Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Saturday, February 25, 2012
Saturday, January 09, 2010
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
The Yes Men Rule (A lesson in how the invisible hand of the market REALLY works)
The bottle looks beautiful. It sports an old-fashioned spring-top stopper. The red, diamond-shaped label features an elegant font. From a distance, the silhouetted landscape on the label looks exotic. It is, like all fine gourmet water, "bottled at source." Even the French name of the water suggests elegance: B'eau Pal.
But wait: B'eau Pal? That sounds rather familiar. You look at the label more carefully. The top of the label reads: "25 years of pollution." The picture on the label isn't an exotic location after all. It's...the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India that poisoned a half a million people and killed thousands back in 1984 when it accidentally released tons of methyl isocyanate.
B'eau Pal is the work of the Yes Men, the dynamic duo of disinformation. Five years ago, one of the pair, Andy Bichlbaum, appeared on BBC as a spokesman for Dow Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide, to announce that his company would provide $12 billion in medical care for the 120,000 victims of the Bhopal calamity and fully clean up the site. Dow lost $2 billion in market value in 20 minutes. That's how long it took before the hoax was exposed.
"We demonstrated what would happen if Dow did do the right thing in Bhopal," Bichlbaum told Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Mark Engler in Pranksters Fixing the World.
Read the rest after the click.
But wait: B'eau Pal? That sounds rather familiar. You look at the label more carefully. The top of the label reads: "25 years of pollution." The picture on the label isn't an exotic location after all. It's...the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India that poisoned a half a million people and killed thousands back in 1984 when it accidentally released tons of methyl isocyanate.
B'eau Pal is the work of the Yes Men, the dynamic duo of disinformation. Five years ago, one of the pair, Andy Bichlbaum, appeared on BBC as a spokesman for Dow Chemical, which now owns Union Carbide, to announce that his company would provide $12 billion in medical care for the 120,000 victims of the Bhopal calamity and fully clean up the site. Dow lost $2 billion in market value in 20 minutes. That's how long it took before the hoax was exposed.
"We demonstrated what would happen if Dow did do the right thing in Bhopal," Bichlbaum told Foreign Policy In Focus (FPIF) senior analyst Mark Engler in Pranksters Fixing the World.
Read the rest after the click.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
Driven: Shai Agassi's Audacious Plan to Put Electric Cars on the Road
WIRED Magazine
Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.
It's December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We've got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won't be a problem.
At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he's not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world's addiction to fossil fuels. It's a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It's not exactly what this audience wants to hear.
Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world's.
... get the rest after the click in WIRED Magazine On-Line.
My comment: I read this earlier this afternoon in one of the examining rooms at the University Medical Center (UMC) in Tucson, waiting for someone to take the stitches out of the scared remainder of my recent ruptured appendix removal. I'd read bits and pieces about Shai Agassi in other places, and when I saw a lengthy piece in WIRED I was happy to have both the time and the opportunity to read something more substantive.
Several commentators have wished that a Steve Jobs would somehow surface to re-wright the auto industry model as a means of weaning us from our oil dependancy and of jump starting manufacturing in this country once again. If there is such a person, I think Shai Agassi could be excellent candidate for that position.
The article is a little on the long side but I think it's worth the read.
Shai Agassi looks up and down the massive rectangular table in the Ritz-Carlton ballroom and begins to worry. He knows he's out of his league here. For the last day and a half, he's been listening to an elite corps of Israeli and US politicians, businesspeople, and intellectuals debate the state of the world. Agassi is just one of 60 sequestered in a Washington, DC, hotel for a conference run by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy. Among the participants: Bill Clinton, former Israeli prime minister Shimon Peres, Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer, and two past directors of the CIA.
It's December 2006. Scheduled to speak in a few minutes, Agassi gets nudged by the Israeli minister of education: "Be optimistic," she tells him. "We've got to close with an upbeat tone." Agassi thanks her. Optimism won't be a problem.
At 38, Agassi is the youngest invitee. Just after the dotcom boom, SAP, the world's largest maker of enterprise software, paid $400 million for a small-business software company he started with his father; now he's SAP's head of products and widely presumed to be the next CEO. But he's not here this morning to talk about business software. Instead, his topic will be the world's addiction to fossil fuels. It's a recent passion and the organizers invited him to counterbalance the man speaking now, Daniel Yergin, the famed energy consultant and oil industry analyst. Yergin gives them his latest thinking: Energy independence is unattainable. Oil consumption will continue to rise. Iran will get richer. It's not exactly what this audience wants to hear.
Now it's Agassi's turn. He starts off uncharacteristically nervous, stammering a bit. He's got something different, he says. A new approach. He believes it just might be possible to get the entire world off oil. For good. Point by point, gaining speed as he goes, he shares for the first time in public the ideas that will change his future—and possibly the world's.
... get the rest after the click in WIRED Magazine On-Line.
My comment: I read this earlier this afternoon in one of the examining rooms at the University Medical Center (UMC) in Tucson, waiting for someone to take the stitches out of the scared remainder of my recent ruptured appendix removal. I'd read bits and pieces about Shai Agassi in other places, and when I saw a lengthy piece in WIRED I was happy to have both the time and the opportunity to read something more substantive.
Several commentators have wished that a Steve Jobs would somehow surface to re-wright the auto industry model as a means of weaning us from our oil dependancy and of jump starting manufacturing in this country once again. If there is such a person, I think Shai Agassi could be excellent candidate for that position.
The article is a little on the long side but I think it's worth the read.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
East and West: Never the Twain Shall Meet?
If you’re American, geographically inclined and a bit of a stickler, this cartographic incongruity is a bit of an annoyance. From the US, the shortest route to what’s conventionally called ‘the East’ is in fact via the west. Going in that direction, you’ll hit the ‘Far East’ before you’re in the ‘Middle East’. And Europe, or at least that part usually included in ‘the West’, lies due east. So East is west, and West is east, in blatant contradiction of what’s probably Rudyard Kipling’s most famous line of verse:
.
Oh, East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet
... find out more on Strange Maps after the click.
Sunday, November 02, 2008
Tapping the Vortex for Green Energy
WIRED
A bane of Big Oil's offshore rigs could become a boon for renewable energy.
By tapping the natural motion of slow-moving water, a new hydrokinetic generator could open vast new swaths of the ocean for energy production.
When ocean currents flow over any kind of cylinder, like the long cables that hold drilling platforms in place, small vortices are created. They eventually spin away, or shed, causing vibrations that over time can destroy an oil rig's moorings.
Now, a University of Michigan engineer who long worked on suppressing this phenomenon, has developed a prototype energy-harvester that can capture the mechanical energy it creates.
... the rest after the click.
A bane of Big Oil's offshore rigs could become a boon for renewable energy.
By tapping the natural motion of slow-moving water, a new hydrokinetic generator could open vast new swaths of the ocean for energy production.
When ocean currents flow over any kind of cylinder, like the long cables that hold drilling platforms in place, small vortices are created. They eventually spin away, or shed, causing vibrations that over time can destroy an oil rig's moorings.
Now, a University of Michigan engineer who long worked on suppressing this phenomenon, has developed a prototype energy-harvester that can capture the mechanical energy it creates.
... the rest after the click.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
Al Gore's New Slide Show
In Al Gore's brand-new slideshow (premiering exclusively on TED.com), he presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of "generational mission" -- the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement -- to set it right. Gore's stirring presentation is followed by a brief Q&A in which he is asked for his verdict on the current political candidates' climate policies and on what role he himself might play in future.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
Few Scientists Warm to Skeptics Conference
reposted from Full Frontal Scruteny
The Heartland Institute's "2008 International Conference on Climate Change" in New York was "a sort of global warming doppelganger conference, where everything was reversed," reports Juliet Eilperin. At the event, skeptics unveiled their response to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, edited by corporate-funded skeptic Fred Singer, argued that "recent climate change stems from natural causes." Eilperin notes that "while the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists." The New York Times reports that while the Heartland conference "was largely framed around science ... when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so." The conference invitation identified its goal as "to generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science." The Heartland Institute offered "$1,000 to those willing to give a talk," and "a free weekend at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan, including travel costs, to all elected officials wanting to attend," according to the RealClimate blog.
The Heartland Institute's "2008 International Conference on Climate Change" in New York was "a sort of global warming doppelganger conference, where everything was reversed," reports Juliet Eilperin. At the event, skeptics unveiled their response to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) report, edited by corporate-funded skeptic Fred Singer, argued that "recent climate change stems from natural causes." Eilperin notes that "while the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists." The New York Times reports that while the Heartland conference "was largely framed around science ... when an organizer made an announcement asking all of the scientists in the large hall to move to the front for a group picture, 19 men did so." The conference invitation identified its goal as "to generate international media attention to the fact that many scientists believe forecasts of rapid warming and catastrophic events are not supported by sound science." The Heartland Institute offered "$1,000 to those willing to give a talk," and "a free weekend at the Marriott Marquis in Manhattan, including travel costs, to all elected officials wanting to attend," according to the RealClimate blog.
Friday, March 07, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
Map reveals extent of human damage to oceans
NewScientist.com news service / Phil McKenna, Boston
Human activities have strongly impacted 41% of the world's oceans and have left only about 4% of their surface area relatively pristine, according to the first-ever global map of human impact upon the oceans.
The new atlas highlights the significant effects humans have had on even the most remote seas and could help guide future conservation efforts, but the findings have also drawn criticism from at least one marine biologist who questions the subjective nature of the ambitious study.
More after the click.
My comment: Should we be filing this under the heading "Droning In Our Own Poop"?
Human activities have strongly impacted 41% of the world's oceans and have left only about 4% of their surface area relatively pristine, according to the first-ever global map of human impact upon the oceans.
The new atlas highlights the significant effects humans have had on even the most remote seas and could help guide future conservation efforts, but the findings have also drawn criticism from at least one marine biologist who questions the subjective nature of the ambitious study.
More after the click.
My comment: Should we be filing this under the heading "Droning In Our Own Poop"?
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Where to start?
AUSTIN, Texas -
Everything's big in Texas — big pickup trucks, big SUVs and the state's big carbon footprint, too. Texans' fondness for large, manly vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation.
The headquarters state of America's oil industry spewed 670 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2003, enough that Texas would rank seventh in the world if it were its own country, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The amount is more than that of California and Pennsylvania — the second- and third-ranking states — combined.
A multitude of factors contribute to the carbon output, among them: Texas' 19 coal-burning power plants; a heavy concentration of refineries and chemical plants; a lack of mass transit; and a penchant among ranchers and urban cowboys alike for brawny, gas-guzzling trucks — sometimes to haul things, but often just to look Texas tough.
More after the click ...
My comment: Pro-lifers with a suicidal lifestyle ... with the added pro-life bonus of the most efficient death row in the country.
In 2007, 42 persons in 10 States were executed -- 26 in Texas; 3 each in Alabama and Oklahoma; 2 each in Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee; and 1 each in South Dakota, Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona.
It would appear we have lots more than just "GW" for which to thank Texas.
Everything's big in Texas — big pickup trucks, big SUVs and the state's big carbon footprint, too. Texans' fondness for large, manly vehicles has helped make the Lone Star State the biggest carbon polluter in the nation.
The headquarters state of America's oil industry spewed 670 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2003, enough that Texas would rank seventh in the world if it were its own country, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The amount is more than that of California and Pennsylvania — the second- and third-ranking states — combined.
A multitude of factors contribute to the carbon output, among them: Texas' 19 coal-burning power plants; a heavy concentration of refineries and chemical plants; a lack of mass transit; and a penchant among ranchers and urban cowboys alike for brawny, gas-guzzling trucks — sometimes to haul things, but often just to look Texas tough.
More after the click ...
My comment: Pro-lifers with a suicidal lifestyle ... with the added pro-life bonus of the most efficient death row in the country.
In 2007, 42 persons in 10 States were executed -- 26 in Texas; 3 each in Alabama and Oklahoma; 2 each in Indiana, Ohio, and Tennessee; and 1 each in South Dakota, Georgia, South Carolina, and Arizona.
It would appear we have lots more than just "GW" for which to thank Texas.
Tuesday, January 15, 2008
Pop quiz
from moveOn.org
In the last year, the major TV networks asked the presidential candidates 2,679 questions. Pop quiz: How many were about global warming?
A) 514—after all, it's one of the top issues facing the country
B) 165—as many as were asked about illegal immigration
C) 3—the same number asked about UFOs
If you guessed 3, you're right: Reporters asked as many questions about UFOs as they did about the climate crisis—the biggest threat to our planet.
Check out the petition ...
The petition to the reporters says: "The American public deserves to know where all the candidates stand on the climate crisis and the solutions they propose to address it. Asking those questions is your responsibility."
In the last year, the major TV networks asked the presidential candidates 2,679 questions. Pop quiz: How many were about global warming?
A) 514—after all, it's one of the top issues facing the country
B) 165—as many as were asked about illegal immigration
C) 3—the same number asked about UFOs
If you guessed 3, you're right: Reporters asked as many questions about UFOs as they did about the climate crisis—the biggest threat to our planet.
Check out the petition ...
The petition to the reporters says: "The American public deserves to know where all the candidates stand on the climate crisis and the solutions they propose to address it. Asking those questions is your responsibility."
Thursday, January 10, 2008
And you think oil prices are a problem NOW ...
NEW DELHI —
India's Tata Motors on Thursday unveiled the world's cheapest car, bringing new mobility within the reach of tens of millions of people and nightmares to environmentalists, traffic engineers and safety advocates.
Company Chairman Ratan Tata, introducing the Nano ... price tag $2,500 ... during India's main auto show, drove onto a stage in a white version of the tiny four-door subcompact, his head nearly scraping the roof.
With a snub nose and a sloping roof, it can fit five people ... if they squeeze. And the basic version is spare: there's no radio, no passenger-side mirror and only one windshield wiper. If you want air conditioning to cope with India's brutal summers, you need to get the deluxe version.
But it's cheap. The Nano's closest competitor here is the Maruti 800, a four-door that sells for nearly twice as much.
More after the click ...
My comment: What happens to the price of oil when India and China produce 3,000,000,000 new drives, all wanting to toodle down the block to the grocery store?
Sunday, January 06, 2008
The Microwave Magician
PopSci - Best of What's New 2007
I’m not sure if I’m watching a magic trick, or an invention that will make the cigar-chomping 64-year-old next to me the richest man on the planet. Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine — a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup — turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm.
The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects — or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running).
Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil.
More on Popular Science after the click ...
I’m not sure if I’m watching a magic trick, or an invention that will make the cigar-chomping 64-year-old next to me the richest man on the planet. Everything that goes into Frank Pringle’s recycling machine — a piece of tire, a rock, a plastic cup — turns to oil and natural gas seconds later. “I’ve been told the oil companies might try to assassinate me,” Pringle says without sarcasm.
The machine is a microwave emitter that extracts the petroleum and gas hidden inside everyday objects — or at least anything made with hydrocarbons, which, it turns out, is most of what’s around you. Every hour, the first commercial version will turn 10 tons of auto waste — tires, plastic, vinyl — into enough natural gas to produce 17 million BTUs of energy (it will use 956,000 of those BTUs to keep itself running).
Pringle created the machine about 10 years ago after he drove by a massive tire fire and thought about the energy being released. He went home and threw bits of a tire in a microwave emitter he’d been working with for another project. It turned to what looked like ash, but a few hours later, he returned and found a black puddle on the floor of the unheated workshop. Somehow, he’d struck oil.
More on Popular Science after the click ...
Tuesday, January 01, 2008
Mother Nature is Not Our Friend
by Sam Harris / on Edge
Like many people, I once trusted in the wisdom of Nature. I imagined that there were real boundaries between the natural and the artificial, between one species and another, and thought that, with the advent of genetic engineering, we would be tinkering with life at our peril. I now believe that this romantic view of Nature is a stultifying and dangerous mythology.
Every 100 million years or so, an asteroid or comet the size of a mountain smashes into the earth, killing nearly everything that lives. If ever we needed proof of Nature's indifference to the welfare of complex organisms such as ourselves, there it is. The history of life on this planet has been one of merciless destruction and blind, lurching renewal.
The fossil record suggests that individual species survive, on average, between one and ten million years. The concept of a "species" is misleading, however, and it tempts us to think that we, as homo sapiens, have arrived at some well-defined position in the natural order. The term "species" merely designates a population of organisms that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring; it cannot be aptly applied to the boundaries between species (to what are often called "intermediate" or "transitional" forms). There was, for instance, no first member of the human species, and there are no canonical members now. Life is a continuous flux. Our nonhuman ancestors bred, generation after generation, and incrementally begat what we now deem to be the species homo sapiens — ourselves. There is nothing about our ancestral line or about our current biology that dictates how we will evolve in the future. Nothing in the natural order demands that our descendants resemble us in any particular way. Very likely, they will not resemble us. We will almost certainly transform ourselves, likely beyond recognition, in the generations to come.
The rest after the click ...
Monday, December 17, 2007
The World to the US
Bali - Climate Change Conference
"We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."
The conference exploded with applause, the U.S. delegation backed down, and the way was cleared yesterday for adoption of the "Bali road map" after a dramatic half-hour that set the stage for a grinding two years of climate talks to come.
My comment: How far we've fallen in the eyes of the world. How great our loss of credibility!
In our press to protect short term economic stability we have ignored the long term consequences and abdicated our position as leaders of the world. The long term consequences are almost universally recognized in the scientific community ... that part of the scientific community not on corporate PR payrolls ... and those consequences are dire. The long term economic consequences are far greater than any of the imagined short term consequences inherent in taking action.
But, if you believe that the second coming is at hand and you believe that you are in a position to "bring it on" ... well, the best course of action on this issue is in-action and that is precisely what our so-called leadership has been doing.
File it all under "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time ... but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
"We seek your leadership. But if for some reason you are not willing to lead, leave it to the rest of us. Please get out of the way."
The conference exploded with applause, the U.S. delegation backed down, and the way was cleared yesterday for adoption of the "Bali road map" after a dramatic half-hour that set the stage for a grinding two years of climate talks to come.
My comment: How far we've fallen in the eyes of the world. How great our loss of credibility!
In our press to protect short term economic stability we have ignored the long term consequences and abdicated our position as leaders of the world. The long term consequences are almost universally recognized in the scientific community ... that part of the scientific community not on corporate PR payrolls ... and those consequences are dire. The long term economic consequences are far greater than any of the imagined short term consequences inherent in taking action.
But, if you believe that the second coming is at hand and you believe that you are in a position to "bring it on" ... well, the best course of action on this issue is in-action and that is precisely what our so-called leadership has been doing.
File it all under "You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time ... but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."
Thursday, November 22, 2007
Manufactured Landscapes
a feature documentary by Jennifer Baichwal
Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.
In interesting perspective on the effects of globalization, corporatization, and the changes in the world over the course of my lifetime. Stunning and thought provoking.
The photography is beautiful; the subject matter is something very different.
Of course, if you believe that human beings don't have an impact on the environment; that there's no way we could effect global warming; that pollution is only a minor problem ... then you probably want to avoid watching this one.
Available from Netflix and other DVD rental sources. RENT IT!
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
The Scientists Speak
New York Times
The world’s scientists have done their job. Now it’s time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest — and the most powerful — report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world’s most authoritative voice on global warming.
Released in Spain over the weekend, the report leaves no doubt that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation) have been responsible for the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures.
If these emissions are not brought under control, the report predicts, the consequences could be disastrous: further melting at the poles, sea levels rising high enough to submerge island nations, the elimination of one-quarter or more of the world’s species, widespread famine in places like Africa, more violent hurricanes.
And it warns that time is running out. To avoid the worst of these disasters, it says, the world must stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by 2015, begin to reduce them shortly thereafter and largely free itself of carbon-emitting technologies by midcentury.
As Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who leads the I.P.C.C., noted: “What we do in the next two or three years will define our future.”
More after the click ...
The world’s scientists have done their job. Now it’s time for world leaders, starting with President Bush, to do theirs. That is the urgent message at the core of the latest — and the most powerful — report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,500 scientists who collectively constitute the world’s most authoritative voice on global warming.
Released in Spain over the weekend, the report leaves no doubt that man-made emissions from the burning of fossil fuels (and, to a lesser extent, deforestation) have been responsible for the steady rise in atmospheric temperatures.
If these emissions are not brought under control, the report predicts, the consequences could be disastrous: further melting at the poles, sea levels rising high enough to submerge island nations, the elimination of one-quarter or more of the world’s species, widespread famine in places like Africa, more violent hurricanes.
And it warns that time is running out. To avoid the worst of these disasters, it says, the world must stabilize emissions of greenhouse gases by 2015, begin to reduce them shortly thereafter and largely free itself of carbon-emitting technologies by midcentury.
As Rajendra Pachauri, a scientist and economist who leads the I.P.C.C., noted: “What we do in the next two or three years will define our future.”
More after the click ...
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