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Topic: Bush undermines global action on climate change
| Author | Message |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 5/26/2007 10:20:15 PM | show profile More of the same old same old. How many more days until this nightmare leaves office? **** Leaked report claims U.S. preparing to reject proposals for G8 climate change deal LONDON: The United States is preparing to reject new targets on climate change at a Group of Eight summit next month...according to a document leaked by environmental campaigners. ...The 27 EU members have agreed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent by 2020 ? building on Kyoto, which runs through 2012 ? and by 30 percent if a broader international agreement can be reached. ...the leaked document claimed the White House is "fundamentally opposed" to many of the European objectives. ..."The U.S. still has serious, fundamental concerns about this draft statement," the notes on the document read. "The treatment of climate change runs counter to our overall position and crosses multiple 'red lines' in terms of what we simply cannot agree to." International Herald Tribune |
| mailbag | Posted – 5/27/2007 9:15:09 AM | show profile | email poster A lot more time for dubious deeds 603 days left.... it only took this guy 556 days to watch the Twin Towers fall, and invade Afghanistan and Iraq. Granted he'll take a good 50 days vacation before leaving office to cut down more trees on his raaanch, so lets call it even number of days remaining to do plenty of harm. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 5/27/2007 6:26:35 PM | show profile 603 days? Way too many, I was thinking it was fewer than that. In the meantime, a recent paper "Global and Regional Drives of Accelerating CO2 Emissions" from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicates that our emissions trajectory since 2000 has been close to the highest-emissions scenario developed by the IPCC (A1F1), with the emissions growth rate exceeding that for the worst case scenario. Thta scenario has global temperatures increasing 3 to 6 degrees celcius by 2100. http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0700609104v1 So, in other words, our current trajectory is worse than worst case. But no urgency from the Bush camp. |
| UGoGirl | Posted – 5/27/2007 6:28:25 PM | show profile And what does 3 to 6 degrees mean? *** +3.4°C Rainforest turns to desert The Amazon rainforest burns in a firestorm of catastrophic ferocity, covering South America with ash and smoke. Once the smoke clears, the interior of Brazil becomes desert, and huge amounts of extra carbon enter the atmosphere, boosting global warming more. The entire Arctic ice-cap disappears in the summer months. The North Pole becomes ice-free for the first time in 3 million years. Polar bears, walruses and ringed seals all go extinct. Water supplies run short in California as the Sierra Nevada snowpack melts away. Tens of millions are displaced as the Kalahari desert expands across southern Africa. +4.4°C Melting ice caps displace millions Rapidly rising temperatures in the Arctic put Siberian permafrost in the melt zone, releasing vast quantities of methane and CO2. Global temperatures keep on rising rapidly in consequence. Melting ice-caps and sea level rises displace more than 100 million people, particularly in Bangladesh, the Nile Delta and Shanghai. Heatwaves and drought make much of the sub-tropics uninhabitable: large-scale migration even takes place within Europe, where deserts are growing in southern Spain, Italy and Greece. More than half of wild species are wiped out, in the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs. Agriculture collapses in Australia. +5.4°C Sea levels rise by five metres The West Antarctic ice sheet breaks up, eventually adding another five metres to global sea levels. If these temperatures are sustained, the entire planet will become ice-free, and sea levels will rise 70 metres higher than today. South Asian society collapses due to the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas, drying up the Indus river. In east India and Bangladesh, monsoon floods threaten millions. Super-El Niños spark global weather chaos. Most of humanity begins to seek refuge away from higher temperatures closer to the poles. Tens of millions of refugees force their way into the British Isles and Scandanavia. World food supplies run out. +6.4°C Most of life is exterminated Warming seas lead to the possible release of methane hydrates trapped in sub-oceanic sediments: methane fireballs tear across the sky, causing further warming. The oceans lose oxygen and turn stagnant, releasing poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas and destroying the ozone layer. Deserts extend almost to the Arctic. "Hypercanes" (hurricanes of unimaginable ferocity) circum-navigate the globe, causing flash floods which strip the land of soil. Humanity reduced to a few survivors eking out a living in polar refuges. Most of life on Earth has been snuffed out, as temperatures rise higher than for hundreds of millions of years. |
