-->| According to the report,
As famine, disease, and weather-related disasters strike due to the abrupt climate change, many countries' needs will exceed their carrying capacity. This will create a sense of desperation, which is likely to lead to offensive aggression in order to reclaim balance. Imagine eastern European countries, struggling to feed their populations with a falling supply of food, water, and energy, eyeing [Russia], whose population is already in decline, for access to its grain, minerals, and energy supply. | | We have done a lot of work in the past for this office, and Andy Marshall knows that I have done a lot of work in climate change." But was the report suppressed? "I think what actually happened is there was a tendency once the Guardian article came out for the Pentagon to distance themselves from the report.
"The Pentagon report is an assessment of the earliest possible date where you might begin to see some effects from global warming," he said.
By 2010, it is increasingly probable these will show up and certainly more likely by 2050 the changes will begin to become manifest. | | Among those scientists present at the White House talks were Professor John Schellnhuber, former chief environmental adviser to the German government and head of the UK's leading group of climate scientists at the Tyndall Centre for climate change Research. He said that the Pentagon's internal fears should prove the 'tipping point' in persuading the United States to accept climatic change." Also present was evangelical Christian and weather scientist Sir John Houghton, former chief executive of the Meteorological Office. |  The new post is in that other rising powerhouse, India, and the mandate is the same: climate change, chemicals and more sustainable economics. The man appointed to head that effort is Robert Donkers, who in September 2007 moved from Washington to the Indian Capital of New Delhi.
The New Diplomats: Power & Pitfalls
Stacy Vandeveer at Brown University has seen a disconcerting change over the past several years in his graduate students: they don't believe him when he describes the groundbreaking role once played by the United States. "My students," he told me ruefully, "have no memory of U.S. | | They asked me to please explain to whomever wants to listen in America, what we're doing in Europe on chemicals and climate change," Donkers told me. "And, second, to inform us [in Brussels] what is happening in the United States. We know that there is a different America out there than the views expressed by President Bush on the environment. |  Today, of course, people from Al Gore to Julia Roberts are on a mission to make it clear that humanity has the power to cause cataclysmic change in just a few generations. But before the 1950s, most scientists believed that climate change took thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of years.
That doesn't mean they didn't accept the notion that glaciers and ice sheets had once covered the Northern Hemisphere. They were just happily certain that glaciers moved, well, glacially: eons to descend and epochs to recede. | | Qi Ye, director of the Institute of Public Policy at Tsinghua University in Beijing, told me in the spring of 2006 that he has been leading regular trips for government officials to Brussels to "consult with the Europeans on many things: chemicals, climate change, environmental governance."15 China sells $19 billion a year worth of chemicals to the European Union, and billions more worth of chemical-containing consumer products. All would be subject to REACH. | | If massive climate change was going to lead us into a new ice age, we'd have a few hundred thousand years to do something about it.
Of course, there were some contrary voices singing a different tune, but the larger scientific community paid them very little regard. Andrew ELUcott Douglass was an astronomer working in Arizona in 1895 when he first started cutting down trees to examine them for evidence of any effect from a specific solar activity, called sunspots, that occurs in cycles. |  Until we better understand which aspects of the models account for the different responses in this region,' they caution, 'we advise against basing assessments of future climate change in the Sahel on the results of any single model.' Nevertheless, they insist, 'a dramatic 21st century drying trend should be considered seriously as a possible future scenario'.
This latter finding also chimes with global studies, which suggest stronger droughts affecting ever-larger areas as the world warms up. | | The efforts of climate change deniers to suggest that there is something special about the disappearance of Kilimanjaro's glaciers are undermined by similar changes taking place in mountain ranges right across the world, not least in the Rwenzori Mountains of Uganda, nearly a thousand kilometres to the north-west. | | Kilimanjaro's international celebrity status has also attracted the attention of climate change deniers, who suggest that deforestation on the mountain's lower slopes is more to blame for glacial retreat than global warming.
None of the contrarian rhetoric cuts any ice, so to speak, with Lonnie Thompson, a glaciologist at Ohio State University and a man who is deservedly one of America's most celebrated natural scientists. | | Fiji's Coral Coast is no longer vulnerable to climate change, I was forced to conclude, because it is already dead.
Another hot spot of biodiversity - and yet another World Heritage Site threatened by global warming - is the Cape Floristic Region of South Africa. Covering a huge coastal arc inland from Cape Town, it is home to the greatest concentration of higher plant species in the world outside the tropical rainforests. Its inauspicious rocky soils and arid Mediterranean climate support 9,000 different plants, more than 6,000 of which are found nowhere else on the planet. | | On the other side of the Atlantic, cooling also occurred, and there is evidence of rapid climate change from as far afield as South America and New Zealand.
The culprit seems to be the sudden shutting-off of the Atlantic circulation due to the bursting of a natural dam holding back Lake Agassiz, a gigantic meltwater lake which had pooled up behind the retreating North American ice sheets. When the dam broke, an enormous surge of water (the lake's volume was equivalent to seven times today's Great Lakes) is thought to have poured through Hudson Bay and out into the Atlantic. | | Kilimanjaro has become something of a poster child for the international climate change campaign. The Swahili words kilitna and njaro translate as 'shining mountain', testament to the power of this massive volcano to inspire awe in onlookers through the ages. A recent aerial photo of the crater, with little more than a few ice fragments encrusting its dark sides, was the centrepiece for a touring global warming photography exhibition sponsored by the British Council in 2005. | | The proof was crystal clear this time— rapid climate change was very real. It was so rapid that scientists stopped using the word rapid to describe it, and started using words like abrupt and violent. Dr. Weart summed it up in his 2003 book:
Swings of temperature that scientists in the 1950s believed to take tens of thousands of years, in the 1970s to take thousands of years, and in the 1980s to take hundreds of years, were now found to take only decades. | | Today, of course, people from Al Gore to Julia Roberts are on a mission to make it clear that humanity has the power to cause cataclysmic change in just a few generations. But before the 1950s, most scientists believed that climate change took thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of years.
That doesn't mean they didn't accept the notion that glaciers and ice sheets had once covered the Northern Hemisphere. They were just happily certain that glaciers moved, well, glacially: eons to descend and epochs to recede. | | As far as the climate change community was concerned, Douglass was cutting down trees in a forest with nobody there to hear it. (According to Dr. Lloyd Burckle of Columbia University, not only was Douglass right: the hundred-year cold spell he discovered was responsible for some beautiful music. Burckle says the superior sound of the great European violin makers, including the famous Stradivari, is the result of the high-density wood from the trees that grew during this century-long freeze—denser because they grew less during the cold and had thinner rings as a result. | | In the process, China has become a playing field for international influence driven partly by the desire to address the country's huge contribution to climate change, and partly for positioning in anticipation of the economic bonanza that is already beginning to come from the development of alternative, renewable energy technologies. On both counts, the United States is falling behind the European Union. Beijing already sees that many new rules governing China's economic future are being written in Brussels and not Washington. |  What if a student could easily find answers to questions like these: "What ideas would help me understand climate change better?" "Why should I care about calculus?" "Who could I read to better grasp the current political situation?" What if the answers combined the guidance of a mentor with source material from some of the world's best minds?
That world is coming. Students already have direct access to many great thinkers and doers through initiatives like MIT OpenCourse-Ware [see Education and Literacy, p. 315], and ResearchChannel. | | In addition, transportation is a major contributor to climate change [see Local Greenhouse Forecast, p. 506].
We could green the shipping industry, though. The huge maritime corporation Walle-nius Wilhelmsen has brought forward conceptual plans for the Orcelle—what it calls the "green flagship" of the future. The Orcelle would be powered by a combination of sails, solar energy, and fuel cells, using optimal designs to carry the most cargo possible—while requiring no ballast water, using fewer toxic chemicals, and generating no greenhouse emissions. | | Increasingly, t'he industry (supported by their armies of bean counters) is coming to the conclusion that, never mind scientific certainty, they can't afford even the risk of significant climate change.
As a result, huge reinsurance companies like Swiss Re and Munich Re Group are taking bold stands on the issue. Both companies are advocating openly for tighter regulations on greenhouse gases and more investment in clean-energy technologies. | | What many people do not realize is that according to the EPA, the world's livestock herds are the largest single source of emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas contributing to ozone depletion and climate change.
We hope that these concerns about livestock farms will encourage you to eat a moderate amount of the foods described in this chapter. If you choose to eat meat, we encourage you to:
• Limit your intake to no more than 3 to 4 ounces daily—about the size of a deck of playing cards. |  If we, through our actions, unleash unprecedented climate change, then we're going to suffer the results. It isn't nature's revenge and it isn't punishment -- it's just cause and effect.
Overall, in "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore paints a grim but highly educational picture of the ecological challenges facing humanity from today forward. It is a movie not to be ignored or trivialized. | | It's a true masterpiece of presentation that manages to tell the truth about carbon dioxide emissions and climate change without sounding alarmist. The movie is, of course, the brainchild of Al Gore, a person I never really respected much when he was a politician. But as a person who is willing to put everything on the line and is asking Americans to wake up to the reality of what's happening in the world around them, Al Gore has earned my renewed respect. He has reinvented himself and he's now squarely positioned as a thought leader outside the realm of politics. | | Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global climate change by Guy Dauncey and Patrick Mazza (New Society Publishers, 2001) In contrast with the copious resources detailing the gloom-and-doom prospects we face as a result of global warming, Dauncey and Mazza's book provides a refreshing change of pace, offering simple and profound solutions that can be the start of serious planetary change. |  Ecomagination is driven by our belief that applying technology to solving problems is great business," said Immelt. "We're launching ecomagination not because it's trendy or moral, but because it will accelerate our growth and make us more competitive."
"Imagine if we discovered a new resource," GE said in its October 17, 2005, two-page advertisement in the Wall Street Journal. "One that could help solve the problems of energy-hungry world. At GE, we think we've discovered just that. We call it ecomagination. | | But satisfying today's hunger for energy comes with enormous and severe environmental costs: climate change, air pollution, oil spills, river-killing dams, and nuclear waste. Dur addiction to cheap energy is the driving cause behind not only the massive disasters we all fear, but also the longer, slower emergencies that threaten to undermine our entire society, from energy shocks to the climate crisis.
The social impacts of our dirty energy system are no better. Dur addiction to cheap oil links us to dictators and repressive regimes, wars and terrorism. |  I believe this will occur through so-called "natural disasters," such as climate change or pandemics of infectious disease (the bird flu virus is a strong candidate). This is not nature's revenge. This is simply cause and effect of our cruelty to nature. It's a reflection of our own cruelty to nature, coming back to haunt us.
When we are cruel to animals, they can't fight back. But nature is resilient when we are cruel to it. Nature doesn't fight back; it overcomes. |  Unfortunately, in the eyes of the mass media, discussion about ending pollution and global climate change has been abandoned. The debate has narrowed to political and short-term economic considerations rather than the long-term physical facts and technological directions which would surely prompt a serious discussion of a sustainable future, as described in this book. Innovation and even talk of innovation are stifled at almost every turn.
An example is a USA Today cover article "Six Ways to Combat
Global Warming" (July 16,2001 issue). | | In some cases these choices can lead to a mass addiction to near-term profit, which can bring us violence, war, climate change and irreversible pollution.
There is no better example of this imbalance than our consumption of oil, coal and natural gas. Our fossil fuel obsession has such a grip on us that we have become mesmerized about being open to alternatives such as cold fusion and other free energy now being researched, as well as the traditional renewable options: hydrogen, solar photovoltaics, wind power and biomass. | |
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