lightblueline

Source: The Independent (UK), December 28, 2007

By: Michael McCarthy

The Year in Review: The planet

Excerpt Below:

No denying the cold, hard facts

The Nobel Lecture given by The Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2007, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), represented by R K Pachauri, Chairman

(Oslo, December 10, 2007)

© The Nobel Foundation, Stockholm, 2007.

Excerpts:

...

As is the case with the dozens of climate scientists who have support Lightblueline, scientists across the world are dismayed that their research results have not led to policy efforts in places like the United States. The time to act is now, and so a group of 200 scientists have signed the Bali Declaration to urge action by the UN and its members:

Bali Declaration
Here is the text:

"2007 Bali Climate Declaration by Scientists

Source: Reuters, Dec. 6, 2007
by Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

INTERVIEW-Greenland ice could be next puzzle for U.N. panel

Excerpt:
BALI, Indonesia, Dec 7 (Reuters) - A thaw of Greenland ice that could raise world sea levels may be the next puzzle for the U.N. climate panel that won the Nobel Peace Prize, a senior member of the group said.

Source: CNN: November 17, 2007

In its final report of the year, the IPCC issued its clearest warning to date about the need for real action really soon:
U.N. report: Urgent action needed on 'severe' climate change

Here are some excerpts from the CNN report on the IPCC report:
"Climate change is "severe and so sweeping that only urgent, global action" can head it off, a United Nations scientific panel said in a report on global warming issued Saturday.

Climate Change Corp., August 16, 2007: John Shephard
[Professor John Shepherd FRS conducts research at the National Oceanography Centre, University of Southampton, UK, and is deputy director of the Tyndall Centre for climate change research]

Is the IPCC report too optimistic? Prof. Shephard reports on the work of James Hansen. You can read the whole report here:
Sea special report: NASA's James Hansen on the IPCC forecas

The article is also available below:

Urgency

The last two years have seen a remarkable turnaround in public perceptions of climate change, especially in the United States. Some critical threshhold seems to finally have been breached, and we see now that both the House of Representatives and Senate are at last considering meaningful legislative proposals to deal with the anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions that are a major cause of warming. Al Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, was clearly an important catalyst for change. Another catalyst has been the release this year of the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC: see www.ipcc.ch.) The IPCC was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Association and United Nations Environment Programme, with a mission to assess the scientific basis for human-induced climate change, and to recommend policy options for what to do about the problem. The IPCC has released four comprehensive reports in its 19 year history, each sounding a successively more urgent warning about the impacts of fossil fuel burning on climate. Now, in its latest report, the IPCC states that most of the increase in temperature (about 0.7 °C or 1.3 °F since the start of the industrial revolution, with most of that increase in the last 40 years) is “very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.” In IPCC terminology, very likely means with greater than 90% probability. In 2001, the Third IPCC report had put the probability of human influence on climate at 67%. The new assessment, based on decades of intensive and increasingly sophisticated experimental observations and computer modeling, is the most authoritative statement yet, and has been a clear driver for the recent legislative initiatives. This is the good news.

On July 19th, Phil McKenna of the New Scientist newservice reported that recent estimates of near-term sea-level rise failed to capture the role of melting glaciers.
Here is a link to the original report: Melting glaciers will dominate sea-level rise

Below is a copy of the report's text:

Source: Scientific American: June 25, 2007

By Gerard Wynn

LONDON (Reuters) - New research shows that man-made climate change could cause the Greenland ice sheet to break up in hundreds, rather than thousands, of years, the chair of a United Nations panel of scientists said on Monday.

Its entire collapse would raise sea-levels globally by around 7 meters (23 feet), they said.

Thousands of scientists and a hundred governments yesterday agreed, at least in outline, on plans to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, in an effort to avoid the worst scenarios for climate change. Meeting in Bangkok, a city vulnerable to even modest sea-level rise, the IPCC's third report of the year offered new insights and a perspective of hope for nations looking to cut their greenhouse emissions. [There is a link to the actual report the end of this blog.] The good news is that the effort's near-term cost is less than three-percent of global GDP.