ONGOING ACTIVITIES AND RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

By Steve Sachs


Al Gore’s organization, Together We Can Solve the Climate Crisis, with almost 1.5 million members, and growing, has been working on action to overcome global warming and related environmental problems. For details go to: http://wecansolveit.org. OneSky was working this “to convince every Member of Congress that America is ready for bold climate solutions. The path to a prosperous and equitable new energy economy is clear -- we simply need our leaders to act.” Tor details go to: http://action.1sky.org/t/1981/signUp.jsp?key=261

Care2 (http://www.care2.com) is working to build the political will to do something about global warming, and has been running a campaign to tell the presidential candidates to be climate leaders. “After a decade of stalling, we need real leadership on climate change. To seriously address climate change and cut carbon emissions in line with the current science, we must create millions new green-collar jobs, prevent the construction of new dirty coal-fired power plants and establish a more secure, prosperous and vibrant America.” In early August, Care 2 was involved in a petition campaign urging President Bush “to take immediate action to end the genocide in Darfur, Sudan and the crimes against humanity in eastern Congo and northern Uganda. While there is no magic formula to end these crimes, I believe there is a strategic one. We can stop genocide and crimes against humanity now and in the future, through the "Three P's": Promoting Peace, Providing Protection, and Punishing the Perpetrators. The 3 P's for Sudan: * Promote a comprehensive peace process with high-level diplomacy. *Protect innocent civilians through the UN/AU peacekeeping force. *Provide information to the International Criminal Court and support multilateral targeted sanctions to punish the perpetrators. The 3 P's for eastern Congo: *Establish a permanent office in eastern Congo to ensure U.S. leadership in the peace process. *Support MONUC - the UN's peacekeeping force in Congo - in protecting the innocent civilians caught in the conflict. *Call for the International Criminal Court to open an investigation into rape as a war crime in eastern Congo to begin punishing those most responsible.”
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

WORLD DEVELOPMENTS
Steve Sachs

Environmental Developments

Bill McKibben, “Civilization's last chance: The planet is nearing a tipping point on climate change, and it gets much worse, fast,” Los Angeles Times, May 11, 2008 (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,4443965.story), reports, “A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific paper -- that ‘if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.’ Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us. So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away, you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear that clunk up front. In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down, we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.” The one counter finding is that the Greenland Glacier is melting more slowly than recently reported. It has now been found that the huge run off of water from glogal warming caused melting ceases during the coldest months. However, the melting of glaciers in Antarctica appears to be releasing DDT, frozen into the ice prior to the ending of widespread DDT use in the 1970s, according to a study published in Ma.y by Heid Geisz in the Journal of Environmental Science. On the hopeful side, a study by M. Debora Iglasias-Rodrigez and Paul Halloran in the Journal of Science, in early April, found that the cocolithopore algae, a cornerstone of the ocean floor food chain, unlike many speceas, grow better in more acidic waters brought on by more carbon dioxide in the air. Like many species, warmer oceans are friendly to its growth. It is higher CO2 levels, not warming oceans, that are harmful to many ocean species.