IPCC Summary released

peter_j

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( http://www.ipcc.ch/ ) has released a summary for policymakers.Written by more than 600 experts in the fields, the report repeats that changes in the climate are partly due to human behaviour. The report can be downloaded as a small PDF here:

IPCC REPORT 2.2.7
NEW SCIENTIST 2.2.7

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level.

Despite a continuing stream of well-backed-up reports singing the same tune, newspapers are still seeking 'balance', as they continue to publish rebuttals from climate change sceptics. Nothing wrong with that except that it gives people (ie voters and consumers) an excuse not to deal with climate change by letting them think that the jury is still out. The New Zealand Herald published one only about a month ago:
NZ HERALD 4.1.7

At the other end of the spectrum, CRAGs are forming across Britain - Carbon Reduction Action Groups - in which people measure their carbon expenditure and pay penalties if they overshoot their quota - a good model perhaps in countries where the governments fail to act:

OBSERVER 21.01.07

Anonymous

Thanks Peter for the link across to the Guardian article about the birth of Crags. I'm proposing that Architects for Peace members start up a group. I'm happy to convene this.

beatriz

Su, that would be great. I believe that there would be interest among our membership.

beatriz

I found this article in OpenDemocracy very relevant to this topic.
The suggestion is that, the problem will no be solved by finding the right technology, but that we must challenge the way we think. One important aspect is to find the right balance between individual freedoms and public good.

The commentator Madeleine Bunting imagines explaining to her grandson, (...). "The problem was that we were intoxicated with an idea of individual freedom... The idea that the most precious freedom of all was freedom from fear gained force much later."

Climate change: a question of democracy
Dougald Hine
2 - 3 - 2007

Global warming requires more than finding the right levers of policy change: it is a challenge to democratic imagination, says Dougald Hine.

When Tony Blair told a reporter he was "still waiting for the first politician who's actually running for office who's going to come out and say" that we need to fly less, the headlines that followed were a measure of the way the debate over climate change has shifted. In 2005, similar remarks the British prime minister made to a parliamentary committee barely touched the news agenda. But in that time, the media here have moved on from debating the reality and the seriousness of climate change, to predicting how bad things will get and asking what needs to be done.
(...)
A central element in that nightmare is the brutal government measures taken to contain vast numbers of refugees desperate to reach safety in Britain. This picture of catastrophic mass migration pushing liberal democracy beyond its limit features in the background of another dystopian vision. The commentator Madeleine Bunting imagines explaining to her grandson, forty years on, why we were so slow to tackle climate change. Her letter from the future recalls, in passing, the African exodus of the 2020s - "those years of barricaded Mediterranean ports and boats sinking under their starving freight" - but this is incidental to her theme, which is our unreadiness for the measures required at home. "The problem was that we were intoxicated with an idea of individual freedom... The idea that the most precious freedom of all was freedom from fear gained force much later."
(...)
"In order to solve the climate crisis we have to address the democracy crisis... I believe that a campaign that's based on a very large set of ideas focused on the future and the public interest now faces such a withering headwind that a higher priority is to change democracy and open it up again to citizens... and to democratise the dominant medium of television, which has been a form of information flow that has stultified modern life."
(...)

continue reading: OpenDemocracy: http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/question_democracy_4399.jsp

Anonymous

below is the link to the Stern Report:
"Stern Review on the economics of climate change"
: http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/independent_reviews/stern_review_economics_climate_change/stern_review_report.cfm