Climate Scientists Frustrated

Think climate change is going to be tough for other, poorer nations but a breeze for the United States? Think again, according to this article in Salon (see intro below.)

How dire is the climate situation? Consider what Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations' prestigious Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said last month: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment." Pachauri has the distinction, or misfortune, of being both an engineer and an economist, two professions not known for overheated rhetoric.
In fact, far from being an alarmist, Pachauri was specifically chosen as IPCC chair in 2002 after the Bush administration waged a successful campaign to have him replace the outspoken Dr. Robert Watson, who was opposed by fossil fuel companies like ExxonMobil. So why is a normally low-key scientist getting more desperate in his efforts to spur the planet to action?
Part of the answer is the most recent IPCC assessment report. For the first time in six years, more than 2,000 of the world's top scientists reviewed and synthesized all of the scientific knowledge about global warming. The Fourth Assessment Report makes clear that the accelerating emissions of human-generated heat-trapping gases has brought the planet close to crossing a threshold that will lead to irreversible catastrophe. Yet like Cassandra's warning about the Trojan horse, the IPCC report has fallen on deaf ears, especially those of conservative politicians, even as its findings are the most grave to date.
Part of this is due to the IPCC's own media naiveté. It doesn't put a lot of thought into publicizing its reports; heck, it released this final synthesis on Nov. 17 -- a Saturday! -- in Valencia, Spain. Not exactly the best way to get attention from the most intransigent and important audience: Americans. How little attention? According to Technorati.com, as of Dec. 11, the synthesis report had some 265 blog reactions, where the Aug. 24 YouTube video of Miss Teen South Carolina struggling to explain why a fifth of Americans can't locate the U.S. on a world map had more than 5,300 blog reactions. Hmmm. Perhaps these two things are related. But I digress.
With such poor notice for a seminal document, more than 200 scientists last week took the remarkable step of issuing a plea at the United Nations climate change conference in Bali. Global greenhouse gas emissions, they declared, "must peak and decline in the next 10 to 15 years, so there is no time to lose." The Associated Press headline on the statement was "Scientists Beg for Climate Action." What will we drive climate scientists to next? A hunger strike?

Interfaith Power and Light is a religious response to global warming with chapters in 25 states and Greater Washington, D.C. Find a link to your local chapter at http://www.theregenerationproject.org/State.
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A Billion Climate Refugees

That's billion with a "B." A billion people, as in just under one sixth of the world's population, could be displaced by climate changes, according to a report being released this week. An article about the report in The Age says,

GLOBAL warming will create at least 1 billion refugees by 2050 as water shortages and crop failures force people to leave their homes, sparking local wars over access to resources, a leading aid agency has said.
Published to mark Christian Aid Week, the report said the numbers of displaced people would dwarf the refugee crisis that followed World War II. Released yesterday, the report, Human Tide: The Real Migration Crisis, said that unless urgent action was taken, the added problems brought by environmental changes would spiral out of control.
Christian Aid said that as the developed world was responsible for most of the climate-changing pollution, it should bear the brunt of the cost of helping those worst hit by it — the poor.
"We believe that forced migration is now the most urgent threat facing poor people in the developing world," said lead author John Davison.
Scientists predict that average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 3 degrees this century because of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, causing floods and famines and putting million of lives at risk.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that by 2080, up to 3.2 billion people — a third of the planet's population — will be short of water. Up to 600 million will be short of food and up to 7 million will face coastal flooding.
"We estimate that, unless strong preventative action is taken, between now and 2050 climate change will push the number of displaced people globally to at least 1 billion," the Christian Aid report said.

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Emergency Climate Summit?

On Tuesday the UN environment agency pressured new Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon to call an emergency climate summit. The summit, which would likely take place in September, would include about twenty world leaders and push for a successor agreement to the Kyoto Protocol.

According to a Reuters article in the NY Times,

On Friday, the broadest scientific study of the human effect on the climate is set to conclude there is at least a 90 percent chance that human activities, mainly burning fossil fuels, are to blame for most of the warming in the last 50 years.
In a previous report in 2001, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said the link was at least 66 percent certain. IPCC experts are meeting in Paris to discuss and approve the draft report.
The report is also set to warn that average global temperatures will rise to 2.0 to 4.5 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 8.1 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels by 2100, with a ''best estimate'' of a 3.0 C (5.4 F) rise, scientists say.
Another section of the report, due in April, is expected to warn that between 1.1 and 3.2 billion people will face water shortages by the end of the century and hundreds of millions will go hungry, according to Australia's The Age newspaper.
Coastal flooding will hit another 7 million homes.

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Climate Change and Insurance

This is an analysis of something you hear little about: the fact that the Insurance industry is banking on serious climate change in order to protect the bottom line. It originally appeared in The Washington Post. Read about it in the "Free Internet Press."