The task of cutting greenhouse gas emissions enough to avert a dangerous rise in global temperatures may be far more difficult than previous research suggested, say scientists who have just published studies indicating that it would require the world to cease carbon emissions altogether within a matter of decades.
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
In a major shift, a group of Southern Baptist leaders said their denomination has been "too timid" on environmental issues and has a biblical duty to stop global warming.
The declaration, signed by the president of the Southern Baptist Convention among others and released today, shows a growing urgency about climate change even within groups that once dismissed claims of an overheating planet as a liberal ruse. The conservative denomination has 16.3 million members and is the largest Protestant group in the United States.
Being president of the Czech Republic is more like being England's monarch than the president of the United States. While the Czech president has veto power over certain types of legislation, his role is supposed to be mostly ceremonial.
But Vaclav Klaus — who was re-elected last month after being chosen by the Czech Parliament as head of state in 2003 — has not been content to confine himself to ribbon cuttings and state dinners.
Czech President Václav Klaus was one of the speakers at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, and his message was unequivocal. It is not about climatology. It is about freedom.
“Future dangers will not come from the same source. The ideology will be different. Its essence will, nevertheless, be identical – the attractive, pathetic, at first sight noble idea that transcends the individual in the name of the common good, and the enormous self-confidence on the side of its proponents about their right to sacrifice the man and his freedom in order to make this idea reality.”
While most other politicians have gotten on the self-sacrifice-at-the-green-altar bandwagon, blinding themselves to the blood that is dripping from that altar, Václav Klaus has the intellectual decency to be Thomas Stockman of his peers. He was a dissident during the communist era, and now he is a dissident among international state leaders.
His recent portrait in the Wall Street Journal portrays several issues, where he chooses to stay off the bandwagons that other European politicians has gotten on, that includes climate change, Russia, and the Kosovo independence. It takes courage to be a lone voice of reason in a world of group think.
Paul Chesser, Climate Strategies Watch
Amazing — a new study released in the journal Science claims that everything we always understood about the age of the Grand Canyon was wrong. Turns out that rather than being 5 or 6 million years old, the new report says it is more like 17 million years old:
Not so fast, said Joel Pederson, a geomorphologist at Utah State University who has spent his career studying the Grand Canyon. He said the estimated age of 5 million to 6 million years is based on abundant evidence amassed by scientists over many decades. Seventeen million is impossible, he said, because there is no evidence of a large quantity of sediment flowing out of a canyon before 6 million years ago.
"They clearly have not taken the time to be rigorous and actually understand the regional geography," Pederson said.
Sound familiar? Won't be long before the paradigm-changing geologists are called deniers and banished from any further publication in established science journals. Let the mock and ridicule begin!
Miklós Zágoni isn't just a physicist and environmental researcher. He is also a global warming activist and Hungary's most outspoken supporter of the Kyoto Protocol. Or was.
That was until he learned the details of a new theory of the greenhouse effect, one that not only gave far more accurate climate predictions here on Earth, but Mars too.
Frederick Seitz, 96, the former president of the National Academy of Sciences who was an outspoken skeptic of global warming, died March 2 at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home in New York City. No cause of death was reported.
Only about one in three Alberta earth scientists and engineers believe the culprit behind climate change has been identified, a new poll reported today.
The expert jury is divided, with 26 per cent attributing global warming to human activity like burning fossil fuels and 27 per cent blaming other causes such as volcanoes, sunspots, earth crust movements and natural evolution of the planet.
A 99-per-cent majority believes the climate is changing. But 45 per cent blame both human and natural influences, and 68 per cent disagree with the popular statement that "the debate on the scientific causes of recent climate change is settled."
Gordon Brown warned yesterday that energy companies could still face a windfall tax unless they offered a much bigger rebate for the poor and pensioners facing big rises in fuel bills.
The prime minister was being questioned in the Commons by David Marshall, Labour MP for Glasgow East, a week before the budget as pressure grows from MPs for action against energy firms. The companies have hit back by warning that a windfall tax could affect their commitment to investment in renewable energy.
NEW YORK — "It is inexcusable for scientists to torture animals," the playwright Henrik Ibsen once remarked. "Let them make their experiments on journalists and politicians."
After years of being labeled everything from devotees of a neo-Flat Earth Society to the equivalent of Holocaust deniers by an opposition that refuses to seriously engage them — i.e. declaring unsettled science settled, refusing to publicly debate spurious claims made in one's Academy Award winning documentaries, repeatedly using scorn as a crutch to steady lack of reason — the global warming skeptics gathered at the Heartland Institute's 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held at the Times Square Marriott certainly appeared fully on board with Ibsen's proposition.
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