ENVIRONMENT 'Final Warning To Humanity'

"[T]he world's scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice," said U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, on the most recent report of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). After a rigorous multi-stage review process that includes 2,500 scientific expert reviewers, 800 contributing authors, and 450 lead authors representing 130 countries, the IPCC warns that "all countries" will be affected by climate change if carbon emissions continue to spiral.

By 2100, global average surface temperatures could rise by between 1.1 and 6.4 degrees celsius, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could lead to an eventual rise in sea levels of up to 1.40 meters.

With "strikingly" blunt language, the report reads like "a final warning to humanity," notes Time magazine. "What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment," declared IPCC chairman Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.

DEBATING WAYS TO BATTLE WARMING: This weekend, Grist and Living on Earth sponsored a presidential candidate forum to discuss ways to tackle climate change, in partnership with the League of Conservation Voters Education Fund, California LCVEF, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council Action Fund, and the Presidential Forum on Renewable Energy.

The event was attended by Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-NY), former senator John Edwards, and Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH). "[R]educing oil dependence and global warming is the second most important issue among independent voters," states Daniel Weiss of the Center for American Progress.

With "little disagreement among them" on the urgency of climate change, Clinton and Edwards emphasized the need to reduce emissions by 80 percent by 2050, consistent with the goals of the IPCC, along with a mandatory cap on greenhouse emissions. Such plans to combat global warming can be undertaken with a very modest reduction in global annual GDP growth of 0.12 percent, notes Pachauri.

Newsweek Hides Global Warming Denier's Financial Ties to Big Oil

By Joshua Holland
AlterNet.org
Thursday 12 April 2007

A recent Newsweek op-ed by global warming denier Richard Lindzen claims the meteorologist has no industry ties, but his bio is as misleading as his writing.

So Newsweek is running an opinion piece about global warming titled: "Why So Gloomy?" The piece is authored by Richard Lindzen, a well-known meteorologist, and his thesis about the potential melt-down of our climate can be boiled down to this: Don't worry, be happy!

At the bottom of the article, is this brief biographical sketch of the author:
Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research has always been funded exclusively by the U.S. government. He receives no funding from any energy companies.

Sounds like he's on the up-and-up, no? After all, the guy's not one of those scientists who denies global warming and then cashes nice checks from a bunch of big energy firms, right? Maybe those wing-nuts are right when they deny that there's a scientific consensus about human activities contributing to global warming. Hmmm.

Oh, but wait. That name ... Lindzen ... sure does sound familiar.

Yes! From that excellent investigative piece in Harper's on the funding behind the climate skepticism "industry" ...

In the last year and a half, one of the leading oil industry public relations outlets, the Global Climate Coalition, has spent more than a million dollars to downplay the threat of climate change ...
For the most part the industry has relied on a small band of skeptics - Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Dr. Pat Michaels, Dr. Robert Balling, Dr. Sherwood Idso, and Dr. S. Fred Singer, among others - who have proven extraordinarily adept at draining the issue of all sense of crisis.

Lindzen, for his part, charges oil and coal interests $2,500 a day for his consulting services; his 1991 trip to testify before a Senate committee was paid for by Western Fuels, and a speech he wrote, entitled "Global Warming: the Origin and Nature of Alleged Scientific Consensus," was underwritten by OPEC.

His research may be funded entirely by the government, but Lindzen himself - his kids' college tuition, his mortgage payments - have at least in part been funded by Big Oil and Big Coal, including OPEC for crying out loud!

But wait, it gets worse. The positions advocated by Richard Lindzen, the paid-by-OPEC opinion writer commenting in Newsweek - he's also written op-eds for a number of other publications including the Wall Street Journal - appear to be the diametric opposite of those held by Richard Lindzen, the serious meteorologist, when he's writing peer-reviewed scientific texts.

Specifically, Lindzen co-authored the 2001 National Academy of Science's report on climate change. It concluded that despite some scientific "uncertainties," there is "agreement that the observed warming is real and particularly strong within the past 20 years."

Greenhouse gases are accumulating in Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise.

Kurt Vonnegut is The Resident's People

Gore gearing up for "Live Earth" charity concerts

By Ray Waddell
Fri Apr 13, 2007 5:53AM EDT

NASHVILLE (Billboard) - The executive producer of the Live 8 charity concerts, which refocused international attention on Africa in 2005, has joined forces with Al Gore to save the world.

Live Earth, set for July 7 on stages in all seven continents, will feature such artists as the Police, Madonna, and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Concert promoter Kevin Wall came up with the concept after he saw the former vice president's now-famous slide show on global warming, and then his Oscar-winning film "An Inconvenient Truth."

"I was very deeply moved," he recalled. "This is not about the haves and the have-nots, this is about all of us."

Wall put a staff together, met with the networks and spent three months building the framework of Live Earth. Wall and the former vice president spoke about what is shaping up to be an unprecedented day of music and message.