Democrats Abroad New Zealand
6.25.2007
The Melting Ice Man Cometh (Guardian.co.uk)
He believes his support for Kyoto lost him the coal states of Kentucky and West Virginia - and the 2000 race for the presidency. But Hurricane Katrina and his Oscar-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, changed all that. Now, on the eve of his Live Earth global concerts, climate change could put Al Gore back in the White House
James Traub
Sunday June 24, 2007
The Observer
One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of An Inconvenient Truth, his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, in which Gore would really immerse himself if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, 'Isn't that AL GORE?!' There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. 'I'll move them,' I said; and Gore, before he could think, said: 'No, don't.'
Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate - saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the American presidency. He probably won't - though he might. ('It's complicated,' he told me, 'but it's not mysterious.') He says he thinks he'd be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him.
Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the past three decades he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone in America wanted to hear - that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument - the smoking-causes-cancer part - is only the beginning. Gore and the US's major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort to persuade the American people of the need for drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. 'The central challenge,' he said to me later that evening as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, 'is to expand the limits of what's now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what's considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.
(More ... Guardian > The Observer Magazine)
James Traub
Sunday June 24, 2007
The Observer
One afternoon in February, Al Gore was waiting to board a flight from Nashville to Miami, where he was to deliver the slide show that forms the basis of An Inconvenient Truth, his Academy Award-winning documentary on global warming. Gore was telling me about Ilya Prigogine, a Belgian chemist who won a Nobel Prize in 1977 for his insights into the thermodynamics of open systems, an intriguing subject that has very little to do with global warming. Every minute or so he flashed a microgrin at a passer-by without interrupting his oratorical flow. We had moved on to complexity theory, in which Gore would really immerse himself if only he had the time, and then to the concept of nested systems, which of course had been developed by the late psychologist Uri Bronfenbrenner, when a woman in a blazing orange shirt emerged from her flight, did a double take and cried, 'Isn't that AL GORE?!' There was no ignoring this fan. As she came over to thank Gore for trying to save the planet, I saw that my bags were in the way. 'I'll move them,' I said; and Gore, before he could think, said: 'No, don't.'
Six years after the Supreme Court declared him the loser of a presidential race that seemed his for the taking, Al Gore has attained what you can only call prophetic status; and he has done so by acting as he could not, or would not, as a candidate - saying precisely what he believes, and saying it with clarity, passion, intellectual mastery and even, sometimes, wit. Everywhere he goes, people urge him, almost beg him, to run for the American presidency. He probably won't - though he might. ('It's complicated,' he told me, 'but it's not mysterious.') He says he thinks he'd be better at it this time than he was last time. And he probably would be: Gore really does know how to hold 6,000 people in a room. But sometimes one person is one person too much for him.
Gore is a gifted, and remorseless, explainer. Over the past three decades he has been trying to explain a complicated and unattractive idea that scarcely anyone in America wanted to hear - that mankind has threatened its future on the planet by massively increasing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Now, thanks in part to Gore himself, fewer and fewer people dispute this premise. But winning the argument - the smoking-causes-cancer part - is only the beginning. Gore and the US's major environmental groups have now embarked on a three-year effort to persuade the American people of the need for drastic action to curb greenhouse gases. It is a campaign of such vast ambition you could almost imagine passing up a run at the presidency in order to pursue it. 'The central challenge,' he said to me later that evening as he was waiting to go onstage at the University of Miami, 'is to expand the limits of what's now considered politically possible. The outer boundary of what's considered plausible today still falls far short of the near boundary of what would actually solve the crisis.
(More ... Guardian > The Observer Magazine)
Labels: Climate Change, Gore, Guardian
¶ 20:24 3 comments
6.18.2007
Barack the Renegade, Say Secret Service (Guardian.co.uk)
Simon Tisdall in Washington
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian
The Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been variously characterised as the bright young hope of the nation, a know-nothing upstart and a rebel without a cause. But for the wired-up, sunglassed, lapel-murmuring men and women of the US secret service, the senator from Illinois is known simply as "renegade", it was revealed yesterday.
If Mr Obama's aim is to present himself as an underdog outsider running against politics-as-usual, the secret service's codename could be a plus with undecided voters. But others in this race-sensitive country are certain to perceive a slight on Mr Obama's African-American background.
Secret service agents seeking a pithy, private way of identifying and protecting the candidate as he zips around the country say the choice of "renegade" is essentially no different from the tags chosen for past and present political high-fliers.
Former agents told the Washington Post that military officials chose the code names without particular reference to the characteristics of the politician. Despite such denials, the tags often appear strangely apposite.
(More ... Guardian)
Monday June 18, 2007
The Guardian
The Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has been variously characterised as the bright young hope of the nation, a know-nothing upstart and a rebel without a cause. But for the wired-up, sunglassed, lapel-murmuring men and women of the US secret service, the senator from Illinois is known simply as "renegade", it was revealed yesterday.
If Mr Obama's aim is to present himself as an underdog outsider running against politics-as-usual, the secret service's codename could be a plus with undecided voters. But others in this race-sensitive country are certain to perceive a slight on Mr Obama's African-American background.
Secret service agents seeking a pithy, private way of identifying and protecting the candidate as he zips around the country say the choice of "renegade" is essentially no different from the tags chosen for past and present political high-fliers.
Former agents told the Washington Post that military officials chose the code names without particular reference to the characteristics of the politician. Despite such denials, the tags often appear strangely apposite.
(More ... Guardian)
Labels: 2008 election, Guardian, Obama
¶ 21:21 0 comments
6.11.2007
The Wrath of 2007: America's Great Drought (Independent.co.uk)
By Andrew Gumbel in Los Angeles
Published: 11 June 2007
America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.
From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.
In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 - the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities.
But the long-term implications are escaping nobody. Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east's weather - today's drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago. In the West, meanwhile, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests a movement towards a state of perpetual drought by the middle of this century. "The 1930s drought lasted less than a decade. This is something that could remain for 100 years," said Richard Seager a climatologist at Columbia University and lead researcher of a report published recently by the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
(More ... Independent > World > Americas)
Published: 11 June 2007
America is facing its worst summer drought since the Dust Bowl years of the Great Depression. Or perhaps worse still.
From the mountains and desert of the West, now into an eighth consecutive dry year, to the wheat farms of Alabama, where crops are failing because of rainfall levels 12 inches lower than usual, to the vast soupy expanse of Lake Okeechobee in southern Florida, which has become so dry it actually caught fire a couple of weeks ago, a continent is crying out for water.
In the south-east, usually a lush, humid region, it is the driest few months since records began in 1895. California and Nevada, where burgeoning population centres co-exist with an often harsh, barren landscape, have seen less rain over the past year than at any time since 1924. The Sierra Nevada range, which straddles the two states, received only 27 per cent of its usual snowfall in winter, with immediate knock-on effects on water supplies for the populations of Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
The human impact, for the moment, has been limited, certainly nothing compared to the great westward migration of Okies in the 1930 - the desperate march described by John Steinbeck in The Grapes of Wrath.
Big farmers are now well protected by government subsidies and emergency funds, and small farmers, some of whom are indeed struggling, have been slowly moving off the land for decades anyway. The most common inconvenience, for the moment, are restrictions on hosepipes and garden sprinklers in eastern cities.
But the long-term implications are escaping nobody. Climatologists see a growing volatility in the south-east's weather - today's drought coming close on the heels of devastating hurricanes two to three years ago. In the West, meanwhile, a growing body of scientific evidence suggests a movement towards a state of perpetual drought by the middle of this century. "The 1930s drought lasted less than a decade. This is something that could remain for 100 years," said Richard Seager a climatologist at Columbia University and lead researcher of a report published recently by the government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
(More ... Independent > World > Americas)
Labels: Climate Change, Independent
¶ 22:07 0 comments
6.06.2007
Global Sea Levels Will Rise Quicker Than Thought -- Study (NZHerald.co.nz)
12:05PM Wednesday June 06, 2007
By Steve Connor
Fears that global sea levels this century may rise faster and further than expected are supported by a study showing that 300 glaciers in Antarctica have begun to move more quickly into the ocean.
Scientists believe that the accelerated movement of glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula indicates a dramatic shift in the way melting ice around the world contributes to overall increases in global sea levels.
Instead of simply adding huge volumes of meltwater to the sea, scientists have found that rising temperatures are causing glaciers as far apart as Alaska, Greenland and now Antarctica to break up and slip into the ocean at a faster rate than expected.
The findings are likely to raises concerns within the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which earlier this year downplayed the so-called "dynamic" nature of melting glaciers - when rising temperatures cause them to break up quickly rather than simple melt away slowly.
(More ... NZ Herald > News > World)
By Steve Connor
Fears that global sea levels this century may rise faster and further than expected are supported by a study showing that 300 glaciers in Antarctica have begun to move more quickly into the ocean.
Scientists believe that the accelerated movement of glaciers in the Antarctic Peninsula indicates a dramatic shift in the way melting ice around the world contributes to overall increases in global sea levels.
Instead of simply adding huge volumes of meltwater to the sea, scientists have found that rising temperatures are causing glaciers as far apart as Alaska, Greenland and now Antarctica to break up and slip into the ocean at a faster rate than expected.
The findings are likely to raises concerns within the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which earlier this year downplayed the so-called "dynamic" nature of melting glaciers - when rising temperatures cause them to break up quickly rather than simple melt away slowly.
(More ... NZ Herald > News > World)
Labels: Climate Change, NZ Herald
¶ 21:24 0 comments
6.04.2007
Lula Rejects Bush Move on Climate Change (Guardian.co.uk)
John Vidal and Julian Borger
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has flatly rejected President Bush's proposals for parallel global negotiations to combat climate change, insisting that countries come to agreement at the United Nations, and not under US leadership.
In a rare interview with a British newspaper, President Lula told the Guardian that Brazil, a fast developing country whose support is critical to a global deal on emission cuts, had not even been informed that Mr Bush was contemplating a new negotiating framework, before the US president made his announcement last Thursday.
"The Brazilian position is clear cut," Mr Lula said. "I cannot accept the idea that we have to build another group to discuss the same issues that were discussed in Kyoto and not fulfilled.
"If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision ... then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution," said Mr Lula, who was in London to watch Friday's England-Brazil international football friendly.
The Bush administration has sought to cultivate President Lula as an ally, seeing the former trade unionist as a centre-left alternative in Latin America to the more radical anti-American socialism espoused by Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Presidents Bush and Lula also share an enthusiasm for the potential for "bio-fuels" made from plants as a substitute for fossil fuels.
However, on overall climate change policy, President Lula was dismissive of the Bush approach, calling it "voluntarism", meaning a reliance on "coalitions of the willing" rather than establish global institutions and the pursuit of voluntary goals rather than binding commitments. "We cannot let voluntarism override multilateralism," he said.
(More ... Guardian > Environment > Climate Change)
Monday June 4, 2007
The Guardian
Brazil's President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, has flatly rejected President Bush's proposals for parallel global negotiations to combat climate change, insisting that countries come to agreement at the United Nations, and not under US leadership.
In a rare interview with a British newspaper, President Lula told the Guardian that Brazil, a fast developing country whose support is critical to a global deal on emission cuts, had not even been informed that Mr Bush was contemplating a new negotiating framework, before the US president made his announcement last Thursday.
"The Brazilian position is clear cut," Mr Lula said. "I cannot accept the idea that we have to build another group to discuss the same issues that were discussed in Kyoto and not fulfilled.
"If you have a multilateral forum [the UN] that makes a democratic decision ... then we should work to abide by those rules [rather than] simply to say that I do not agree with Kyoto and that I will develop another institution," said Mr Lula, who was in London to watch Friday's England-Brazil international football friendly.
The Bush administration has sought to cultivate President Lula as an ally, seeing the former trade unionist as a centre-left alternative in Latin America to the more radical anti-American socialism espoused by Cuba's Fidel Castro and Venezuela's Hugo Chavez. Presidents Bush and Lula also share an enthusiasm for the potential for "bio-fuels" made from plants as a substitute for fossil fuels.
However, on overall climate change policy, President Lula was dismissive of the Bush approach, calling it "voluntarism", meaning a reliance on "coalitions of the willing" rather than establish global institutions and the pursuit of voluntary goals rather than binding commitments. "We cannot let voluntarism override multilateralism," he said.
(More ... Guardian > Environment > Climate Change)
Labels: Brazil, Bush, Climate Change, G8, Guardian
¶ 12:31 0 comments
