Tag: IPCC

The Six Degrees of Species Extinction


— Experts estimates that we are losing 137 plant, animal and insect species every single day due to rainforest deforestation. That equates to 50,000 species a year. As the rainforest species disappear, so do many possible cures for life-threatening diseases.

Nearly half of the world’s species of plants, animals and microorganisms will be destroyed or severely threatened over the next quarter century due to rainforest deforestation.

— Rainforests once covered 14% of the earth’s land surface; now they cover a mere 6% and experts estimate that the last remaining rainforests could be consumed in less than 40 years.

One and one-half acres of rainforest are lost every second with tragic consequences for both developing and industrial countries.

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts…

Frank Luntz: a one man wrecking crew, without a conscience

Mr Luntz is at it again, doing what he does best:   Making Stuff Up for purely Politcal Gain!

Wall St Consultant Frank Luntz Pens Memo On

How To Channel Economic Anxiety Into Protecting Wall St Abuses

Lee Fang, ThinkProgress – 02/01/2010

[…] Luntz, who gained national recognition for his role in shaping the buzzword-heavy Contract for America with Newt Gingrich in 1994, has built a sizable business selling his messaging advice to both corporations and Republican campaigns.

The new memo instructs opponents of financial reform to simply lie about reform legislation, and to twist economic anxiety resulting from the recession into fear of any government effort to fix the underlying cause of the financial crisis. The most dishonest argument is that financial reform would “punish” taxpayers while rewarding “big banks and credit card companies.” In reality, top financial industry lobbyists are not only fighting proposed oversight regulations, but have said recently that they are opposed to “any regulation” at all.

http://thinkprogress.org/2010/…

How DOES this Man sleep at night?

Al Gore: It’s like gravity; It exists.

Chalk One up for Science, as if Science, were subject to Popular Vote …

(If that were true, guess who would of won in 2000?)

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviews Al Gore



http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21…

MITCHELL: Palin calls it “junk science.” She says, “The agenda-driven policies being pushed in Copenhagen won’t change the weather, but they would change our economy for the worst.”

What’s your response to that?

Break-In, Thieves Target Another Top Climate Scientist

In the wake of the illegal hacking of a leading climate scientist’s computers, to concoct a false scandal compared to which the birther absurdity is merely amusing, someone is criminally targeting another leading climate scientist.

The Observer:

Attempts have been made to break into the offices of one of Canada’s leading climate scientists, it was revealed yesterday. The victim was Andrew Weaver, a University of Victoria scientist and a key contributor to the work of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In one incident, an old computer was stolen and papers were disturbed.

In addition, individuals have attempted to impersonate technicians in a bid to access data from his office, said Weaver. The attempted breaches, on top of the hacking of files from British climate researcher Phil Jones, have heightened fears that climate-change deniers are mounting a campaign to discredit the work of leading meteorologists before the start of the Copenhagen climate summit tomorrow.

“The key thing is to try to find anybody who’s involved in any aspect of the IPCC and find something that you can … take out of context,” said Weaver. The prospect of more break-ins and hacking has forced researchers to step up computer security.

Someone is getting desperate. And it appears to be becoming a pattern. For more on Weaver, this is his homepage.

For those who don’t know about the literally criminal first false scandal, DarkSyde at Daily Kos made two superb posts:

Keeping the grease in the ground: a challenge

If the state of public opinion were to reflect the research on abrupt climate change, billions of people would be in a state of panic.  The problem is not merely that the proposed measures to deal with the problem will be inadequate, nor that Copenhagen will wind up with no agreement or be a farce, although both of those predictions will come true; it’s that the intelligentsia, that class of individuals who should be asking the right questions and coming up with the right answers, is not yet talking about what needs to be done.  

What we will need is an agreement to limit fossil fuel production, and a new concept of economy to replace the neoliberal one, which is structurally incapable of making such a solution real.  This essay is intended to  promote debate about such a change.

(Crossposted at Big Orange)

Global warming: new figures MUCH worse than feared

“We should be worried – really worried.”

And you thought Wall Street was underwater now . . .

Want a safe place to put your money? How ’bout, higher ground, away from the coastline?

An analysis of new figures shows that even the worst-case scenario predicted last year by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has already been exceeded.

The world pumped up emissions of the chief human-produced global warming gas last year, setting a course that . . . exceeds the most dire outlook for emissions from burning coal and oil and related activities as projected by a Nobel Prize-winning group of international scientists in 2007.

U.N. Climate Panel Warns of ‘Abrupt’ Warming

Cross-posted from THE ENVIRONMENTALIST

Note: This report, a portion which is copied (text only) below, has important embedded links here.



The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will issue a report this weekend that warns of “abrupt and irreversible” impacts unless world leaders address climate change this year.

In its strongest statement to date, the panel warns of a potential temperature rise up to 6.4C, sea level rise up to 43cm, Arctic summer ice to disappear within the second half of this century, and an increase to the increase we’re already seeing in heat waves and tropical storm intensity.

More below the fold…

Will Congress now back Gore & the IPCC? Let’s pressure them to!

Amidst all the excitement about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize, the questions and dreams about a possible presidential campaign, and the inevitable criticism from right wing cynics (demonstrating, once again, that they neither understand nor even like the concept of peace), let’s not lose focus on what really matters. It is not about the man, it is about his cause; and he is the man he is because he puts the cause above any personal considerations, and whether or not he runs will undoubtedly be determined by his best assessment of whether it will be the best way to serve the cause! We need also keep that priority straight! The coming weeks are critical, and we can help!

Largely because of Al Gore and the IPCC, global warming and climate change have now come to be frontline political issues. Bush no longer ignores it, and now tries to spin it (the best he will ever do on any political issue), and Congress is finally crafting legislation to address it. For now, this is where we need focus.

Mark Hertsgaard, the environmental correspondent for The Nation, puts it directly:

Now that Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, will the US Congress take the IPCC’s scientific advice on how to fight global warming? The IPCC holds that the world must reduce greenhouse gas emissions at least 80 percent by the year 2050. Few in Congress seem prepared to go that far, however. And judging from the discussion at a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week, even lawmakers who personally embrace the “gold standard” of 80 percent reductions are prepared to endorse a weaker measure in the name of getting some form of climate legislation moving in Congress.

If we take Al Gore seriously, and we take seriously his Nobel Prize, we need to immediately begin lobbying Congress to do the same. This is no time for the compromises that define the usual failures of our political system. With the issue in the headlines, we need let our Congressional representatives know that we are watching, and that we are expecting more than lip service.

The question is, what bill will reformers get behind? How ambitious will they be? Will they demand what the scientific community says is the minimum necessary to enable our civilization to (perhaps) avoid the worst future scenarios of global warming: deep cuts in emissions by 2020 on the way to 80-90 percent cuts by 2050? Or, in the name of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good, will they favor a more modest and gradual approach?

The weak, ineffectual compromise approach is being championed by those champions of political weakness and ineffectual compromise, Senators John Warner (R-VA) and Joseph Lieberman (?-CT). Their bill would mandate emission reductions of 10 percent by 2020, and 70 percent by 2050. That they would, for some reason, decide on an approach that falls 10 percent short on such a critical goal says everything. It won’t solve the problem, but it will make nice window dressing. It’s not just embarrassing and absurd, it’s dangerous!

Not only do these provisions fall short of the scientific standard; there is even less here than meets the eye. The bill, as described in briefings and press accounts, contains a number of loopholes, including provisions that (1) will give rather than sell greenhouse-gas-emissions permits to polluters, thus violating the “polluter pays” principle of environmental accounting, and (2) count so-called carbon offsets–that is, paying someone else to reduce emissions while continuing to emit oneself–as genuine reductions.

An alternative has been proposed by Senators Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Bernard Sanders (I-VT), with a similar bill in the House being sponsored by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA). Their bills mandate the 80 percent reductions, on real terms, rather than with carbon offsets, and they make the polluters pay. Hertsgaard links to the World Resource Institute’s comparison of these, and other, proposals.

Of course, only one of the bills is getting traction, on Congress.

According to sources speaking on background because of the confidential nature of the discussions, most Senate Democrats and many environmental and other public interest groups are preparing to support the Lieberman-Warner bill, despite misgivings about its shortcomings.

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While some in Congress apparently believe it is important to pass something, anything, environmental writer Bill McKibben disagrees. Since Bush is likely to veto even Warner-Lieberman, McKibben believes that even passing it will only serve to lower the bar, for the next Congress and the next president. It will make Warner-Lieberman appear to be the proper standard. Clearly, that would be unacceptable.

As McKibben explained to Hertsgaard, in a previous interview:

Since Bush is going to veto it anyway, there is no reason to make [a climate bill] less ambitious than what science requires. Climate change isn’t like other issues. It doesn’t do any good to split the difference to reach a deal everyone can live with. Climate change is about the laws of physics and chemistry, and they don’t give.

We’re all thrilled that Al Gore and the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s time for us to help them leverage that prestige, by pressuring Congress to do what is right. Call your senators and congresspeople. Tell them that Warner-Lieberman is unacceptable, and that the only valid options are Boxer-Sanders and Waxman. We now have the political momentum. Let’s not waste it!