During a visit to Henderson Nevada, President Obama explained basic climate science for the people who had gathered to listen to him at the town hall.
“First of all, we just got five feet of snow in Washington and so everybody is like — a lot of the people who are opponents of climate change, they say, see, look at that, there’s all this snow on the ground, this doesn’t mean anything. I want to just be clear that the science of climate change doesn’t mean that every place is getting warmer; it means the planet as a whole is getting warmer. But what it may mean is, for example, Vancouver, which is supposed to be getting snow during the Olympics, suddenly is at 55 degrees, and Dallas suddenly is getting seven inches of snow.
The idea is, is that as the planet as a whole gets warmer, you start seeing changing weather patterns, and that creates more violent storm systems, more unpredictable weather. So any single place might end up being warmer; another place might end up being a little bit cooler; there might end up being more precipitation in the air, more monsoons, more hurricanes, more tornadoes, more drought in some places, floods in other places.”
In an interesting interview during COP15 Amy Goodman from Democracy Now asks Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, about his view of the climate summit in Copenhagen, climate change, USA, and the huge oil reserves in Venezuela. Watch it:
“AMY GOODMAN: What level of emissions are you willing to support reductions of emissions?
PRESIDENT HUGO CHAVEZ: [translated] One hundred percent. One hundred percent. We must reduce the emissions 100 percent. In Venezuela, the emissions are currently insignificant compared to the emissions of the developed countries. We are in agreement. We must reduce all the emissions that are destroying the planet. However, that requires a change in lifestyle, a change in the economic model: we must go from capitalism to socialism. That’s the real solution.”
Our world leaders haven’t yet apologized for their climate failure in Copenhagen so Greenpeace and the global tcktcktck campaign have done it for them in these advertisements at the Copenhagen airport:
“I’m sorry,” the text of the ad reads. “We could have stopped catastrophic climate change… We didn’t.”
Some of the so called world “leaders” depicted are Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, Gordon Brown, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Dmitry Medvedev and others.
Yesterday Hugo Chavez, President of Venezuela, made a passionate and courageous speech at the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen. Chavez criticized President Obama’s “laughable” promise to help climate change and also said that capitalism will destroy our planet. Watch it:
Here are some of the biggest and most interesting news today related to the ongoing COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen:
A draft text for a potential final agreement in Copenhagen was leaked today to the Guardian. The “Danish text” has made the developing countries “furious” as the draft agreement would give even more powers to the rich nations, weakening UN’s future role as well as abandon the Kyoto protocol. Some say this shows the true agenda in Copenhagen, others believe the draft is unofficial and may have changed a lot since its first creation.
It’s here! The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) and the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”. The climate conference is taking place at Bella Center in Copenhagen from the 7th to the 18th of December. Around 15000 participants from 192 countries representing governments, the business community, and civil society is expected to attend. About 110 world leaders will come to Copenhagen, and last week Barack Obama promised to come to the last days of the climate conference.
COP 15 President Connie Hedegaard and UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer have, after the first day of the conference, said that there is “an unprecedented political will to reach an agreement”. Hedegaard continued by saying that “there is a huge pressure on everyone to deliver not just a deal, but an ambitious deal in Copenhagen”:
Maybe he liked the city? Either way, President Barack Obama announced today that he will attend the climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December. The climate summit is held between 7-18 December and is the last chance we have to take action against “the greatest threat the world has ever faced”.
“U.S. President Barack Obama will go to Copenhagen for a U.N. climate change meeting on December 9, hoping to add momentum to an international process despite slow progress on a domestic bill to cut carbon emissions”, Reuters reports.
“Obama planned to make a visit at the beginning of the climate negotiations in Denmark, an administration official told Reuters on Wednesday, before picking up the Nobel Peace Prize at a ceremony in neighboring Oslo.”
With him to the climate summit Obama has a pledge to cut emissions in the USA with 17% from 2005 levels by 2020, 30% by 2025, 42% by 2030 and 83% by 2050. But these numbers are much lower than those proposed by the EU and other industrialised countries such as Norway.
“President Barack Obama, who initially planned to let First Lady Michelle Obama represent the United States in Copenhagen this week, when the International Olympic Committee chooses a site for the 2016 summer games, plans to travel there too.”
Besides Obama, the Brazilian President Lula di Silva and Japanese Prime Minister Hatoyama will also visit Copenhagen tomorrow and pitch their home countries as the perfect host for the Olympic summer games in 2016. The event will take place at the International Olympic Committee summit tomorrow which just happens to be the same venue where the UN climate change summit will be held in December.
In the aftermath of Van Jones’ abrupt Labor Day weekend resignation as the Obama administration’s special advisor for environmental jobs, human rights and environmental organizations are expressing outrage at the barrage of attacks against the green jobs leader by Fox News talk show host Glenn Beck and other extreme right Republicans.
“On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” Jones said in his resignation letter, issued in the wee hours Sept. 6. “I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for our future.”
The attacks, reminiscent of the far right’s “tea party” efforts to savage late-summer health-care town halls, centered on allegations about actions before Jones accepted the administration post last March. Among the accusations were characterizing Republicans with an expletive (for which Jones has since apologized), signing a petition to investigate whether the Bush administration allowed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks (Jones has repeatedly said the petition didn’t reflect his views) and early-90s involvement in a small Marxist-oriented group.
But critics of the far-right drive saw a broader agenda.
Top scientists and economists tell us that Carbon Trading (Emissions Trading Scheme, ETS) proposals are dangerous, fraudulent Ponzi schemes and that genuine, non-manipulatable, equitable Carbon Taxes are urgently required to help stop planet-threatening carbon burning. [1].
16 million people die avoidably each year from deprivation (including 9.5 million infants) – and this global avoidable mortality holocaust is increasingly climate change-impacted. However, estimates from Dr James Lovelock FRS indicate that about 10 billion people will die this century due to unaddressed global warming – this including 6 billion infants, 3 billion Muslims, 2 billion Indians and 0.3 billion Bangladeshis. [2, 3].
Excess deaths (avoidable deaths) associated with the Bush (now Obama) wars and occupations in 1990-2009 (Occupied Haiti, Occupied Somalia, Occupied Palestine, Occupied Syria, Occupied Iraq, Occupied Diego Garcia, Occupied Afghanistan and US robot drone-bombed NW Pakistan) now total 9-11 million. [3, 4, 5, 6, 7].
It can be estimated from UN Population Division data that there are a total of 655,000 non-violent avoidable deaths from deprivation per year and 1,795 each day in the various Occupied countries of the American Empire. Thus in the first 6 months of Obama’s rule as President of the United States of America there have been 328,000 avoidable deaths from deprivation in the Overseas American Empire – this figure of about 0.3 million avoidable deaths in the Overseas American Empire under Obama does not include violent deaths from military actions of the US or its surrogates (as a notorious US general once declared: “We don’t do body counts’). [5, 7].
Green Blog has daily updates and posts from authors around the world. Get our latest posts, commentaries
and articles by RSS-feed or by adding your
Email to our newsletter.
It’s here! The 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) and the last chance we have to take action against “
In the aftermath of 
