| Aerial Tornado Damage In Atlanta |
Uploaded by: WSBTVdotcom, March 15, 2008; 4:19min
A severe weather system moved into Georgia March 14 resulting in numerous injuries and major destruction and damage to areas of Atlanta and Fulton County, Ga.
The system produced one tornado, injuring at least 20 people and damaging dozens of homes and businesses, according to Georgia Gov. Sonny Purdue.
| A Beautiful Lie |
via: Hug-Lies and A Beautiful Lie
Nice collection of tips from abeautifullie.org helpful to reduce energy consumption.
1. Slow down to cut costs and cut carbon! Slowing down from 75 mph to 65 mph will drop your highway gasoline consumption 15 percent.
2. If everyone took 30 seconds to inflate their tires to the proper pressure we would save 200,000 barrels of oil a day!
3. Bring Your Own Bag: You’ll save one mile’s worth of petroleum for every 14 plastic bags you don’t use. Not to mention cut down on pollution-we throw away over 30 billion one time use bags each year. (more…)
Finally in a dramatic session the participating countries agreed on the ‘Bali Action Plan’. What do you expect when representatives from over 180 countries come to a conclusion? Would searching the least common denominator lead to a powerless settlement? Will single states block all reasonable steps pretending imbalanced economic consequences?
| Bali climate summit final plenary |
However, finally the US left their isolated position and US Under Secretary of State Paula Dobriansky took the floor again, said the US wanted a roadmap and wanted to be part of the roadmap.
“We are very committed to long-term greenhouse gas emission reductions,” and she said the US would work with other large emitters to halve global emissions by 2050. And then she said the US “will go forward and join the consensus,” which was followed by a thunderous ovation.
Two results are remarkable: the implemenation of a ‘Ad Hoc Working Group on Long-term Cooperative Action under the Convention’ with the mission to collect the input from all parties and present the result at the fourteenth session of the conference of the Parties (Dec. 2008) and last but not least the conference accepted the stabilization scenarios developed by the Working Group III.
You may bring up that’s only a footnote, well it is, but it is written down, it is agreed and is states that an emission reduction of 50 up to 85% is indispensable to stabilize global mean temperature at 2 - 2.4°C above pre-industrial levels.
More:
AR4: Technical Summary of Working Group III / Mitigation of Climate Change
AR4: Chapter 13: Policies, instruments, and co-operative arrangements
Videos: germanwatch@youtube
| Schwarzenegger at UN |
7 min 38 sec, uploaded November 06, 2007, Transcript
United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited California’s Governor Schwarzenegger to speak at the General Assembly Hall at the United Nations Headquarters in New York.
This high level event “The Future in our Hands: Addressing the Leadership Challenge of Climate Change” on 24 September 2007 was supposed to galvanize political will for the Bali Conference.
Always good for strong words, Professor James Lovelock will held a lecture this evening at Carlton House Terrace in London at 6:20 pm local time. He is famous for his Gaya theory which considers Earth as a living organism and describes very good the feedback effects of our planet. However, he also supports nuclear energy as a ‘green option’ and even more controvery claims.
The Telegraph had a view into the script and cites: ‘Reducing emissions could speed global warming’. Which according to Lovelock leads to the truth, if industry cuts all emissions so fast that the aerosols will outpower the warming of the greenhouse gases. A theoretical but drastic option.
More interesting may be the part on positive feedbacks and seeing Earth from a holistic point of view. The Telegraph writes:
… Prof Lovelock believes that even the gloomiest predictions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are underestimating the current severity of climate change because they do not go into the consequences of the current burden pollution in the atmosphere which will last for centuries….
… According to Professor Lovelock’s gloomy analysis, the IPCC’s climate models fail to take account of the Earth as a living system where life in the oceans and land takes an active part in regulating the climate….
| Signs and the Science |
Inspired by Lydia Dotto’s work: ‘Storm Warnings: ‘Gambling with Climate of Our Planet’.
With contributions of Paul Malewski, Thom Hartman, Klaus Lackner, Zhou Dadi, Larence Kalkstein, Dr. John Breen. Responsible for the Content is Carolina ETV. Produced by David Kennard.
Via: Overheating
| Battersea |
Past, present and future of our industrial civilization illustrated with 3D animations of the Battersea power station in London.
| Briksdalsbreen Glacier |
Glaciers melt faster than scientists can save their instruments.
BBC News feature broadcasted 21-11-06
Produced by Morris Karp and Gil Shochat “The Denial Machine” will be aired at 10pm ET/PT today (Nov 18th) at CBC Newsworld.
The 40min documentation asks how scientific facts, which many believe determine the very future of the planet, become a political battleground, pitting left versus right, environmentalist versus climate change sceptic?
The Denial Machine investigates the roots of the campaign to negate the science and the threat of global warming. It tracks the activities of a group of scientists, some of whom previously consulted for for Big Tobacco, and who are now receiving donations from major coal and oil companies.
The feature also explores how the arguments supported by oil companies were adopted by policy makers in both Canada and the U.S. and helped form government policy.
Info + Video: The Denial Machine, Video Link (wvx, wmedia needed, 500kb)
| Climate Change |
A two-minute film broadcasted in UK that starts to tell the story of why climate change is happening and why it needs to be tackled together.
Original source: climatechallenge.gov.uk, Quicktime
