Monthly Archive for December, 2010

From Michael Halpern, Academe Online,

Ben Santer answered his doorbell one evening to find a dead rat on his doorstep. He looked up and saw a man driving away, shouting obscenities out the car window. It would be one thing if this were an isolated incident. But Santer had been harassed before. A groundbreaking climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, he was a lead author of the 1995 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which for the first time attributed global warming to human activity. Santer’s research had earned him high esteem from scientists and contempt from those who did not accept his conclusions.

The funders of climate-change skepticism are engaged in a full-throttle effort to sow seeds of doubt among the public and policy makers, much as tobacco companies did decades ago. Without science on their side, these groups seek to manufacture controversy by attacking scientists conducting important research.

Muddying the Waters

Santer—and dozens of other climate scientists—have received threatening letters and e-mails for years. Their names have been dragged through the mud in congressional hearings, on newspaper editorial pages, on talk-radio shows, and in their home communities by those seeking to distract and mislead the public.

Despite the continued harassment, however, scientists were still winning in the court of public opinion. The majority of the public understood that the overwhelming body of evidence supports the theory that the earth is warming and that humans are contributing significantly to the warming. Scientists and the organizations that represent them had made significant headway in helping the public and policy makers better understand what is happening and what can be done to mitigate and adapt to changes in the earth’s climate.

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From Bruno Berthon at Greener World Media via Reuters:

From one international summit to the next, I can’t help but notice a steady and discernible trend: National politicians are finding it ever harder to make their voices heard.

That’s partly because there are more of them at the table: Once it was the G7, now it’s the G20. Add the NGOs and the regional organizations, such as the EU and ASEAN, as well as all the emerging markets raising their voices. Don’t forget the world’s largest businesses that are rightly calling for a place at the negotiating table, too.

It’s no different here in Cancun at the COP16 global climate change talks –  except in one regard: Cities. We are now joined at climate summits by numerous mayors and metropolitan leaders, and in fact, the C40 group of mega-cities met in Cancun two weeks before the summit to claim a seat at the table and demonstrate their willingness to commit to emissions reductions, no matter what. I was speaking last weekend at the World Climate Summit alongside the Mayor of Technology and Environment from Copenhagen and a city councilor from Vancouver, both cities that are leaders in the Siemens Green City Index.

In 1800, 3 percent of the world’s population was living in cities. We’re well past the 50 percent mark now, and since last year’s climate talks in Copenhagen, approximately 44 million people have been added to the global total. Well over 300 million people will move from rural areas to cities in China by 2025, the equivalent of the entire population of the U.S. migrating in less than 15 years.

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