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Politics : The Exxon Free Environmental Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (1539)	11/15/2007 1:39:23 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 49004

Climate change to take just years Wilkinson Environment Editor November 15, 2007 AUSTRALIANS will begin to see the stark effects of climate change within the next few years, not the next decades, a leading Australian scientist has warned. Graeme Pearman, the former head of CSIRO's atmospheric research unit, yesterday released a report showing that evidence of global warming has dramatically increased in the past 12 months. Dr Pearman told the Herald: "If you think climate change is on the agenda, just wait another couple of years. Every day the media are going to be reporting people seeing changes as a result of things we have already done and the implications of these all over the world: like the breeding patterns and migration patterns of birds and animals, the flowering times, the production capacity of farms and the impact of coastal erosion. We are going to get more of them, not in the next few decades but the next few years." His report for the Climate Institute comes just days before the United Nation's peak scientific body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is due to release the last of four reports by the world's leading scientists and policy-makers on the worsening effect of climate change on the planet. The panel's report will be released on Saturday in Spain at a meeting attended by the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and is expected to carry a dire warning that without urgent action over the next five to 10 years, the world's leaders risk climate change accelerating at dangerous levels. The head of the UN climate negotiations warned this week that failure to recognise the urgency of the warnings "would be nothing less than criminally irresponsible". Dr Pearman fears there is a "disconnect" between the level of urgency understood by the scientists and the actions of governments to change our use of energy. His report for the Climate Institute points out that already the IPCC evidence is out of date because new data on climate change has emerged in the past 12 months. This includes the melt of the Arctic sea ice this year at a much faster rate than any of the scientific models forecast. It shrunk the sea ice 40 per cent below its average size, losing an area twice the size of NSW. The growth in carbon emissions, mainly from fossil fuels, has also leapt in the past decade from 1.1 per cent a year to 3 per cent a year. "Greenhouse emissions are rising faster than the worst-case IPCC scenarios," Dr Pearman said. He is due to address a conference of the Committee for Economic Development of Australia today in Sydney, where his opinion on the urgency of climate change will clash with that of many of the economists attending. The committee released its response to the climate change challenge yesterday in a report called Getting It Right, which was sponsored largely by oil, gas and coal companies including Exxon, TRUenergy and Xstrata. The overall message is that while climate change is real, Australia should delay imposing short-term targets on industry to cut emissions because of the costs to the economy. smh.com.au

To: Sam who wrote (1539)	11/16/2007 7:52:48 AM
From: Ron	Respond to of 49004

Cyclone Sidr Kills 240 in Bangladesh By SOMINI SENGUPTA NEW DELHI — Packing winds of over 100 miles an hour, the furious cyclone that swept across the low-lying watery edges of southern Bangladesh late Thursday downed trees, sent mobile telephone towers crashing and swept away mud and thatch homes. By midday today local time, the death toll of Cyclone Sidr, as it was called, stood at roughly 240, said an official reached by telephone at the control room of the Disaster Management ministry of Bangladesh. Long vulnerable to nature's fury, Bangladesh stands to suffer even more from extreme weather events like this as a result of human-induced climate change, scientists say. It was too early for government officials and independent relief workers to quantify the total scale of damage, though it was clear that by Bangladeshi standards, the impact would likely be relatively low. In 1991, a tropical storm claimed roughly 140,000 lives. Bangladeshi relief agencies have since then developed early warning systems and storm shelters to help people evacuate before disaster strikes. The Associated Press reported that 650,000 people had moved out of their homes. The storm weakened by today. Still, it brought distress to some of the most vulnerable people on Earth. Preliminary reports from the fragile delta regions of the Bay of Bengal indicated that rivers had swelled so high that water punched through mud embankments and washed away paddy and vegetable fields, ruining the year's earnings for peasants who live off of those lands. In one district, Shatkhira, according to local journalists, roughly 5,000 mud homes collapsed back into the ground. Local relief workers for Caritas, the Catholic relief agency, reported that an entire island in Barisal district was submerged under at least six feet of water and houses were blown away by winds. The capital, Dhaka, though not directly in the path of the storm, felt its punch. Electricity towers were down, darkening the entire country for several hours overnight, and much of Dhaka remained without power for most of the day today, which also pinched the water supply. Relief and rehabilitation efforts are likely to be a crucial test for the army-backed caretaker government in charge of Bangladesh. The Indian side of the Bay of Bengal delta was largely spared. Government officials there estimated that 100,000 people had left their homes in search of safety, and while some trees and roofs had been blown away on the deltaic islands known as the Sunderbans, no casualties were reported and people had already begun returning home. The United Nations Development Program, in pressing world leaders to take immediate steps to address climate change, argues that the increased frequency of droughts, floods and storms stands to hit the world's poor hardest and exacerbate poverty in places like Bangladesh. The agency is due to come out with details in its annual Human Development Report later this month. Julfikar Ali Manik contributed reporting from Dhaka. nytimes.com