Carbon Footprints

From NewsAdvance: Global warming is the biggest threat

The single greatest problem facing mankind in 5,000 years of civilization is not terrorism, but global warming.

That’s the message Mark Hertsgaard just brought back from Europe, where he spent two months interviewing government officials, scientists and business leaders.

“Here in the U.S. our public discussion of global warming is at least 10 years behind the rest of the world,” Hertsgaard told about 300 people at Sweet Briar College on Thursday night, as he was literally traveling home from California.

Technorati Tags: carbon credits, climate change, global warming, modeling, politics, Hertsgaard, USA

The article goes on to say:

While Americans are still arguing about whether climate change is a problem, Britain has 30-year plans to increase levees and dikes to prepare for rising waters as the polar ice caps melt.

The island nation may be facing the loss of three-fifths of its farmland and one of 13 houses as the oceans rise, Hertsgaard said.

Sir David King, chief scientific adviser for the British government, is the official who has proclaimed that climate change is a bigger threat to the planet than terrorism.

While the British have been the U.S.’s staunchest allies on the war on terrorism, they are befuddled by our stance on global warming, Hertsgaard said. Even the parties to the political right of Tony Blair have attacked him for not holding Bush accountable on climate change, he said.

But instead of agreeing to reduce the greenhouse gases that are heating up the Earth - or even improving fuel standards - the U.S. is still listening to people like Sen. James Inhouf, R-Okla., chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, who has called global warming the “greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

British scientists find it “quite ludicrous” that Inhouf called science fiction writer Michael Crichton to testify at a recent hearing on global warming.

“But a science fiction writer? At a Senate hearing?” were the questions posed by Michael Meacher, former British environment minister.

The fact that such a hearing could be held just six weeks after Hurricane Katrina “boggled their minds,” Hertsgaard said of British officials.

The reporter was also highly critical of the mainstream media for its failure to recognize and report on global warming in any meaningful way. Fox News has gone so far as to call climate change “junk science,” while The Wall Street Journal calls it a “liberal hoax.”

In Britain, the Financial Times (their equivalent to The Wall Street Journal) stopped questioning whether global warming is real years ago, he said.

In 1988, the United Nations created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, convening 2,500 of the world’s top experts on climate to review the evidence on global warming. Each subsequent report by the group, the largest peer-reviewed scientific inquiry in history, shows that the effects of warming are worse and arriving sooner than predicted.
But the U.S. media continues to give equal time to the “six scientists” who say global warming is not a problem, Hertsgaard said. All those scientists have their research funded by the oil industry, he noted.

The rest of the world understands that global warming is upon us, Hertsgaard claims. As spring arrives earlier and fall later, climate is becoming more extreme. The drought and heat wave that killed 31,000 people in Europe in 2003, the increasing severity of hurricanes, cold snaps and downpours are all being brought on by global climate change, the journalist said.

“We can’t wait for Washington anymore,” Hertsgaard said.

Read the whole article for much more detail. Hertsgaard’s conclusion is right though, we can’t afford to wait for our Governments to help us. They are too busy trying to scare the pants off us right now. Take personal responsibility for your pollution and subscribe to a stream of carbon credits to offset your personal CO₂ footprint.

-DS

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 13th, 2005 at 6:02 pm and is filed under Climate Change. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.