In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now leading scientist John Holdren says the term “global warming” is wrong. He rather prefer to use the term “global disruption.”

“I don’t like the term “global warming,” because it’s misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.”

“It’s also highly non-uniform. The largest changes are occurring in the far north in the Arctic, in the Antarctic Peninsula in the far south. It is certainly not gradual, in the sense that it is rapid compared to the capacity of ecosystems to adjust. It’s rapid compared to the capacity of human systems to adjust.”

(more…)

Nidhi Jamwa from the Centre for Science and Environment India asks in the organisations journal Down to Earth “why green projects in India are hot favourite of international NGOs?”

Nidhi Jamwa focuses on a recently started green Sierra Club initiative in India that will try “to explore other ways of creating a robust dialogue on developing a green economy” and to “network, collaborate and share information”:

“There it goes again. It is always India and China that are the two emerging villains of climate change. The developed world has built their infrastructure and created wealth, based on technologies that are high on carbon emissions. Even now, it refuses to deliver on its promise to bring down carbon emissions. Yet goes about patronising the developing world on the need for green economy.

(more…)

Mohan Munasinghe, vice-president of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), said during a lecture at Cambridge University that climate change will lead to a “fortress world in which the rich lock themselves away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered environments.”

Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation.[...]

(more…)

Kansas Governor Katherine Sebelius said this when she vetoed a bill last week that would have allowed the construction of two new coal fired power plants:

Of all the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me as governor, none is greater than my obligation to protect the health and well-being of the people of Kansas.

Stephanie Cole, a Sierra Club spokeswoman, said that this…

…sends a message that Kansas is willing to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

(more…)

Here is a short summary of California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s State of the State Address, which he made in January 8, 2008. You can read the whole speech over at knbc.com. Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his speech, pushes for more dams to be built and repeating his promise to sue the Bush Administration for stopping California to get their “clean-car” standards to take effect.

(more…)