Global Warming News

Fri Jul 10, 2009 5:42am EDT -President Barack Obama takes his seat before a round table session during the G8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy July 9, 2009.

Former Vice President Al Gore declared that the Congressional climate bill will help bring about "global governance." "I bring you good news from the U.S., "Gore said on July 7, 2009 in Oxford at the Smith School World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment, sponsored by UK Times.

Gore touted the Congressional climate bill, claiming it “will dramatically increase the prospects for success” in combating what he sees as the “crisis” of man-made global warming. “But it is the awareness itself that will drive the change and one of the ways it will drive the change is through global governance and global agreements.” (Editor's Note: Gore makes the “global governance” comment at the 1min. 10 sec. mark in this UK Times video.)

Gore's call for “global governance” echoes former French President Jacques Chirac's call in 2000. On November 20, 2000, then French President Chirac said during a speech at The Hague that the UN's Kyoto Protocol represented "the first component of an authentic global governance." “For the first time, humanity is instituting a genuine instrument of global governance,” Chirac explained. “From the very earliest age, we should make environmental awareness a major theme of education and a major theme of political debate, until respect for the environment comes to be as fundamental as safeguarding our rights and freedoms. By acting together, by building this unprecedented instrument, the first component of an authentic global governance, we are working for dialogue and peace,” Chirac added.

Niwa senior climate scientist Georgina Griffiths said May "broke records from one end of the country to the other - it was the coldest May on record", and there was nothing much to toast in the South Wairarapa wine village, which registered 69 percent of normal sunshine hours for May - the lowest figure for the town since records began.

It was wet too with double the normal rainfall for May (about 200 percent of normal) in Wairarapa, Canterbury and Otago while much of Northland, Auckland, Wellington and Southland got at least 150 percent of normal May rainfall. June didn't fare much better as Ngawi racked up a record low topping the mercury at just 6.6C on June 16 - the lowest daily maximum temperature on the books. Ms Griffiths said these temperatures were 1.5C lower than what is typical for June - a pattern that was repeated across the lower North Island.

A new survey by the Pew Research center focuses on science. While the survey says Americans like science, it also confirms, by asking scientists themselves, what we already knew: the Bush Administration suppressed any results scientific research which did not comform to its own narrow POV.

This study, undertaken by researchers from the University of the Basque Country (UBC), analyses the role played by the media in creating and spreading a stance regarding the protection of the environment, sustainable development and natural heritage.

Jose Ignacio Lorente, a lecturer at the UBC and one of the researchers who participated in the project told SINC that the study was concerned with "the way in which social communication media, particularly news media, contribute to creating and spreading social visions of sustainable development and the conservation and protection of the environment in general and natural heritage in particular".

A target set by the G8 for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent by 2050 is unacceptable for Russia, President Dmitry Medvedev's top economic aide said Wednesday. "For us the 80 percent figure is unacceptable and likely unattainable," Arkady Dvorkovich told reporters.

"We won't sacrifice economic growth for the sake of emission reduction," he added.

The last time global warming came to the Andes it produced the Inca Empire. A team of English and U.S. scientists has analyzed pollen, seeds and isotopes in core samples taken from the deep mud of a small lake not far from Machu Picchu and their report says that "the success of the Inca was underpinned by a period of warming that lasted more than than four centuries."

The four centuries coincided directly with the rise of this startling, hyper-productive culture that at its zenith was bigger than the Ming Dynasty China and the Ottoman Empire, the two most powerful contemporaries of the Inca. "This period of increased temperatures," the scientists say, "allowed the Inca and their predecessors to expand, from AD 1150 onwards, their agricultural zones by moving up the mountains to build a massive system of terraces fed frequently by glacial water, as well as planting trees to reduce erosion and increase soil fertility.

Core samples from glaciers and from the mud beneath lakes in the Andes, the Amazon and elsewhere have built up a history of the world's climate and the message is crystal clear. It is that changes have taken place in the past, during the six or seven thousand years of our agriculture-based civilizations, that are just as big as the ones we are facing from today's CO2 warming.

Texas oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens has called off plans to build the world's biggest wind farm in the Texas Panhandle, The Wall Street Journal said.

Pickens said the wind farm project was scuttled partly because of the lack of adequate transmission lines to carry the electricity from remote locations to cities, according to the paper.

The oil tycoon had hoped to build new transmission lines but could not secure financing, the paper said.

Having helped companies explore the labyrinth of greenhouse gas regulation in Europe, the Big Four auditing and accounting firms are now moving quickly to build climate and carbon shops in the United States. Their goal is to stake claim to a business that could one day rival tax compliance and financial disclosure in size and scope.

Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers are the undisputed giants of the auditing, tax advisory and business consulting world.

Other emerging trends in the United States point to even greater opportunities for the Big Four, including repeated calls by groups like the Investor Network on Climate Risk and Ceres to have the Securities and Exchange Commission force companies to disclose climate change risks and business opportunities in their quarterly financial reports. Though they're not quite sure in what final shape or how quickly the new reality will emerge, the companies see climate eventually touching virtually every aspect of their business should Congress ultimately pass sweeping greenhouse gas regulation.

The boys in green are coming as the Environment Agency sets up a squad to police companies generating excessive CO2 emissions.

Decked out in green jackets, the enforcers will be able to demand access to company property, view power meters, call up electricity and gas bills and examine carbon-trading records for an estimated 6,000 British businesses. Ed Mitchell, head of business performance and regulation at the Environment Agency, said the squad would help to bring emissions under control. “Climate change and CO2 are the world’s biggest issues right now. The Carbon Reduction Commitment is one of the ways in which Britain is responding.”

The central unit, based in Warrington, Cheshire, can call on the agency’s national network of hundreds of pollution inspectors, many of whom will soon be trained in CO2 monitoring. It will also be able to demand energy bills from utilities without the companies under investigation knowing they are being watched.

Al Gore today compared the battle against climate change with the struggle against the Nazis. Al Gore invoked the spirit of Winston Churchill today by encouraging political leaders to follow the example of Britain's wartime leader and unite their nations to fight climate change.

Mr Gore admitted that it was difficult to persuade the public that the threat from climate change was as urgent as the threat from Nazi Germany. “The level of awareness and concern among populations has not crossed the threshold where political leaders feel that they must change. “The only way politicians will act is if awareness raises to a level to make them feel that it’s a necessity.”

WASHINGTON - Saying global warming poses unprecedented threats to Americans' way of life, four of President Barack Obama's top environmental and energy officials urged the Senate on Tuesday to pass legislation to reduce the pollution linked to the planet's rising temperature.

ROME: Eight of the world's most powerful leaders gather in an Italian earthquake zone this week to thrash out a common strategy on how to absorb the tremors of global recession, climate change and Iran.

One question could dominate this week's gathering of the world's top economic powers in Italy: Will the United States and Europe act by themselves to cut emissions of the heat-trapping gases that are causing long-term global warming and will they be able to persuade fast-developing nations such as China and India to go along? President Barack Obama ...

To fairly divide the climate change fight between rich and poor, a new study suggests basing targets for emission cuts on the number of wealthy people, who are also the biggest greenhouse gas emitters, in a country.

Home gardeners beware: This year, late blight -- a destructive infectious disease that caused the Irish potato famine in the 1840s -- is killing tomato and potato plants in gardens and on commercial farms in the eastern United States. In addition, basil downy mildew is affecting plants in the Northeast. "Late blight has never occurred this early and this widespread in the U.S," said Meg McGrath, associate professor of plant pathology and plant-microbe biology.

A town of 4,300 inhabitants near the Hungarian border, Guessing launched into renewable energy in the early 1990s and now produces more than it can consume.

The latest project, opened last week, is a one-megawatt plant capable of producing gas from wood chips. Located in a region of crop fields and forests, Guessing used its assets -- biomass and sunshine -- to pull itself out of its economic stagnation. Since 1996, this project has been coordinated by the European Centre for Renewable Energy (EEE) and co-financed by the European Union. After discarding wind power for lack of breezes, researchers developed a number of techniques to produce heat, electricity and agrofuel using maize, rapeseed, agricultural waste, wood or sunshine. -- The town now produces more energy than it can use --

President Obama is calling the climate bill that the House passed last week an "extraordinary" achievement, and so it is. The 1,200-page wonder manages the supreme feat of being both hugely expensive while doing almost nothing to reduce carbon emissions.

Even if the law works as intended, over the next decade or two real U.S. greenhouse emissions might be reduced by 2% compared to business as usual. However, consumers would still face higher prices for electric power, transportation and most goods and services as this inefficient and indirect tax flowed down the energy chain.

The sound bite is that this policy would only cost households "a postage stamp a day." But that's true only as long as the program doesn't really cut emissions. The goal here is to tell voters they'll pay nothing in order to get the cap-and-tax bureaucracy in place -- even though the whole idea is to raise prices to change American behavior. At the same time -- wink, wink -- Democrats tell the greens they can tighten the emissions vise gradually over time.

Even journalists are beginning to revolt at tactics the government is now using to spin the Global Warming myth.

Controversy erupted this week at the World Conference of Science Journalists over the National Science Foundation's "underwriting" of media projects. It turns out that the NSF, which is heavily invested in propagating the Global Warming party line, has been quietly producing content for news outlets, content which the casual observer might not recognize for the propaganda it is. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, the NSF's Jeff Nesbit was met with "consternation" at the London conference for "attempting to 'disguise' publicity as objective reporting."

Sweden plans to use its "climate change miracle" to convince China and the United States to sign up to tough cuts in greenhouse gases at the Copenhagen summit to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.