The Reality is a future we must change for all who will inherit the future we have left them, my children, your children and theirs.

The Reality is that those with vested interests to protect (big oil and coal; amongst others) have the status quo to protect. They have successfully done this with misinformation about climate change, as others have done in the past. :– Smoking is not addictive or a heath hazard!

The Climate Reality Project is to raise awareness of a need for collective understanding that the single (multiple) ‘extreme weather events’ around the world over recent times are related to a change in climate, directly resulting from the pollution of our atmosphere by the burning of once safely stored carbon (fossil fuels ) along with the increase of other greenhouse gases resulting from positive feedbacks linked with these emissions. We have entered unknown and very dangerous territory with our giant chemical experiment with the atmosphere.

Join with us now on this global action day to ask those still sitting on the inactive fence of comfortable complacency, to demand action from our policy makers, to move to a future, safe, for those who will inherit what we are leaving behind; my children and yours.

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Economic recession has failed to curb rising emissions, undermining hope of keeping global warming to safe levels Photograph: Dave Reede/All Canada Photos/Corbis

Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency.

The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions.

Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data.

“I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.”

Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said.

“Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.”

Birol said disaster could yet be averted, if governments heed the warning. “If we have bold, decisive and urgent action, very soon, we still have a chance of succeeding,” he said.

The IEA has calculated that if the world is to escape the most damaging effects of global warming, annual energy-related emissions should be no more than 32Gt by 2020. If this year’s emissions rise by as much as they did in 2010, that limit will be exceeded nine years ahead of schedule, making it all but impossible to hold warming to a manageable degree.

Emissions from energy fell slightly between 2008 and 2009, from 29.3Gt to 29Gt, due to the financial crisis. A small rise was predicted for 2010 as economies recovered, but the scale of the increase has shocked the IEA. “I was expecting a rebound, but not such a strong one,” said Birol, who is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on energy.

John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace UK, said time was running out. “This news should shock the world. Yet even now politicians in each of the great powers are eyeing up extraordinary and risky ways to extract the world’s last remaining reserves of fossil fuels – even from under the melting ice of the Arctic. You don’t put out a fire with gasoline. It will now be up to us to stop them.”

Most of the rise – about three-quarters – has come from developing countries, as rapidly emerging economies have weathered the financial crisis and the recession that has gripped most of the developed world.

But he added that, while the emissions data was bad enough news, there were other factors that made it even less likely that the world would meet its greenhouse gas targets.

• About 80% of the power stations likely to be in use in 2020 are either already built or under construction, the IEA found. Most of these are fossil fuel power stations unlikely to be taken out of service early, so they will continue to pour out carbon – possibly into the mid-century. The emissions from these stations amount to about 11.2Gt, out of a total of 13.7Gt from the electricity sector. These “locked-in” emissions mean savings must be found elsewhere.

“It means the room for manoeuvre is shrinking,” warned Birol.

• Another factor that suggests emissions will continue their climb is the crisis in the nuclear power industry. Following the tsunami damage at Fukushima, Japan and Germany have called a halt to their reactor programmes, and other countries are reconsidering nuclear power.

“People may not like nuclear, but it is one of the major technologies for generating electricity without carbon dioxide,” said Birol. The gap left by scaling back the world’s nuclear ambitions is unlikely to be filled entirely by renewable energy, meaning an increased reliance on fossil fuels.

• Added to that, the United Nations-led negotiations on a new global treaty on climate change have stalled. “The significance of climate change in international policy debates is much less pronounced than it was a few years ago,” said Birol.

He urged governments to take action urgently. “This should be a wake-up call. A chance [of staying below 2 degrees] would be if we had a legally binding international agreement or major moves on clean energy technologies, energy efficiency and other technologies.”

Governments are to meet next week in Bonn for the next round of the UN talks, but little progress is expected.

Sir David King, former chief scientific adviser to the UK government, said the global emissions figures showed that the link between rising GDP and rising emissions had not been broken. “The only people who will be surprised by this are people who have not been reading the situation properly,” he said.

Forthcoming research led by Sir David will show the west has only managed to reduce emissions by relying on imports from countries such as China.

Another telling message from the IEA’s estimates is the relatively small effect that the recession – the worst since the 1930s – had on emissions. Initially, the agency had hoped the resulting reduction in emissions could be maintained, helping to give the world a “breathing space” and set countries on a low-carbon path. The new estimates suggest that opportunity may have been missed.

Source Guardian

Extracted from the Greenhouse Neutral Foundations article in Green Lifestyle Magazine in 2010 Soy -SOy what are we doing?  - ‘The Amazon lost some 10,000 square miles of forest cover last year alone — 40 percent more than the year before.” Among the players responsible for this rainforest destruction are multinational, international agribusinesses such as Cargill, Bunge and Archer Daniels Midland, companies investing in growing genetically modified soy. The U.S. company, Cargill, built a soy processing and port facility in Santarém, Brazil, without the environmental impact assessment required by the Brazilian government.
   Wikipedia lists the main producers of soy around the world as the United States (32%), Brazil (28%), Argentina (21%), China (7%) and India (4%). Of the 32% of global production of soy in the U.S., 85% percent was genetically modified by 2004, accounting for some 63.6 million acres of soybeans.
   Who is driving this steam engine of environmental destruction?  You guessed it, Monsanto.

Speaking in an unusually candid manner during a European Parliament hearing on Wednesday (14 April), De Boer said the UN climate negotiations in Copenhagen last year had been dominated by a sense of “suspicion”.

The December UN conference ended with a loose agreement, the Copenhagen Accord, which left Europeans “disappointed” because it contained no firm commitment from world nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“A lot of the reason why this process has been moving so slowly is because of suspicion, especially on the part of developing counties,” said De Boer, who will step down from the UNFCCC in July to take an advising role at consulting firm KPMG.

“Trust just isn’t there.”

European leaders routinely refer to the EU’s 2020 target to reduce emissions by 20% on 1990 levels as the most ambitious in the world.

But the UN climate chief suggested that the target will in fact be easy to achieve, raising suspicion from developing countries that it is only a smokescreen.

“Many of the discussions that you have in Europe are not terribly private,” he said. “And the rest of the world knows that the European Commission said to EU countries that achieving the minus 20% was a piece of cake and that achieving minus 30% isn’t going to ruin the European economy.”

“So countries in the rest of the world are asking themselves: ‘If that’s true, then why is this minus 30 now being taken off the table?’”

EU divided over move to 30%

The WWF’s Stefan Singer says the EU will easily reach its 20% objective for 2020, thanks mainly to the de-industrialisation that has taken place in ex-Soviet states since the fall of communism and offset projects in developing countries (EurActiv 14/04/09).

Moreover, emissions dropped steeply last year – by 11% – due to the economic recession, making the 2020 objective that much easier to attain (EurActiv 2/04/10).

But the EU’s possible move to a 30% reduction target for 2020 is causing internal divisions among the 27 member states, with Eastern European countries saying the EU must first analyse how other countries’ pledges compare before making a decision.

By contrast, the European Commission and most Western EU member states including the UK, Denmark, the Netherlands and Sweden, argue that the move to 30% will stimulate green economic growth and innovation, creating new jobs along the way.

“If Europe is a strong believer in the green economic growth story, then those targets are imperative to achieve that sense of change of direction,” De Boer stressed.

‘Climate-wash’

De Boer said another major point of contention relates to the 100 billion dollars in annual climate aid that industrialised countries pledged for poor nations in Copenhagen.

“Is that going to be climate-wash or real and additional finance?” he asked. “Quite frankly, the track record is not quite there [to prove it],” he said.

Under existing arrangements, developing countries were asked to produce technology need assessments in their effort to fight climate change, De Boer explained. But these were rarely followed up and the promised funding was kept under wraps for the most part.

“Many among developing nations feel, with some justification, that these financial resources are not being provided. And that if financial resources are provided, they are often ‘climate-wash’,” he said, meaning development assistance re-labelled as climate aid. “So the money that was originally intended for poverty eradication now magically becomes climate change money.”

To break the deadlock, De Boer suggests giving developing countries responsibility for managing the aid. “What they would really like to see is that these huge sums of money are going to be distributed according to the priorities of the countries rather than according to the priorities of the donators.”

His proposal is to create a financial governance mechanism at the next UN summit in Cancún “that will really give developing countries the feeling that they are in control or in co-control of the money that is intended to help them green their economic growth”.

According to the Dutchman, developing countries are ready to accept that the money will be channelled through existing institutions like the World Bank, regional development banks or cooperation agencies.

Kyoto pledges not met

Speaking in the European Parliament, De Boer said the sense of suspicion had been heightened by the fact that industrialised nations had shown little willingness to meet their emission reduction pledges under the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

“The first suspicion relates to the fact that, yes, although Europe as a whole is on track to meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol, there are individual countries within the European Union which are having a little more difficulty – at least for the time being – achieving their targets under Kyoto.”

Although the EU as a whole is set to overshoot its collective emission reduction target under the Kyoto Protocol, a recent report by the European Environment Agency (EEA) showed the ‘older’ EU-15 member states will fall short of their targets without new policies or offset credits (EurActiv 13/11/09).

Moreover, under the UNFCCC, rich countries were supposed to return their emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000, De Boer said. “But in fact, only four individual countries met that goal,” he pointed out.

De Boer singled out Canada, which announced it will not meet its Kyoto target but nevertheless refuses to withdraw from the treaty. Developing countries have not heard any reaction to that statement, De Boer said, adding to their suspicion. 

“So there is not that much confidence that industrialised countries will meet their targets under the Kyoto Protocol,” he explained.

Source Euractiv

If further proof were needed that, despite their pious words, our political leaders do not take climate change seriously, the recent population debate provides it.

The argument over whether we should aim for 36 million people by the middle of the century is conducted as if the world in 2050 were going to be a richer version of what we have now. This is the grand delusion of the climate change debate.

None of our political or business leaders is listening to what the scientists are saying. More surprisingly, nor are our leading demographers, economists and Treasury officials. All have joined the debate but seem oblivious to the sort of world the growing population is expected to inhabit.

In truth, Australians in 2050 will be living in a nation transformed by a changing climate, with widespread doubt over whether we will make it to the end of the century in a land that is recognisably Australian.

Over the next decades hundreds of thousands of Australians will try to escape those parts of the continent that have become too unpleasant or dangerous to live in and migrate to those that have better water supplies, fewer days of extreme heat and adequate protection from floods, fires and rising seas.

What will drive these waves of internal migration? No one has studied it in detail, but the primary factors are well known.

The Garnaut Review anticipates the drying of the Murray-Darling Basin will end irrigated agriculture and reduce the population of the region. Water shortages in Perth and Adelaide will make them less liveable.

Elsewhere, severe impacts of a changing climate on industries as diverse as livestock, wheat farming, wine-growing and tourism will cause some regions to decline as employment opportunities shrink.

Many low-lying coastal regions will become unsuitable for habitation as seas rise and storm surges damage infrastructure, commercial buildings and housing. Increases in the number and intensity of extreme floods – especially in Queensland – will render some areas unsuitable for development. Declining services and the difficulty of insuring against losses will induce many to move. The high risk of extreme fires will make many regional areas too dangerous for habitation.

Many Australians will be on the move. But where will they go? Many will be leaving the wide brown land for the narrow green strip down the eastern seaboard, and many more will be heading from the north of the green strip to cooler southern climes.

As less of the continent is suitable for human habitation, the pressure on southern cities and regional areas will become intense. And it won’t let up any time soon.

We are also likely to face more pressure to accept people displaced from low-lying Pacific islands inundated by rising seas. Tuvalu is already asking Australia to accept homeless islanders as its atoll sinks. In 2008, the Maldives government said it was looking to buy real estate to establish a new homeland and Australia was on the list of potential targets.

We will be lucky if we can restrict our obligations to climate refugees from our immediate region and not have to deal with a tide of people forced out of the mega-cities of south-east Asia and China, where 100 million people will be displaced by a metre rise in sea-levels, the expected rise this century even if the world could agree on drastic emission cuts.

Yet the population debate is carried on as if all this is irrelevant, as if Australia in 2050 or 2100 will be as it is today but with higher living standards.

It is not only the impacts of a changing climate that escape our leaders’ comprehension, but the implications of a rapidly expanding population for climate policy.

The Labor government has committed to reducing Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent by 2050, from about 500 million tonnes to about 200 million tonnes. With a population of 22 million that means we would be allowed nine tonnes each every year.

If there are 36 million of us we will be allowed 5.5 tonnes each.

In truth, 60 per cent is not enough. However much we are forced to cut our emissions, doubling the population means halving the emission we are allowed each year.

So when Kevin Rudd says he believes in ”a big Australia” he is promising us a future with many more people squeezed into an ever-shrinking patchwork of liveable areas. The quality of life we value so much will become a scarcer commodity.

Clive Hamilton is the author of Requiem for a Species and a panellist in a Sydney Writers’ Festival event on May 21: ”Have We All Been Conned?”

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The reality of that welcome to us would be our reply, “I’m not getting on this flight!”

Yet we are all in fact on that flight with climate change and the plane has taken off.

Much has been promoted in the media lately that climate change science is somehow conspiring to concoct data and the conspiracy theories abound from ‘Climate Gate’ and timeframes for the disappearance of glaciers in the Himalayas. There has been little said to the fact that the glaciers in the Himalayas will in fact disappear. This is a forgone conclusion with climate change. That plane will crash. As we watch impassively at the Arctic thaw and the recent reports of glacial melt and iceshelf collapse in Antarctica, we can see too that this plane is flying on one engine. As we observe species extinction reports and look at the lonely figure of the polar bear on the ever shrinking ice flows that they depend on for their very existence, we can see their plane has crashed and is slowly going down.

There is accelerated thawing of the permafrost in northern latitudes with recent observations of methane emissions being on a dramatic rise adding further to the possibility that this climatic tipping point has been breached. That plane is on vertical takeoff.

The Foundations main mission is ‘To broaden the understanding of the choices made that impact or increase depletion of finite resources resulting in environmental and ecosystem damage.’ Enshrined in this environmental educational message is environmental and ecosystem damage, so climate change as a direct result of our unsustainable consumption of finite fossil fuels with the resultant pollution of our atmosphere daily of heat trapping greenhouse gases is a part of that massage. This plane also will crash unless we take some immediate action to perform some maintenance. Would you get on that plane if no maintenance had been carried out since it was commissioned?

In the last six months or so, while still reporting the observed effects of climate change that are coming daily, much to the surprise of the scientific community ahead of the date they thought those changes might occur, we have moved the messages more to inevitable finite resource extinction. Yes extinction; because just like the polar bear with climate change and its ecosystem damage, our future relies as much on sustainable resource consumption as theirs does on ice flows. And there is a certainty that can be predicted when this will happen. Maybe we can’t get people to think of the impact their actions today will have on their children and grandchildren in 100 years time when the climate change plane inevitably crashes, but within my lifetime and yours the plane of consumption you and I are sitting on will crash.

Consumption Airlines will crash and it’s time we all thought about getting off the plane. Check the back of your ticket, it’s written there in plain language. If you need further convincing, then see the simple math of when.

Anyway should scientists have to give us the date that the plane will crash? They know it will; it’s only when the impact will take place that is in doubt.

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Source Climate Safety

Want a weekly update of all the greatest posts on the web? Subscribe for the weekly VOICE FOR CHANGE Newsletter and never miss a story! CLICK Bob Williamson and in the subject line type SUBSCRIBE

The Populus poll of 1,001 adults found 25% did not think global warming was happening, a rise of 8% since a similar poll was conducted in November.

The percentage of respondents who said climate change was a reality had fallen from 83% in November to 75% this month.

And only 26% of those asked believed climate change was happening and “now established as largely man-made”.

The findings are based on interviews carried out on 3-4 February.

In November 2009, a similar poll by Populus – commissioned by the Times newspaper – showed that 41% agreed that climate change was happening and it was largely the result of human activities.

“It is very unusual indeed to see such a dramatic shift in opinion in such a short period,” Populus managing director Michael Simmonds told BBC News.

“The British public are sceptical about man’s contribution to climate change – and becoming more so,” he added.

“More people are now doubters than firm believers.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs’ (Defra) chief scientific adviser, Professor Bob Watson, called the findings “very disappointing”.

“The fact that there has been a very significant drop in the number of people that believe that we humans are changing the Earth’s climate is serious,” he told BBC News.

“Action is urgently needed,” Professor Watson warned.

“We need the public to understand that climate change is serious so they will change their habits and help us move towards a low carbon economy.”

‘Exaggerated risks’

Of the 75% of respondents who agreed that climate change was happening, one-in-three people felt that the potential consequences of living in a warming world had been exaggerated, up from one-in-five people in November.

The number of people who felt the risks of climate change had been understated dropped from 38% in November to 25% in the latest poll.

During the intervening period between the two polls, there was a series of high profile climate-related stories, some of which made grim reading for climate scientists and policymakers.

In November, the contents of emails stolen from a leading climate science unit led to accusations that a number of researchers had manipulated data.

And in January, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admitted that it had made a mistake in asserting that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035.

All of this happened against the backdrop of many parts of the northern hemisphere being gripped by a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures.

However, 73% of the people who said that they were aware of the “science flaws” stories stated that the media coverage had not changed their views about the risks of climate change.

“People tend to make judgements over time based on a whole range of different sources,” Mr Simmonds explained.

He added that it was very unusual for single events to have a dramatic impact on public opinion.

“Normally, people make their minds up over a longer period and are influenced by all the voices they hear, what they read and what people they know are talking about.”

Source BBC News

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Even before Republican Scott Brown’s stunning election to the Senate in traditionally Democratic Massachusetts last month, it was proving hard to corral moderate Democrats to support a bill capping greenhouse gas emissions. Now they’re afraid to back anything that could be perceived as harmful to the economy. “Realistically, the cap-and-trade bills in the House and the Senate are going nowhere,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told the New York Times. That’s a distressing comment coming from one of the three senators supposedly crafting a compromise climate bill that’s capable of achieving a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

President Obama has backed down too. On Tuesday, he signaled that cap-and-trade could go the way of healthcare reform’s “public option,” saying it could be removed from the climate bill. That would eliminate the market mechanism for pricing greenhouse gas pollution — and without setting such a carbon price, other measures under consideration, such as a national renewable energy standard, won’t go far enough to significantly slow global warming.

Global emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rise every year, and within decades are expected to hit a worrisome atmospheric concentration threshold of 450 parts per million. At that point, there’s a high probability that average global temperatures will be at least 2 degrees Celsius higher than they were in 1850 (they’re already 1 C higher). Our children would live in a world of mass migrations, wars and conflicts fueled by scarce water supplies, infrastructure destruction as rising sea levels swallow coastlines, extreme weather events, wildfires and increased poverty and disease. These are not the predictions of wild-eyed liberal pundits but of thousands of climate researchers around the world, along with organizations such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,the U.S. Global Change Research Program and the National Academies of Sciences.

It gets worse. No one really knows what would happen if average temperatures hit 5 C higher than 1850 — a level we could easily reach within a century under a business-as-usual scenario — but changes to the physical geography of the planet become probable: land masses would vanish; ecosystems would collapse. Human civilization would change, and not for the better.

This process can still be slowed at a moderate economic cost, but time is short — delays make both fighting climate change and adapting to it dramatically more expensive, and eventually could make it impossible. It’s foolish to say we can’t afford to pass a climate bill during a recession. We can’t afford not to.

Source LA Times

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Based on a scientific survey of 18- to 30-year-olds, researchers from MSU’s Eli Broad Graduate School of Management found that young consumers will not pay a premium price for an automobile simply because it is environmentally friendly. Instead, the determining factor — by far — is fuel efficiency.

The findings are being released to coincide with the North American International Auto Show in Detroit.

Clay Voorhees, MSU assistant professor of marketing and lead faculty researcher on the project, said the findings indicate an eco-savvy generation that has grown up and is coming to grips with the economic reality of paying bills.

“Generation Y is aging, and the stereotypical assumption that they are a spoiled generation of pierced, tattooed outcasts couldn’t be further from the truth,” Voorhees said. “They’re maturing into a pragmatic generation that wants to do the right thing for the environment but also has real economic concerns.”

MSU and Deloitte, a New York-based marketing and accounting firm, teamed to study the attitudes toward the auto industry of Gen Y — at 75 million strong, the largest generation since the baby boomers. MSU also launched an in-depth investigation into Gen Y’s view of sustainability as it relates to the industry.

According to the sustainability study, young consumers will pay only $1,500 extra for a $20,000 automobile simply because it is a hybrid and considered environmentally friendly. But those same consumers will pay an additional $8,000 for a vehicle that gets 15 extra miles per gallon — regardless of whether it’s a hybrid.

“It’s all about economic motivation,” Voorhees said. “While people want to do the right thing — they want to save the world, particularly Gen Y — they need an extra incentive on top of the motivation of owning a car that produces less emissions.”

Jeremy Vanisacker, an MSU graduate student who was involved in the project, said initially he was surprised that his fellow Gen Y’ers needed such a large economic incentive to buy an eco-friendly car. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense.

“We’ve grown up with a green mindset but we haven’t really had to pay for it. Think about curbside recycling and free social networks,” said Vanisacker, 26, who’s scheduled to graduate in May with a master’s in business administration. “As a generation we’ve come to expect more for less.”

Voorhees said the auto manufacturers need to do a better job of educating consumers on the financial benefits of owning eco-friendly vehicles, which typically cost more than combustion-engine vehicles but theoretically pay for themselves over time.

“Why put the burden on a Gen Y customer to walk in the showroom and out how many miles they have to drive this Ford Fusion before they break even?” he said. “Automotive manufacturers need to make the investment in education to assist consumers in understanding how these technologies work and how they will ultimately help the environment and save them money.”

Also involved in the project from MSU were Chris Grindem, senior lecturer in marketing, and MBA students Anthony Khedaywi, Carlos Beltran, Roger Kempa and Aditya Rajpal.

Source Science Daily