Tag: Climate Change

UNSG BAN squeezes into the picture

AP Photo by Fernando Bustamante - right to left are UN SGl Ban Ki-moon, IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauiri and Michel Jarraud of the World Meteorological Organization at a closing press conference in Valencia

The three major news agencies have all covered the just-released “synthesis” report on climate change following the close of the IPCC meeting in Valencia, Spain today. The”synthesis” report will be discussed by some 10,0000 delegates who are expected to participate in the Bali meeting of the UN Conference on Climate Change starting in just over two weeks’ time.

While UNSG BAN has squeezed into the picture for reasons of image and legacy, it’s also certainly true that it would be worse if he ignored the issue. BAN has even embarked on his own eco-tourism to learn at first hand about the issue, which he seized upon just before taking office.

Reuters reported that BAN told delegates from more than 130 nations meeting in Valencia that ” ‘This report will be formally presented to the (U.N. Climate Change) Conference in Bali … Already, it has set the stage for a real breakthrough — an agreement to launch negotiations for a comprehensive climate change deal that all nations can embrace’, he said. Ban singled out the United States and China, the world’s top two emitters of greenhouse gases, which have no binding goals for curbs, as key countries in the process. He welcomed initiatives by both and urged them to do more. ‘I look forward to seeing the U.S. and China playing a more constructive role starting from the Bali conference’, Ban told a news conference afterwards … Ban said he had just been to see ice shelves breaking up in Antarctica and the melting Torres del Paine glaciers in Chile. He also visited the Amazon rainforest, which he said was being ‘suffocated’ by global warming. ‘I come to you humbled after seeing some of the most precious treasures of our planet — treasures that are being threatened by humanity’s own hand’, he said. ‘These scenes are as frightening as a science fiction movie’, Ban said. ‘But they are even more terrifying, because they are real’ …
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New Climate Report warns of "abrupt" changes

A “synthesis” report on the climate prepared by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is being released today by UNSG BAN Ki-Moon, who decided soon after his election that taking on global warming and other signs of climate change would be lofty but not too controversial goals for his term in office.

The BBC reported that Bill Hare, an Australian climate scientist and one of the authors of the synthesis report, told Reuters: “This is the strongest report yet by the IPCC – but says that there is still time to act”. The BBC said that “among the report’s top-line conclusions are that climate change is ‘unequivocal’, that humankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost … At a news conference, WWF presented testimonies from ‘climate change witnesses’ in various parts of the world. Speaking by video link, Australian scientists and fishermen spoke of the changes they were seeing on the Great Barrier Reef. And Olav Mathis Eira, a Sami reindeer herder from Norway, said that his communities are seeing weather patterns unprecedented in their oral history. ‘Winter is one-and-a-half months later than it used to be’, he said. ‘We observed birds and insects that do not have a name in Sami’…
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UN Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore win 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

The announcement, widely predicted, is just in.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, jointly, to the UN Panel on Climate Change and to former U.S. Vice President Al Gore.
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Time Mag: UN's Hot Air on Climate Change

Time Magazine has an appropriately sceptical and sarcastic account of yesterdays “high-level” meeting at the UN on how to stop or stall climate change:

“Though political awareness of the need to grapple with climate change was clearly at an all-time high — scores of national leaders don’t suddenly convene at the U.N. without a decent reason — the global political will to actually do something still seems lacking. It’s now 20 years since the issue of climate change was first raised in the U.N.’s General Assembly chamber by the island nation of Malta, 15 years since the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and 10 since after the Kyoto Protocol was drafted — and many governments speak as if they’d just discovered global warming. Other concerns remain more pressing … a fact that was made apparent when Iranian President Mahmoud Ahadinejad (who skipped the climate meeting) gave his speech at Columbia University in the afternoon, drawing crowds of delegates around nearby televisions.
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Climate change caused Neanderthal extinction?

Humans survived, but Neanderthals disappeared from Earth more than 20,000 years ago. There is a new theory that Neanderthals were made extinct not by competition with Humans, but by climate change. Does that mean that humans can continue to live with climate change?

Dave Mosher. LiveScience Staff Writer, writing on LiveScience.com, reports that a team of Spanish scientists now says that climate change may have been the main culprit in the disappearance of Neanderthals from the earth:

“The Iberian Peninsula, better known as present-day Spain and Portugal, was one of the last Neanderthal refuges. Many scientists have thought that out-hunting by Homo sapiens and interbreeding with them brought Neanderthals to their demise, but climate change has also been proposed. Francisco Jimenez-Espejo, a paleoclimatologist at the University of Granada in Spain, says a lack of evidence has left climate change weakly supported — until now. ‘We put data behind the theory’, he said, filling in a large gap in European climate records when Neanderthals faded out of existence. The scientists’ study is detailed in a recent issue of Quaternary Science Reviews. The study reveals three rough climatic periods for Neanderthals, with the last and harshest period starting about 26,000 years ago. ‘The last event was very, very cold and dry’, Jimenez-Espejo says, ‘and other than 250,000 years ago, such a harsh climate was never reached before … Neanderthals struggled with climate change more than modern humans, and during the period of their extinction, very unfavorable climatic conditions were present’. To reach North America, humans eventually migrated across Siberia and learned to survive in the icy regions. But ‘Neanderthals couldn’t make the trip’, Jimenez-Espejo said. This fact, the team believes, highlights the weakness of Neanderthals to cold, open environments — as Iberia would have been at the time of their extinction. Other scientists think less game for Neanderthals to hunt — and not having modern humans’ skills to hunt them — probably sealed our humanoid cousin’s demise. Yet others believe Neanderthals never went extinct and instead interbred their genes into our own, as recent skeletal evidence might suggest“. News story here.

Is the issue of climate change manipulated?

This article asks real questions about the manipulation of climate change — real though global warming undoubtedly is:

Whistleblowers Get Kiss-Off: Pro-Man-Made Global Warming Crowd Will Do Anything to ‘Sex-Up’ the Threat by Licia Corbella – February 11, 2007 – The Calgary Sun
http://calgarysun.canoe.ca/NewsStand/
News/Columnists/Corbella_Licia/2007/02/11/3587074-sun.html

“It’s too bad the world’s media doesn’t hold the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the same standards that it holds large corporations.

When Enron cooked the books, there were — rightly — no end of indignant columns and talk shows condemning these high-paid fraudsters who massaged the numbers to fit their agenda and bolster their bank accounts.

The whistleblower who tried to get Enron to change its evil ways — Sherron Watkins — was named, along with two other whistleblowing women — TIME magazine’s Persons of the Year for 2002.

But when it comes to scientists who whistleblow about IPCC reports cooked by politicians to fit their politicized agendas, those whistleblowers are either ignored or dismissed as ‘skeptics’ or quacks and are libelled as haters of this planet and nature, even though most of them have dedicated their lives to studying nature and protecting it.
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