The Global Warming Week That Was

New York, NY -- So what would a polar bear's take-away have been from the last week of global warming events -- is the ice-pack she depends on for a summer home more or less secure than it was a week ago?

At week's end, how does ursus maritimus -- or homo (allegedly) sapiens, for that matter -- add up the UN's huge conversation at the beginning of the week, the settlement of the GM strike, the Clinton Global Initiative at which global warming was the biggest focus by far, and George Bush's coalition of the polluting?

Well, globally at least, humanity seems to have made up its mind -- it's time for action. A new BBC World Services poll in 22 countries found overwhelming support for action, and action now.

An average of eight in ten (79%) say that 'human activity, including industry and transportation, is a significant cause of climate change.' Nine out of ten say that action is necessary to address global warming. A substantial majority (65%) choose the strongest position, saying that 'it is necessary to take major steps starting very soon.'

That global sentiment lay behind last Monday's day-long session at the United Nations, which President Bush stayed away from, but which 70 heads of state attended. According to the UN, the gathering "is aimed at securing political commitment and building momentum for the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali where negotiations about a new international climate agreement should start."

And there appeared to be huge momentum at the Clinton Global Initiative. In the opening session, Clinton tried to pin down World Bank President Robert Zoellick on his view of whether the bank needed to take a lead in helping Third World countries produce electricty without carbonizing, but Zoellick, who knows that the bank preferentially funds fossil-fuel developments, refused to commit. Later in the week, however, a clutch of public utilities agreed to establish an Institute for Electric Efficiency.

A coalition of eight American utilities collectively serving nearly 20 million customers in 22 states announced Thursday that they would focus on energy efficiency. For the Save-a-Watt Proposal, Duke Energy, Consolidated Edison, Edison International, Great Plains Energy, Pepco Holdings, PNM Resources, Sierra Pacific Resources and Xcel Energy pledged to increase their collective investment in energy efficiency. ....The utilities estimate that these changes will lead to the elimination of 30 million tons of green house gas emissions per year.

Many of these companies are still half-mired in the bad energy technologies of the past, but at least they see the need to start moving.

But then, at the end of the week, Bush assembled the world's largest carbon-emitting nations, basically to see if he could persuade them to bypass the UN's mandatory carbon emission targets in favor of much more modest "aspirational" goals. Bush again refused to commit the US to sign onto any mandatory treaty regime and urged instead that each country set its own goals and methodologies. Bush said this in spite of the fact that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, widely reported to be an advocate of a stronger US response, specifically conceded that it would be impossible to solve the global warming problem without international agreements. The press reported that Bush was evidently trying to change his, and the US's, image on global warming, but that it had not worked.

Bush made clear, however, that he saw his talks as complementary to the U.N. negotiations over what will succeed the Kyoto treaty after 2012. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon held a summit Monday to grease the wheels for an agreement in December in Bali, Indonesia. Bush has seemed more sensitive lately to perceptions in other parts of the world that the U.S. government either does not take the phenomenon of global warming seriously -- or seriously enough.

It may be too little, too late. As John Ashton, a special representative on climate change for the British foreign secretary, said: "One of the striking features of this meeting is how isolated this administration has become. There is absolutely no support that I can see in the international community that we can drive this effort on the basis of voluntary efforts."

So it was a mixed week for the polar bear. The world's leaders are clearly setting out to confront the problem, but the most important carbon emitter is still not on board.

Comments

[Boxorox]

Forget about Evo Morales.
Forget about public opinion too. Remember that, by definition, 50 percent of all people are below average intelligence.

Now, so what about the polar bear? The polar bears are doing fine, flourishing in fact. No land animal thrives living on ice, unless it some sort of bacteria. The polar bear populations have grown from 5000 in 1970 to about 25,000 today.

Global warming does not deserve a huge degree of our attention. It ranks way down the list of important things to consider and it doesn't really even need our attention, since climate change is almost entirely a natural process anyway. Lets work on things we can really influence, like real pollution.

[dobermanmacleod]

That idiot Bush, optional emissions limits will be about as effective as an optional speed limit on the highway. Look at how well it worked in TX, when he was governor (although it got him a whole lot of campaign donations from rich TX industrialists!).
By the way, get a load of this alarming news:
"There is no linear predictability in terms of how ecosystems respond. The phenomena of collapse is one that we have under-appreciated, partly because of the feed-back mechanisms that we are still trying to understand." Achim Steiner, head of the UN Environment Programme, Oct 2007
Leemans and Eickhout (2004) found that ecosystem adaptive capacity decreases rapidly with an increasing rate of climate change.
If the rate should exceed 0.4 C/decade, all ecosystems will be quickly destroyed.
According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global average temperature today is increasing by 0.2 C/decade.
This increase is caused by greenhouse gases we put into the atmosphere decades ago, due to the lag time between emission and temperature rise.
We have emitted nearly double the greenhouse gas since then, and are increasing our emissions at a rate of over 3% per year.
Therefore, in the next couple of decades we are facing the quick destruction of all the world's ecosystems, which will result in abrupt climate change (I suggest reading the Pentagon's alarming report on this subject).
Reference: Leemans og Eickhout, 2004, Another reason for concern: regional and global impacts on ecosystems for different levels of climate change, Global Environmental Change 14, 219"228.

[SamThornton]

"Homo sapiens?" Thought Bush changed that to "Heterosexual sapiens" after the '04 elections. No wonder his ratings are getting drowned in the rising tides. I know he says a rising tide raises all boats, but how about us poor goonies who don't have a boat? Sure hope global warming has an upside. Otherwise, don't know how...glub, glub, glub...

[batguano]

Evo Morales
pt4

I know that change is not easy when an extremely powerful sector has to renounce their extraordinary profits for the planet to survive. In my own country I suffer, with my head held high, this permanent sabotage because we are ending privileges so that everyone can ?Live Well? and not better than our counterparts. I know that change in the world is much more difficult than in my country, but I have absolute confidence in human beings, in their capacity to reason, to learn from mistakes, to recuperate their roots, and to change in order to forge a just, diverse, inclusive, equilibrated world in harmony with nature

Evo Morales Ayma
President of the Republic de Bolivia

September 24, 2007

[batguano]

Evo Morales
pt3

I am convinced that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, recently approved after so many years of struggle, needs to pass from paper to reality so that our knowledge and our participation can help to construct a new future of hope for all. Who else but the indigenous people, can point out the path for humanity in order to preserve nature, natural resources and the territories that we have inhabited from ancient times.

We need a profound change of direction, at the world wide level, so as to stop being the condemned of the earth. The countries of the north need to reduce their carbon emissions by between 60% and 80% if we want to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2? in what is left of this century, which would provoke global warming of catastrophic proportions for life and nature.

We need to create a World Environment Organisation which is binding, and which can discipline the World Trade Organisation, which is propelling as towards barbarism. We can no longer continue to talk of growth in Gross National Product without taking into consideration the destruction and wastage of natural resources. We need to adopt an indicator that allows us to consider, in a combined way, the Human Development Index and the Ecological Footprint in order to measure our environmental situation.

We need to apply harsh taxes on the super concentration of wealth, and adopt effective mechanisms for its equitable redistribution. It is not possible that three families can have an income superior to the combined GDP of the 48 poorest countries. We can not talk of equity and social justice whilst this situation continues.

The United States and Europe consume, on average, 8.4 times more that the world average. It is necessary for them to reduce their level of consumption and recognise that all of us are guests on this same land; of the same Pachamama.

[batguano]

Evo Morales
pt2

I read in the World Bank report that in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change we need to end subsidies on hydrocarbons, put a price on water and promote private investment in the clean energy sector. Once again they want to apply market recipes and privatisation in order to carry out business as usual, and with it, the same illnesses that these policies produce. The same occurs in the case of biofuels, given that to produce one litre of ethanol you require 12 litres of water. In the same way, to process one ton of agrifuels you need, on average, one hectare of land.

Faced with this situation, we ? the indigenous peoples and humble and honest inhabitants of this planet ? believe that the time has come to put a stop to this, in order to rediscover our roots, with respect for Mother Earth; with the Pachamama as we call it in the Andes. Today, the indigenous peoples of Latin America and the world have been called upon by history to convert ourselves into the vanguard of the struggle to defend nature and life.

I am convinced that the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, recently approved after so many years of struggle, needs to pass from paper to reality so that our knowledge and our participation can help to construct a new future of hope for all. Who else but the indigenous people, can point out the path for humanity in order to preserve nature, natural resources and the territories that we have inhabited from ancient times.

We need a profound change of direction, at the world wide level, so as to stop being the condemned of the earth. The countries of the north need to reduce their carbon emissions by between 60% and 80% if we want to avoid a temperature rise of more than 2? in what is left of this century, which would provoke global warming of catastrophic proportions for life and nature.

[batguano]

Letter from President Evo Morales to the member representatives of the United Nations on the issue of the environment.


part1

Sister and brother Presidents and Heads of States of the United Nations: The world is suffering from a fever due to climate change, and the disease is the capitalist development model. Whilst over 10,000 years the variation in carbon dioxide (CO2) levels on the planet was approximately 10%, during the last 200 years of industrial development, carbon emissions have increased by 30%. Since 1860, Europe and North America have contributed 70% of the emissions of CO2. 2005 was the hottest year in the last one thousand years on this planet.

Different investigations have demonstrated that out of the 40,170 living species that have been studied, 16,119 are in danger of extinction. One out of eight birds could disappear forever. One out of four mammals is under threat. One out of every three reptiles could cease to exist. Eight out of ten crustaceans and three out of four insects are at risk of extinction. We are living through the sixth crisis of the extinction of living species in the history of the planet and, on this occasion, the rate of extinction is 100 times more accelerated than in geological times.

Faced with this bleak future, transnational interests are proposing to continue as before, and paint the machine green, which is to say, continue with growth and irrational consumerism and inequality, generating more and more profits, without realising that we are currently consuming in one year what the planet produces in one year and three months. Faced with this reality, the solution can not be an environmental make over.