Erik Rasmussen Urges Action On Climate Change: 'We Are Running Out Of Time' (VIDEO)

Denmark's Erik Rasmussen, one of the world's leading figures in the public debate over climate change, shares his colleagues' frustrations over the widespread disregard and denial of the global crisis.

But the founder and CEO of Scandinavia's largest think tank, Monday Morning, hasn't given up hope yet -- even if, as he says, "more big disasters" might be what it takes to convince the public to take on the "biggest challenge ever."

"We've failed all along -- the politicians failed, business failed, science failed, media failed," Rasmussen told The Huffington Post, noting the missed chances include the 2009 climate conference in his home country. "But there is still time for setting a new agenda."

His sights are now set on a couple key opportunities: The next United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa, at the end of November, and the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) next June in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

To maximize the potential for success, Rasmussen said there needed to be a new kind of leadership that is representative of society -- from members of "the next generation" to "an extended version of business" that goes beyond the usual clean-tech companies to include fashion, art and film.

"People don't trust politicians," said Rasmussen.

And the pressure is on. An international climate agreement that was drawn up in the late 1990s, the Kyoto Protocol, is set to expire next year.

"We are running out of time, and running out of possibilities," Rasmussen added. "But threats provide innovation."

Jacob Zuma, President of the Republic of South Africa, underscored this sense of urgency when he spoke on a panel this Tuesday at the Clinton Global Initiative annual conference in New York City. "We all agree that climate change is a danger to humanity," he said. "We need to come to an agreement that encompasses all of us, even though we're affected somewhat differently."

"For small island nations, it is not a theoretical danger. For them, it's a question of life and death," added President Zuma. "They can’t understand why we’re failing to realize that, and therefore whenever we come out of these conferences, they come out the most dissatisfied."

One of the key issues, according to former U.S. President Bill Clinton, is the great "disconnect between where the money is, where profits are made and where the burdens fall."

The biggest losers tend to be the poorest countries. "I think it's quite possible that the Maldives won't be here in 30 or 40 years," he said, while speaking on the same panel. In addition to sea level rise, President Clinton noted the dangers many other nations face as temperatures rise and patterns of rainfall and drought change.

Mexico is another one of the vulnerable countries already feeling the effects. "Last year we had the worst rains ever in Mexico, and this year we are living with the worst drought ever," said Felipe Calderon, President of the Mexico, also a member of the panel.

While Rasmussen is "sorry to say" that natural disasters can speak volumes, and inspire action, he also emphasized the need for a "new language" that will "get people to understand that this is not something that is happening in the far future, but something related to your life right now."

Through his new Project Green Light, he aims to make this idea "visual" and "visceral."

President Clinton offered a similar message to his conference's attendees: "You have to change the experience of people," he said. He, too, noted the importance of the public's engagement on the issue -- as long as it's in a way that is supported by science.

"If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial," he said during a separate session at CGI. "I mean, it makes us –- we look like a joke, right? You can’t win the nomination of one of the major parties in the country if you admit that the scientists are right."

Jens Stoltenberg, Prime Minister of Norway, also noted during the Tuesday panel that it would be "completely irresponsible to base our policies on an assumption that the majority of scientific advice we get is wrong."

"You have to understand that it is in your hands, it's in your power to change the situation," Rasmussen told HuffPost. "Because right there, next to you, are certain possibilities you can adopt and you can use that can prevent this."

According to President Clinton, these alternatives can also be economic winners, and said the economic return on greater energy efficiency is four times that of traditional energy investments. "We have to get ordinary people to understand that this is not an economic problem, but an economic opportunity," he said.

"People have to feel and experience that," added President Clinton. "We're still a long way from having a critical mass of people who have seen evidence that climate change can be defeated in a way that broadens economic growth and prosperity."

"We have all the tools," said Rasmussen, "just not the mindset yet."

Comments

[TalkAlot]

12:49 PM on 10/29/2011

Carl Sagan:

- Those who are sceptical about carbon dioxide greenhouse warming might profitably note the massive greenhouse effect on Venus. No one proposes that Venus's greenhouse effect derives from imprudent Venusians who burned too much coal, drove fuel-inefficient autos, and cut down their forests. My point is different. The climatological history of our planetary neighbour, an otherwise Earthlike planet on which the surface became hot enough to melt tin or lead, is worth considering—especially by those who say that the increasing greenhouse effect on Earth will be self-correcting, that we don't really have to worry about it, or (you can see this in the publications of some groups that call themselves conservative) that the greenhouse effect is a "hoax."

[HP-reader]

05:22 PM on 10/05/2011

RE: 'too expensive to fix'
1. We have no choice. Within a radius of several thousand AU around there is nothing like the Earth (even at first approximation).
2. This thing with CO2 is a 'one way ticket'. If it is too expensive to fix why are we going there at all?
3. It can be fixed in many ways (at least significantly delayed) but the problem is that some people should change their approach of 'fixing the things' (like for example the financial system by printing more money to prevent the pyramid of Modern Money Mechanics from sinking, based on the idea that so and so the pyramid is built on quicksand it could be made bigger (hoping this will fix the things, somehow).
With the CO2 is seen exactly the same approach - we have CO2 in the air (which is not the end of the world for now), but nobody has the vaguest idea of how it will be cleaned up from there (and from the ocean). This cleaning requires energy, the production of which will emit another CO2 (so far the energy production is based on fossil fuels).
On the other hand nobody knows how much CO2 will be needed to switch over from fossil fuels to solar energy ... and as we don't know this and that, and a lot of other things, the best thing that could be done is to increase the CO2 as much and as fast as possible. Words fail me.

[MrBIgp]

01:32 AM on 10/06/2011

".. but nobody has the vaguest idea of how it will be cleaned up.."
Klaus Lackner has ideas.
http://www.earth.columbia.edu/articles/view/2523

[REMEMBER2050]

04:14 PM on 10/12/2011

Nobody has the vaguest idea? How about this book, which was released in 2007: http://ases.org/images/stories/file/ASES/climate_change.pdf

What about Al Gore's book, "Our Choice?" Bitch all you like about Gore being a capitalist--he spared no expense to produce expert reporting on the current state of renewables.

What about everything that was published between these books and subsequently? Like even a recent paper Jim Hansen co-authored?

What about the brilliant examples of installations ALREADY BUILT, like a power tower in Spain with an array of solar collectors and 15 HOURS WORTH OF STORAGE? In other words, baseline. A complete replacement for coal. One example from thousands of installations.

There is a plethora of currently available technology waiting. Sure, more research is needed to reduce costs and produce even more efficiency. Should we wait instead for that famous clean coal--that pie-in-the-sky crap that makes conservatives like Palin wax ecstatic? Should we continue to subsidize oil and gas to make the market artificially non-competitive?

There's a field of expertise that understands EXACTLY how to stop CO2 production NOW: engineering.

[maxwells]

03:20 PM on 10/02/2011

Common lame excuses:

1. It's not warming. (collective satellite and surface station data says it is)

2. Warming isn't due to CO2 (CO2 already warms Earth by 55 degs F. and it's increasing­­)

....a. the sun (we're at a solar minimum but 2010 tied for warmest year)

....b. cosmic rays (initial papers all disproved)

....c. natural variations (flltering them out leaves steadily accelerati­­ng warming)

....d. volcanoes (emit less than 1% the CO2 humans do)

....e. water vapor (temperatu­re rise due to CO2 quickly increases water vapor, but not vice versa.)

3. Increased CO2 isn't man-made (changing C13/C12 ratio shows it is)

4. smaller than our evidence indicates. (huh?)

5. too expensive to fix (ignores catastroph­­ic cost of doing nothing)

6. China's doing nothing; why should we? (During 2010 they installed >1/2 the world's new wind energy.)

7. hopeless (true, given that attitude)

8. God ordained (She only speaks to saints. Are you one?)

9. global conspiracy of 10,000 scientists (herding them is like cats. But the Exxon/Koch Brothers/r­igh­t wing think tank conspiracy is well-docum­ented.)

10. Gore, Gore, Gore (just another messenger. So what?)

All bogus

What we should really talk about are deniers' true motives, like:

1. Rigid, free market ideology

2. Sloth

3. Knee-jerk opposition to anything progressiv­­e

4. Vested fossil fuel interests (HuffPo's numerous trolls and bots)

[MrBIgp]

01:39 AM on 10/06/2011

"5. too expensive to fix (ignores catastroph­­­ic cost of doing nothing)"
So, how much will it cost to fix? I've never gotten a straight answer to that question.

[maxwells]

02:15 PM on 10/06/2011

Assuming you're honestly asking, here's one hard-nosed hedge fund guy's take on the subject.

http://8020vision.com/2010/08/02/jeremy-grantham-everything-you-need-to-know-about-global-warming-in-5-minutes/

But if you want a more thorough perspective, there's the U.K.'s Stern Review. compiled by Nicholas Stern, the World Bank's former Chief Economist, now at the London School of Economics, who lately figures a 2% annual drag on GDP, vs. perhaps an eventual 20% drag if we do nothing.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/lord-stern-on-global-warming-its-even-worse-than-i-thought-1643957.html

U.S. GDP is nominally $14 trillion, but 70% of that is services, which the rest of the world actually values at about 50%. So, perhaps real U.S. GDP is ~$9 trillion, which suggests an annual global warming mitigation cost here of ~ $180 Billion, or roughly what we've paid annually for Iraq/Afghanistan during this decade.

Or there's Harvard's Martin Weitzman:

http://www.economics.harvard.edu/faculty/weitzman/files/ExtremeUncertaintyCliCh.pdf en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_climate_change_mitigation

Or, Yale: http://environment.yale.edu/news/Research/5624

Or maybe you want a general overview first...climate change econ lite.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_climate_change_mitigation

There's lots more, but Lomborg's analysis is beyond flawed; it's bogus.

[maxwells]

02:18 PM on 10/06/2011

Hmm...let's try links 2 and 3 again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stern_Review

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/lord-stern-on-global-warming-its-even-worse-than-i-thought-1643957.html

[FreeHat]

06:57 PM on 09/27/2011

'famine in Africa' as evidence of a link between climate change and natural disasters. rofl.

We are the World, anyone?

[alteredstory]

04:20 PM on 09/27/2011

What gets me is how it's "greed" if it's green companies trying to make a profit, but it's "capitalism" if it's fossil fuels companies.

[jimboy71]

05:19 PM on 09/27/2011

The only rich capitalists they hate are Al and George. The rest get a pass for some odd reason.

[luminavi]

11:13 PM on 09/26/2011

When Mt. Tambora erupts in a few days or weeks, it will probably release more sulfur, carbon gases and smoke and earth into the atmosphere in ONE week than all of humanity did in the last 100 years.

Silly alarmists. We're fleas on a dog, and one day soon, that dog will shake us off, whether we like it or not.

Civilizations and millions of species have been destroyed by the planet in the past.
Happened before, will happen again, and there's absolutely NOTHING we can do about it.

So get over it, and enjoy our moment in the sun. The planet is more than 2 billion years old. If that were a day, the entire length of human existence is but 10 seconds in that day.

[jimboy71]

05:20 PM on 09/27/2011

Actually, vulcanism contributes less than one percent per annum to the CO2 in the atmosphere.

[luminavi]

08:17 PM on 09/29/2011

That 'less than one percent' caused global temperatures to drop in 1992 and 1993 by approximately one per cent.

And that was just from ONE volcano. A big one, with emphasis on the word ONE.

[texfly]

08:52 PM on 09/29/2011

luminavi:"When Mt. Tambora erupts in a few days or weeks, it will probably release more sulfur, carbon gases and smoke and earth into the atmosphere in ONE week than all of humanity did in the last 100 years"

A soothsayer and inventor of "facts". No truth here. Volcanos do cause cooling, but only temporarily. Nothing like the continuous, steady +1.6 C/century we are currently experiencing.

luminavi: "...and there's absolutely NOTHING we can do about it.

And so we DO what we can do, to offset what WE DO. That's all.

luminavi: "The planet is more than 2 billion years old. If that were a day, the entire length of human existence is but 10 seconds in that day."

By your logic, there has been no impact of human existence nor any consequences from it. The accomplishments and destruction humans have done are unnoticeable to the species of the world. You have your head buried in the sand.

[lambdin1]

01:50 PM on 09/26/2011

One more voice to the chorus! But GREED is still winning!

[JHKH]

11:00 PM on 09/25/2011

I just read this on Science Daily about carbon sequestering ... maybe there is a splinter of hope...

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110923130112.htm

[alteredstory]

04:16 PM on 09/27/2011

There are a number of splinters of hope, I think, but it will require a level of pro-activeness that is, I think, unfamiliar to most of us.

It's such a massive issue that it can be daunting even to try to figure out where to begin. That said, I think we CAN make progress - it just won't be easy or quick.

[jimboy71]

05:21 PM on 09/27/2011

Like the artificial "leaves" that use sunlight to split water into oxygen and hydrogen. Which can then be burned to generate energy, producing water vapour as a by-product.

[kadellagroove]

10:47 PM on 09/25/2011

This is a travesty. Nature exists with or without our feeble politics. But when it comes to the effects we have on nature some of us have framed the issue as an entirely political issue. IT has nothing to do with politics! Its just... it just is.

I mean, its getting very difficult to even comprehend new ways to try to explain it to deniers. This isn't opinion. its physics and biology and chemistry. and we didn't invent these forms of science, we just named them. they are just ways for us to observe and predict what happens in the natural world.

People speak about this issue as if progressive scientist invented the way that the earth works to fit some political or economic agenda. but thats not how science works.

this is like the dark ages all over again.

[Genders]

03:19 PM on 09/25/2011

Clinton has placed the finally nail in the Republic of the USA. His DLC centrist approach, has corrupted the democratic party, to where they are no enablers of the Reaganomics GOP/Tea agenda, because they sold out to the same people. DLC admin Obama crushed the citizens hope for a more Locke Liberal founder type gov by pretending to be a progressive, when in fact all his economic actions are Reaganomics.

Obama has already sold out to the fossil and nukes companies to get elected. Rahm and Axelrod lobbied for the nukes power companies, Obama's admin sold nuke power tech to s America the week after the Japan nuke disaster, and Chu's official energy plan uses 1993 green energy cost versus 2016 industry PR numbers for fossil and nukes.

Obama and the DLC charmed us. They are bought and sold.

Vote for the Kucinich, Grayson, Dean CPC progressives in the Dems primaries if you want green energy, Obama and the DLC won't do it. Obviously the GOP/Tea wont' either.

[lbsaltzman]

11:41 PM on 09/25/2011

Unfortunately Kucinich, and Grayson can't get elected and Dean doesn't seem to run. Obama looks mediocre until you compare him to the Republican candidates who are truly appalling.

[energydem]

09:10 AM on 09/27/2011

Totally agree with you, lb, complete loser strategy. How many votes did Kucinich get when he ran? Three or four?

This brilliant strategy would give us President Perry, Secretary of Energy, Joe "stop picking on BP" Barton, Science Advisor John "climate change, what climate change?" Boehner (assuming Perry wouldn't get rid of the position), Secretary of the Treasury, Michelle "if we paid no taxes at all we would be a great nation" Bachmann, and how about Mitch "never met a coal plant I didn't love" McConnell. I would go with Obama over unelectable, already demonstrated loser Democrats any day.

[Andrew Harvey]

05:49 AM on 09/25/2011

Even if that is true about the Maldives not being here in 40 years; who cares? The Maldives are a tiny collection of dots in the Indian Ocean, they can go colonize Madagascar.

[gallon]

06:52 AM on 09/25/2011

Heartless Harvey says: "who cares"

Well, perhaps the residents care, Harvey.

[ubrew12]

07:14 PM on 09/25/2011

Let em eat cake, Harvey. And consider what happened to the last person who said that.

[HP-reader]

01:49 AM on 09/25/2011

RE: 'If we go to gas-methane diesel and water fuel emulsions ... a lot of people will loose their jobs'
Words fail me. I get curious how will this happen?!
If you mean that a lot of people living on easy makering - yes, that is the idea. All the parasites on this planet should be put under control (get extinguish). It doesn't matter whether they call themselves 'investors'. investing 'their' money for 10 nanoseconds in High Frequency Trading with economic effect of absolute zero in any scale, or not.

[HP-reader]

12:09 AM on 09/25/2011

RE: ... 'the solar industry' ...
Most of the greeN projects are not implemented because of greeD. The easy makers cannot find a way to make fast and easy money with that, or sooner there are other more lucrative ways to make easy money (like for example wasting the resources of the planet).
The solar industry is not only the PV. You can fill for example a glass package with CO2 and put it on the roof of the greenhouse and you will save 15% - 20% of your energy bill (which is the equivalent of producing energy without a carbon footprint), but the problem is that the easy makers could not make fast and easy money with this (the money will go to you), so this technology is intercepted and becomes apocryphal.

[Gebby]

10:39 PM on 09/24/2011

The denial includes wall street which is selling solar stocks like the solar industry does not have a future. Many of these stocks trade at one times earnings. Do we have the guts to speak up? If so sign my petition to the president and congress to support clean energy. http://signon.org/sign/increase-government-support.fb1?source=c.fb&r_by=548645

[TheOuroborus]

08:49 PM on 09/24/2011

"If you’re an American, the best thing you can do is to make it politically unacceptable for people to engage in denial..." LOL! Tell THAT to an Okie from Muskogee and you're likely to get buckshot in your behind.

[silverwolf13]

09:17 PM on 09/24/2011

Have you checked with people in Muscogee this year? Oklahoma suffered from tremendous heat and drought this year; that might have reduced the Congregation of the Denial.