Al Gore: “…we have begun to wage war on the earth itself”
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Posted on December 11, 2007
Filed Under Justice, Global warming/Climate change, Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Yesterday, December 10, on International Human Rights Day, as per tradition, the Nobel Committee presented this year’s Peace Prize to Al Gore, Jr., and to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for their persistent, bold, pioneering work to make the world aware of the growing threat of global warming and climate change to the planet.
I still cannot believe that their work, the work of so many thousands of others, and the urgency of the crisis does not make this event a top news story — for days! Cable news channels overwhelm us with the banalities and Hollywood hoopla of the presidential race, the debates ad nauseum, with so little real content — and here is an event with two speeches that everyone in this world, everyone, ought to hear. These are the speeches that should be shown over and over again at all times of the day and night.
TV pseudo-news stations, broadcast and cable, should give this story the coverage it deserves.
Anyway, I just wanted to leave these two links for you. One is to the acceptance speech by Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, which summarizes the work of the Panel and stresses the inordinate impacts that climate change will have on the poor of the world. 
This is a moral challenge of grave proportions (Christians, watch out! You will be judged by how you address this challenge, not on gay marriage or reproductive rights. This is the issue that will determine whether or not your faith has relevance in this world.)
The other link is to Al Gore’s speech, his being a more impassioned clarion call to make the changes required — now - to preserve and protect the viability of life on the planet — at least that life that has made us and millions of species possible over the past hundreds of thousands of years.
Both recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize are reasons for hope and sources of it. Let’s see, now, how well we heed the call. Time is running out.
Technorati Tags: Nobel Peace Prize, Al Gore, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri
Photo credit: NASA, The Blue Marble
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5 Responses to “Al Gore: “…we have begun to wage war on the earth itself””
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A resolute call to action, Mr. Gore.
If not you, then who?
If not now, then when?
The time has come, yet again, for you to run for the US Presidency. Afterall, you won the job once already. This may be the remaining unfinished work of your life.
The United States was meant to lead the world in our time. Admittedly, things have not gone well recently; however, no other country has the wherewithall to do what is necessary.
People around the world are looking to the United States for moral leadership, but apparently see our country as a woefully inadequate exemplar today.
As you put it, since “we have to travel far quickly,” there is not time to waste….no sensible reason for waiting.
All the current presidential candidates in the USA are not talking about the real issues of our time. You and you alone can “re-center” our national debate on issues like the unsustainability of increasing conspicuous per-human over-consumption of limited resources; the unsustainability of skyrocketing absolute global human population numbers; and the soon to become patently unsustainable, seemingly endless growth of large-scale industrial/corporate activities, now threatening to engulf the surface of the planetary home God has blessed us to inhabit and, I suppose, not to overwhelm.
How can we help?
Sincerely,
Steve Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population
http://sustainabilitysoutheast.org/
Perhaps a duplicitous rear-guard action by representatives of the wealthy and powerful, and others who find the status quo to their liking, come what may.
Hear ye, hear ye, words from representatives of the “Masters of the Universe” among us.
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/925
United Nation Climate change, Bali
Skeptical Scientists Urge World To ‘Have the Courage to Do Nothing’ At UN Conference
By EPW Blog Tuesday, December 11, 2007
BALI, Indonesia – An international team of scientists skeptical of man-made climate fears promoted by the UN and former Vice President Al Gore, descended on Bali this week to urge the world to “have the courage to do nothing” in response to UN demands.
Lord Christopher Monckton, a UK climate researcher, had a blunt message for UN climate conference participants on Monday.
“Climate change is a non problem. The right answer to a non problem is to have the courage to do nothing,” Monckton told participants.
“The UN conference is a complete waste of our time and your money and we should no longer pay the slightest attention to the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,)” Monckton added. (LINK)
Monckton also noted that the UN has not been overly welcoming to the group of skeptical scientists.
“UN organizers refused my credentials and appeared desperate that I should not come to this conference. They have also made several attempts to interfere with our public meetings,” Monckton explained.
“It is a circus here,” agreed Australian scientist Dr. David Evans. Evans is making scientific presentations to delegates and journalists at the conference revealing the latest peer-reviewed studies that refute the UN’s climate claims.
“This is the most lavish conference I have ever been to, but I am only a scientist and I actually only go to the science conferences,” Evans said, noting the luxury of the tropical resort. (Note: An analysis by Bloomberg News on December 6 found: “Government officials and activists flying to Bali, Indonesia, for the United Nations meeting on climate change will cause as much pollution as 20,000 cars in a year.” – LINK)
Evans, a mathematician who did carbon accounting for the Australian government, recently converted to a skeptical scientist about man-made global warming after reviewing the new scientific studies. (LINK)
“We now have quite a lot of evidence that carbon emissions definitely don’t cause global warming. We have the missing [human] signature [in the atmosphere], we have the IPCC models being wrong and we have the lack of a temperature going up the last 5 years,” Evans said in an interview with the Inhofe EPW Press Blog. Evans authored a November 28 2007 paper “Carbon Emissions Don’t Cause Global Warming.” (LINK)
Evans touted a new peer-reviewed study by a team of scientists appearing in the December 2007 issue of the International Journal of Climatology of the Royal Meteorological Society which found “Warming is naturally caused and shows no human influence.” (LINK)
“Most of the people here have jobs that are very well paid and they depend on the idea that carbon emissions cause global warming. They are not going to be very receptive to the idea that well actually the science has gone off in a different direction,” Evans explained.
[Inhofe EPW Press Blog Note: Several other recent peer-reviewed studies have cast considerable doubt about man-made global warming fears. For most recent sampling see: New Peer-Reviewed Study finds ‘Solar changes significantly alter climate’ (11-3-07) (LINK) & “New Peer-Reviewed Study Halves the Global Average Surface Temperature Trend 1980 – 2002” (LINK) & New Study finds Medieval Warm Period ‘0.3C Warmer than 20th Century’ (LINK) For a more comprehensive sampling of peer-reviewed studies earlier in 2007 see “New Peer-Reviewed Scientific Studies Chill Global Warming Fears” LINK ]
‘IPCC is unsound’
UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports since its inception going back to 1990, had a clear message to UN participants.
“There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any affect whatsoever on the climate,” Gray, who shares in the Nobel Prize awarded to the UN IPCC, explained. (LINK)
“All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails,” Gray, who wrote the book “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of “Climate Change 2001,” said.
“It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics,” he added.
‘Dangerous time for science’
Evans, who believes the UN has heavily politicized science, warned there is going to be a “dangerous time for science” ahead.
“We have a split here. Official science driven by politics, money and power, goes in one direction. Unofficial science, which is more determined by what is actually happening with the [climate] data, has now started to move off in a different direction” away from fears of a man-made climate crisis, Evans explained.
“The two are splitting. This is always a dangerous time for science and a dangerous time for politics. Historically science always wins these battles but there can be a lot of causalities and a lot of time in between,” he concluded.
Carbon trading ‘fraud?’
New Zealander Bryan Leland of the International Climate Science Coalition warned participants that all the UN promoted discussions of “carbon trading” should be viewed with suspicion.
“I am an energy engineer and I know something about electricity trading and I know enough about carbon trading and the inaccuracies of carbon trading to know that carbon trading is more about fraud than it is about anything else,” Leland said.
“We should probably ask why we have 10,000 people here [in Bali] in a futile attempt to ‘solve’ a [climate] problem that probably does not exist,” Leland added.
‘Simply not work’
Owen McShane, the head of the International Climate Science Coalition, also worried that a UN promoted global approach to economics would mean financial ruin for many nations.
“I don’t think this conference can actually achieve anything because it seems to be saying that we are going to draw up one protocol for every country in the world to follow,” McShane said. (LINK)
“Now these countries and these economies are so diverse that trying to presume you can put all of these feet into one shoe will simply not work,” McShane explained.
“Having the same set of rules apply to everybody will blow some economies apart totally while others will be unscathed and I wouldn’t be surprised if the ones who remain unscathed are the ones who write the rules,” he added.
‘Nothing happening at this conference’
Professor Dr. William Alexander, emeritus of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, warned poor nations and their residents that the UN policies could mean more poverty and thus more death.
“My message is specifically for the poor people of Africa. And there is nothing happening at this conference that can help them one little bit but there is the potential that they could be damaged,” Alexander said. (LINK)
“The government and people of Africa will have their attention drawn to reducing climate change instead of reducing poverty,” Alexander added.
Steven Earl Salmony, Ph.D., M.P.A.
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Oh goodness, let’s be clear about who these people are. The EPW Blog belongs to none other than the inimitable Sen. Jim Inhofe, Oklahoma Republican and minority leader of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works and one of the US’s leading global warming deniers. The blog is housed on the minority page of the committee’s website: (See, http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs).
Inhofe has made it his business for a very long time now to pretend there is scientific controversy about human-caused global warming and these shenanigans in Bali are another example of his theatrics. The moral responsibility settling on his shoulders is getting heavier and heavier.
Inhofe is the guy who once so famously said that global warming ‘is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.’
Lord Monckton, by the way, is Inhofe’s carbon copy (no pun intended) in England. See: http://www.realcrash.com/gore-carbon-futures-lord-monkton/ Don’t miss the odd curve he throws at the end in an attempt to link Gore and climate change scientists to Hitler.
You can see the kind of folks attracted to Monckton on the google search list — the Larouchies, for example. See: http://www.larouchepac.com/pages/breaking_news/2007/0404_monckton.shtml
For a great rebuttal of this group of pseudo-scientists, I recommend this article by George Monbiot in his ‘Comment is Free’ blog at the site of the UK’s ‘The Independent.’ The article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1947248,00.html.
So it was all circus and charade. But the sad thing is that the very fact that you, Steven, and Monbiot, and I and others are taking time to talk about this shows that they have had their impact. However, that said, while only distracting some minds easily distracted or with a political agenda, it will have no impact at all on the work of the IPCC, Al Gore, or the rest of us who care about the planet.
Margaret
Three humble proposals……………………..
Hello Margaret,
Thanks for your contributions to this discussion and for the uncommonly constructive way in which you participate.
Perhaps you will be so kind and respond to three following proposals.
The first proposal is an idea that has been deeply developed by Dr. Jack Alpert of the Stanford Knowledge Integration Laboratory (SKIL), .
According to his calculations, if we agreed, as one family of humanity, to begin now to implement VOLUNTARILY a “One Child Per Family” policy, it would be possible in the coming 50 years to rapidly decrease absolute global human population numbers to 1.5 billion rather than have human numbers worldwide grow to a fully anticipated 9.2 billion people by 2050 (UN Population Division projections). Although there is much more to say about this proposal, I am going to immediately pass on to the matter of modifying the global economy: the second proposal.
There are remarkably well-developed ideas by Aubrey Meyer of the Global Commons Institute in England regarding a plan for the “contraction and convergence” of the global economy, as a way of protecting the Earth from the reckless and relentless expansion of economic globalization that could soon become patently unsustainable on a relatively small planet with Earth’s limited resources.
It goes without saying that the Earth does not possess enough resources to sustain the human species, if every human being on the planet consumes resources as voraciously as people in the ‘developed’ world do now. My third proposal calls for a plan to be formulated that redistributes resources and caps excessive per-capita over-consumption.
I suppose what I am trying to point out is this: current per human consumption in the ‘developed’ world, unbridled increase of human industrial/production capabilities in the ‘developing’ world, and skyrocketing human numbers in the ‘undeveloped’ world cannot be sustained much longer by the limited natural resources and frangible ecosystem services of Earth.
As you have made clear to us elsewhere, there is plenty of blame to go around for the distinctly human-forced predicament in which humanity finds itself in these early years of Century XXI. At least to me, it appears that all of us in the human community are implicated in this situation, even though no one among us is responsible for our circumstances. Collective thought and action is anticipated; more sensibly sharing resources and cooperating with one another as a family of humanity is in the offing, I suppose.
With warm regards,
Steve
Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001
Steve,
Thanks for the thoughtful challenge. Happy to respond, as these are issues I have been writing about and which are the focus of my project.
On population growth. We have a problem. We are already beyond the Earth’s capacity to support our levels of consumption and waste, and we will add another 2-3 billion to the populaton over the next four decades. Clearly, we must find a way to curb population growth (this has already happened to some extent as predictions 2-3 decades age were that we would reach 12-14 billion instead of the now anticipated 9 billion by 2050). Trying to force people to limit births violates human rights, so it needs to be done by choice.
One of the proven methods thus far to curb population growth is through education of women and availability of reproductive services. When women have real choice about getting pregnant, birth rates go down. Yet, our government suspects such programs and has cut US contributions to the UN’s population programs.
Secondly, the age of capitalist economic growth as the mode of organizing production and labor is coming to an end — either by choice or under the weight of a collapse some decades from now that will be something to behold as the planet begins to run out of the very things needed to engine that growth — like fossil fuels, forests, water sources, agricultural lands, and on and on.
It seems incumbent upon us to begin envisioning the new human economy, one that is in concert with the actual limits of the Earth and with its ecosystems, and to begin doing this immediately in order to avoid as much catastrophe as possible during the transition. There is already work being done on this, but very little awareness of it, or of the problem itself.
‘Contraction and Convergence’ is a very interesting approach to this, and rather than explain, I refer those interested to the website of the Global Commons Institute: (http://www.gci.org.uk/. I may post on this more in the future. What I like about it is the element of justice — that we who have more must give up more, a lot more, in order for the poor and the 2-3 billion more who will join us, to have the basics for a dignified life.
Finally, you address the issue of ‘ecological overshoot,’ the hard fact that we are already overshooting the ability of the planet to support our levels of consumption and waste. Right now, 1.3 planets are required to sustain current levels; 5-6 would be required to support this level for all the world’s population. Add 2-3 billion and one can see that we are headed for a major comeuppance, with or without global warming.
However, climate change will combine with overshoot to create a terrible future over the next few generations.
How will we pass through this era, and will the human species survive it? Those are the questions we must ponder. But an inordinate amount of the moral weight of these questions rests firmly on the shoulders of the affluent who are overshooting the planet in leaps and bounds, thinking there is no end to their wealth accumulation.
These are the very moral challenges that this blog is trying to articulate to this society. Never before has the fate of the evolutionary story resided in the conscious choices of one its species. Are we up to that responsibility?
We’ll see, no?
Margaret