in the summary. But key language remained, they said on condition of anonymity, including a warning that climate change could lead to "abrupt and irreversible" results, such as the widespread extinction of species.
Delegates fought for the inclusion of issues of special interest to them: mountainous countries wanted a reference to melting glaciers; island states wanted to include warnings that oceans are becoming more acidic; poor countries insisted on firm language on "adaptation," implying international funding to help them cope with the effects of global warming.
40 scientists worked on synthesis
The IPCC reports draw on the research of thousands of scientists which is reviewed by about 2,500 experts, then distilled and drafted by several hundred authors. The "synthesis report," the fourth and final report released this year, further distills those reports into a concise document intended to be an easy scientific reference. It was drafted by about 40 scientists, then submitted to government delegations for debate.
The final report must be adopted by consensus, meaning that governments take ownership of the end result and cannot disavow it later.
Metz said the discussions that began Monday were "contentious in a number of places," and required compromise language. "If I had written it myself, I might have done it a bit different," he said, though he added he was satisfied with the outcome.
"It says in crisp language: This is the problem, and this is what we can do to stop it," said Verolme, the WWF campaigner.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21834951/
| WHAT IS THE U.S. MAYORS’ CLIMATE PROTECTION AGREEMENT? |
Climate disruption is an urgent threat to the environmental and economic health of our communities. Many cities, in this country and abroad, already have strong local policies and programs in place to reduce global warming pollution, but more action is needed at the local, state, and federal levels to meet the challenge. On February 16, 2005 the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement to address climate disruption, became law for the 141 countries that have ratified it to date. On that day, Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels launched the US Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to advance the goals of the Kyoto Protocol through leadership and action. Two years later in anticipation of over 500 signatories to the Agreement, The US Conference of Mayors launched its Climate Protection Center in February to administer and track the agreement. Under the Agreement, participating cities commit to take the following three actions:
Though Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" uses some faulty and unscientific data to get the "masses" to think seriously about climate change, the IPCC consortium of thousands of scientists who have studied climate change over the last several years is no "docudrama" on the subject of global warming. Climate change is real. The Bush Administration is going to have to take "it's head out of the sand" and join the Kyoto agreement, as the mayors of Seattle, WA., Denton, TX and hundreds of other American cities have done along with most of the rest of the nations of the world. (Please view the above You Tube Video on this subject) I believe it is going to require a "global social engineering" effort to mitigate and lessen the negative effects of climate change on humanity in the twenty first century. In the power of One Mind humanity can accomplish anything. What do you think? |
Current News & Views Search
