The world is starting to realise that the goal of 450 ppm as a reasonable level to balance and stabilize the CO2 in our atmosphere is based on wrong and outdated science and won’t be enough to stop man-made climate change.

More and more scientific reports show that the older science has been too “soft” in their climate change calculations. For example, we can already now see a never ending and rapid melting of the Arctic ice, something that “would happen in 20-30 years” according to the older science reports. Scientific reports earlier projected that the Arctic would become ice-free by year 2050. But newly released reports suggest it could happen as early as 2013.

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An extraordinary admission by the Australian Federal Government has passed unnoticed by the Mainstream media in the “look away” Land of Oz, the Antipodean Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths), the Murdochracy called Australia.

However from the Green Senator Christine Milne’s blog of the June 4, 2008 entitled “Rudd Treasury not modelling real climate protection scenarios” we read that “Treasury is only modelling global emissions scenarios with a very high risk of triggering runaway climate change, Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, discovered today in Senate Estimates hearings … On questioning from Senator Milne in today’s [Senate] Estimates hearings, [public servant] Meghan Quinn revealed that her Department [Treasury] is only modelling scenarios leading to global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 and 550 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent. Treasury had not been asked to model lower concentrations, Ms Quinn said.”

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Martin Parry, Jean Palutikof, Clair Hanson and Jason Lowe, all four respected and known scientists from the IPCC, have written on The Nature about the dangers of false optimism regarding climate change. They warn that the “damages will be large” if we continue to believe that we have climate change under control.

“We have lost ten years talking about climate change but not acting on it. Meanwhile, evidence from the IPCC indicates that the problem is bigger than we thought. A curious optimism […] pervades the political arenas of the G8 summit and UN climate meetings. This is false optimism, and it is obscuring reality. The sooner we recognize this delusion, confront the challenge and implement both stringent emissions cuts and major adaptation efforts, the less will be the damage that we and our children will have to live with.”

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According to a newly released study from the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the deforestation in Burma have exposed coastal communities and worsen the effects of the cyclone.

Jan Heino, the Assistant Director General of the FAO Forestry Department, said in the report that “mangroves have been converted to agricultural land and fish ponds. Settlements have been established closer to the sea and the combination of proximity to coastal hazards and lack of a protective forest buffer has increased the risks to human populations in many countries.”

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By now I guess everyone has seen Al Gore’s movie and slide show, or at least understands the severity of climate change.

Now Al Gore has updated his slide show and “presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right.”

You can see his presentation of the new slide show over at TED (or after the jump). The video is 27 minutes long but worth every second of your time.

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Did you participate in Earth Hour this weekend? Yes? Great, cause now its time to take it to the next level. It’s time to actually make a difference.

Earth Hour has teamed up with Zerofootprint, a Canadian not-for-profit organisation, to provide two carbon calculators so that Earth Hour participants (and anyone else for that matter) to measure their carbon footprint and “make ongoing changes to their individual lifestyles in a bid to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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This is a continuation on an earlier post called “It keeps getting warmer, no matter what some people say“.

Just like the global warming deniers say the Arctic ice is approximately the same as it was last year, as data from Nasa clearly shows. But, the Nasa data also shows that the old and thick Arctic ice is melting much faster than previous years.

Data shows that ice older than two years have decreased from 60% to 30% of the total ice mass in Arctic.

Seelye Martin, manager of the Cryospheric Sciences Program at Nasa headquarters in Washington DC, said that “although this March the area is slightly larger than last March, the area of [thick] perennial ice has reached an all time low.” And he concludes that “the volume of Arctic ice continues to decrease.”

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There have been some talks, especially on the Internet, that the global temperature this winter has increased less than it’s done the last fourteen years.

Climate deniers have, of course, been acting like crazy about this. But is it true? Are the climate deniers correct? Can we finally breathe out? Have the scientists been wrong all this time?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

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Thursday and Friday this week the top boys and girls of the European Union meet in Brussels. EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, and Europe’s commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, have prepared a report on climate change and security risks in advance of the meeting. Today the conclusion of the report is being quoted in literally every media across the world. Here are a few samples.

BBC / EU warns of climate change threat.

An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water.

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In February 2008 Australian Friends of the Earth published a very important book entitled “Book Review: Climate Code Red – the case for a sustainability emergency” by David Spratt (a policy analyst with Carbon Equity) and Philip Sutton (director of the Greenleap Strategic Institute Inc), both authors being located in Melbourne, Australia. This book can be downloaded from the Web. The book was launched at an Australian Climate Change Convergence in Melbourne on February 8 2008 (see GreenBlog).

“Climate Code Red is a very important and timely book. It adduces the latest scientific evidence that we have already passed a key environmental “tipping point” , argues for a national and global Declaration of a Climate State of Emergency and urges rapid implementation of the “negative CO2 emissions policy” advocated by NASA’s Dr James Hansen i.e. rapid replacement of fossil fuel burning with renewables and rapid installation of mechanisms to reduce atmospheric CO2.

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