Monday, September 2, 2013

AFP — U.N researchers: Global warming clock is at ‘five minutes to midnight’

Humanity has pushed the world’s climate system to the brink, leaving itself only scant time to act, the head of the UN’s group of climate scientists said on Monday.
“We have five minutes before midnight,” warned Rajendra Pachauri, whose organisation will this month release the first volume of a new assessment of global warming and its impacts.“We may utilise the gifts of nature just as we choose, but in our books the debits are always equal to the credits,” Pachauri told a conference marking the 20th anniversary of the environmental organisation Green Cross International, quoting fellow Indian Mahatma Gandhi.

“May I submit that humanity has completely ignored, disregarded and been totally indifferent to the debits?“Today we have the knowledge to be able to map out the debits and to understand what we have done to the condition of this planet,” Pachauri said.
The Raw Story
U.N researchers: Global warming clock is at ‘five minutes to midnight’
Agence France-Presse

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

off topic but does anyone have the details on this:
Russia has failed to raise new money through bond auction
http://russia-media.ru/economy/morenews.php?iditem=1906

I get the usual responce on my blog: MMT is wrong, government bond auctions can fail
I don't know the details about what's happening in Russia

JK said...

Is it Matt Franko that always harps on the use of analogies by morons or as a means of propaganda or something?

"5 minutes till midnight" …???

Is midnight just always around the corner?Fearmongering is a tool of a good propagandist.

Tom, I really don't know if Climate Change is going to be a serious problem humans have to deal with, but I'm surprised you don't see the propaganda going on in the climate change / global warming advocation. It's the same rhetoric-style that's been employed in the War on Terror, but for a Left-friendly agenda.

Climate Change, just like the War on Terror, is an enemy that can not be defeated. A perpetual struggle for a perpetual problem.

Paulo Garrido said...

The so-called global warming problem
is but a symptom of the global greed problem.

In a hypothetical "greed solved human world" engineering climate should be at hand.

Tom Hickey said...

Whether it is a climate change issues or not, the solution to pollution is no longer dilution. Humans are poisoning the nest, oceans, air, ground water, soil, and these negative externalities are enough reason to clean up our act.

I moved out of cities in 1973, and since they have only lived in them a matter of months on projects that were more important than my health.

My physician, a prof in the UI med school, recently told me substantially the same thing and the medical profession is becoming increasingly alarmed at the raid increase in disease in children that are traceable to increasing environmental toxicity.

The cost both economically and in quality of life is huge, and now the only way to address it is to research the few relative safe spots in developed countries wrt air quality and ingest only pure foods and water.

Tom Hickey said...

Oh, and then throw in not buying stuff produced through exploitation of workers and that really narrow the field of what is available.

But this a reasonable amount of attention and commitment, it is possible to disengage quite a bit from the dark side.

The carbon problem is pretty much impossible to avoid. Have to work on narrowing one's footprint.