Kyoto approach on climate is bad policy: Bush

US President George W Bush has denounced Kyoto-style mandatory caps as "bad policy".

He says his administration's approach of emphasising voluntary approaches to address climate change was working.

Mr Bush's comments were the latest sign that his opposition to binding emissions caps remains firmly entrenched, even as he has made efforts to show he wants to be more engaged in the global debate on climate change amid sharp criticism from other countries.

"The fundamental question is whether or not we will be able to grow our economy and be good stewards of the environment at the same time," Mr Bush said during a question-and-answer session after a speech on the US budget in Arkansas.

"I'm interested in good policy. Kyoto, I thought, was bad policy."

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Gus: Obviously the "economy" is more than important than stopping the world being set on fire... Sure, some important people still do not believe in GW, like Bush or like our Howard who gives it lip service... Blew blew blew...

voluntary approaches to address climate change? Do I believe in Santa Claus?

Bush is lucky that some States in America are doing what he should be doing nationally: mandatory reduction of pollution and of emissions that are based on the Kyoto protocol recommendations. If this is voluntary approach, it is not by national agreement nor by industry agreement but by State's legislation. Nothing voluntary about legislation. Meanwhile as a whole, the USA have still a long-long-long way to go to be addressing climate change... Bush's policy is BAD POLICY...

'Warm wind' hits Arctic climate

The Arctic is being hit by melting ice, hotter air and dying wildlife, according to a US government report on the impact of global warming there.

A new wind circulation pattern is blowing more warm air towards the North Pole than in the 20th Century, scientists found.

Shrubs are now growing in tundra areas while caribou herds are dwindling in Canada and parts of Alaska.

The report stresses that the fate of the Arctic affects the entire planet.

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Gus: as mentioned before on this site, as the ice melts it cools our temperate regions... thus we do not feel the full impact of global warming yet. But like a block of ice in our drink, the whole ice and drink combo is slowly going towards "room temperature". As the melting of the ice is accelerating, the less ice there is to melt, the less "latent" cold, the faster the heating process becomes...

We still are in the infancy of the effects of global warming though the process started more than 150 years ago (with the industrial revolution)... A massive worldwide study of the atmosphere heat exchange processes (via wind and jet treams) needs to be undertaken from the poles to the doldrums. It might show that on average, the low pressure and high pressure systems have slightly shifted towards the equator, or extended their "normal" patterns of shifts. 

Animals are on the move. Polar bears, kings of the Arctic, now search for ice on which to hunt and bear young. Seals, walrus and fish adapted to the cold are retreating north. New species -- salmon, crabs, even crows -- are coming from the south. The Inuit, who have lived on the frozen land for millennia, are seeing their houses sink into once-frozen mud, and their hunting trails on the ice are pocked with sinkholes.

"It affects everyone," said Carin Ashjian, a Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute scientist who spent early September with native Inupiats in Barrow, the northernmost town of Alaska. "The only ice I saw this year was in my cup at the cafeteria."

At the South Pole, ancient ice shelves have abruptly crumbled. The air over the western Antarctic peninsula has warmed by nearly 6 degrees since 1950. The sea there is heating as well, further melting edges of the ice cap. Green grass and beech trees are taking root on the ice fringes.

Antarctica's signature Adelie penguins are moving inland, seeking the cold of their ancestors, replaced by chinstrap and Gentoo penguins, which prefer open water. Krill, the massive smorgasbord for a food chain reaching to the whales, are disappearing from traditional spawning grounds.

"We've seen quite big changes in the living environment," John King, a lead researcher for the British Antarctic Survey, said from Cambridge, England.

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Gus: on this site we have not been shy about warning about global warming... and I hope we'll carry on doing so until governments of rich countries (most of the poor countries do not contribute much greenhouse gases — apart from those of camp fires and rebel skirmishes helped by weapons sold by rich countries) around the world wake up to the reality of the HUGE global warming incoming problem. Although not admittedly related yet to global warming, there is a shortage of fresh water worldwide... Less rain, less snow, more evaporation. Even the great lakes in the US are suffering lower than average water levels — although not quite as low as the record low seen last century, in 1932. And the south east in the US is dry. Super dry. We all know about the seven years cycles of dry and wet — now more in the range of three years wet and eleven years dry... Sure, some typhoons will bucket more of the water we need somewhere else... We all know about the "great flood" — "fairy-taled" in the Bible, when a certain Noah build an ark under God's guidance, but "flood" also recorded in the overhangs of the Arnhem Land plateau by Aboriginal people, some fleeing the plains between Australia and New Guinea being swamped by rising sea level, fast... It did happen! Only happened a bit more than 10,000 years ago. The seas rose and rose...

Now, we push the Earth to its limits. Beyond its limits, but we do not know it yet. We don't want to know... When a wormed-John Howard offers a rebate to old folks on their energy bills offset by some weirdo scheme blah-blah in 2011, it means nothing more but the words of a clever lawyer who thinks he is an economist... The sum total of the offer will do bugger all to solve the problem... In terms of knowing the future you'd better consult an astrologist, a palm reader or even a climatologist rather than an "economist"... John Howard does not understand the mechanics of the earth — and should he, he acts as if he does not... As if he did not want to know. So far, the Howard years have been a waste of precious time to fight the onslaught of global warming. Sure his mate George Bush has been recalcitrant but why, oh why, help him raid the oil wells of Iraq at great human cost to the locals, all under false pretences and contribute to George's reluctancy?

Global warming is the most dramatic human encounter with nature. The greater and contained universe is resonating back at us. A universe in which processes take place with a certain elasticity, but with inexorable might and reactive developments to our actions. Live actions... Out of our glorious full-of-ourselvesness, we've taken charge of this little planet, yet we do not want to accept our responsibility in the slow but accelerating killing of it... from the other animals which we drive to extinction daily, as reported between a news item about Britney Spears and the result of a football match, which ever code it is, to the felling of most important forests for whatever purpose we choose... Saving one tree from being felled would do far more than any shonky energy rebate for old ladies.

Meanwhile we dig more holes, we burn more fossil fuel and our granaries are becoming bare... But we'll push on regardless, till the poor die off from starvation and the rich inherit what's left of earth, smouldering until nothing's left...

May the great Howard, as he is booted out of office, watch a show like "planet in Peril" and cry at the revelation of his miserable misunderstanding for too many years...

Apocalypse in slow motion, self inflicted by greed, not by gods. Far fetched?... No.

NZ should ditch Kyoto: think tank

By New Zealand correspondent Peter Lewis

A New Zealand right-wing think tank says Christchurch should abandon its support for the Kyoto Protocol and only reduce its carbon emissions when other countries do.

The New Zealand Institute estimates it could cost nearly $600 million to meet Kyoto's 2012 deadline for reducing the country's emissions to 1990 levels, and cheaper alternative strategies need to be considered.

But the Business Council for Sustainable Development believes giving up on Kyoto would be foolish in the long-term and compromise New Zealand's clean green trading image in key areas such as agriculture and tourism.

The Sustainability Council agrees, claiming there is a moral and commercial imperative to aim higher than lower on climate change, while the Green Party says the Institute's thinking is simply a political and economic throwback.

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Gus: why don't all the world's countries ditch the Kyoto Protocol... It would speed up global warming much faster, thus get rid of the skeptics quick smart...

Natural decline 'hurting lives'

Continuing destruction of the natural world is affecting the health, wealth and well-being of people around the globe, according to a major UN report.

The Global Environment Outlook says most trends are going the wrong way.

It lists degradation of farmland, loss of forest cover, pollution, dwindling fresh water supplies and overfishing among society's environmental ills.

The UN Environment Programme (Unep) says there is a "remarkable lack of urgency" to reverse these trends.

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Gus: Since I was a little boy, the human population of the world has grown nearly four times over and the natural world has shrunk by about 80 per cent of it former self then. To some extent. the only "unspoilt" places are the Australian deserts — unless we've transformed them in Gruyere cheese to dig stuff out of them — other desert places around the world, and a few token "national" parks that are shrinking daily by the inefficiently too sick buffer zones...

But we still see, even in UN terms, the natural world as a place to plunder and profit to multiply like rats and rabbits. I see the earth as a place in which life in whatever natural form has a right to life. No, not a godly place, but a tiny dot of extraordinary accidental development, in which the increment of evolution has made us top monkey. But we're too full of our self importance to see that and we destroy as if we wanted to erase our origin markers.

Now, in the short and long term, our existence is only guided by money. Money is the illusion of wealth should we destroy our natural life support system... Money is now war as well... We (our leaders) fail to appreciate our fantastic natural planet and want to turn it into a concrete bunker and a place to suck the stuff out of.

And I will ramble on. People like Bush and Howard are ignoramus when it comes to coming to term with these greater concepts that, in fact, are the reality of our place in the grand universe. Get rid of Howard.

US power company linked to Bush is named in database as a top polluter
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 16 November 2007

An American power company with close financial links to President George Bush has been named as one of the world's top producers of global warming pollution.

The first-ever worldwide database of such pollution also reveals the rapid growth in global-warming emissions by power plants in China, South Africa and India. Power plants already produce 40 per cent of US greenhouse gas and 25 per cent of the world's.

But it is the enormous carbon footprint of Southern Company – among the largest financiers of Republican Party politicians – which has raised eyebrows. Southern's employees handed George Bush $217,047 to help him get elected, and they and the company have contributed an extraordinary $6.2m to Republican campaigns since 1990.

Experts warn of 'abrupt' warming

The IPCC says more heatwaves are very likely in the future
A UN panel has agreed a landmark report on climate change, and says the world must act hastily to prevent the worst predicted effects coming to pass.

After arduous talks in Valencia, Spain, scientists agreed a document they hope will shape debate on the next phase of the fight against climate change.

It declared the fact of global warming "unequivocal", and said it may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts.

The text will be officially launched by UN chief Ban Ki-moon on Saturday.

Delegates to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarised thousands of pages of scientific analysis, bringing together elements of the three reports already released this year, on the science of climate change, impacts and adaptation, and options for mitigating the problem.

"This is the strongest report yet by the IPCC - but says that there is still time to act," Bill Hare, an Australian climate scientist and one of the authors, told Reuters.

Among the report's top-line conclusions are that climate change is "unequivocal", that humankind's emissions of greenhouse gases are more than 90% likely to be the main cause, and that impacts can be reduced at reasonable cost.

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Gus: We need to hit the brakes... in about atmos...

"We are in trouble and need to act and secondly, we have both the means and the possibility to act to avoid the worst.

"But it means we act now and we need to act collectively."

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Global warming is baloney... We need to consider "global hotting"

Unfortunately the comprehensive top article/blog got truncated and vanished in the ether of hosting tranfers... but the gist is there... One day I will search my archives and dig the full article/blog...   

A world dying, but can we unite to save it? Pollution in the seas is now speeding global warming, says a devastating new climate report. 'IoS' Environment Editor Geoffrey Lean reports from Valencia Published: 18 November 2007

Humanity is rapidly turning the seas acid through the same pollution that causes global warming, the world's governments and top scientists agreed yesterday. The process – thought to be the most profound change in the chemistry of the oceans for 20 million years – is expected both to disrupt the entire web of life of the oceans and to make climate change worse.

The warning is just one of a whole series of alarming conclusions in a new report published by the official Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which last month shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former US vice president Al Gore.

Drawn up by more than 2,500 of the world's top scientists and their governments, and agreed last week by representatives of all its national governments, the report also predicts that nearly a third of the world's species could be driven to extinction as the world warms up, and that harvests will be cut dramatically across the world.

Expanding tropics 'a threat to millions' By Steve Connor, Science Editor, The Independent

The tropical belt that girdles the Earth is expanding north and south, which could have dire consequences for large regions of the world where the climate is likely to become more arid or more stormy, scientists have warned in a seminal study published today.

Climate change is having a dramatic impact on the tropics by pushing their boundaries towards the poles at an unprecedented rate not foreseen by computer models, which had predicted this sort of poleward movement only by the end of the century.

The House yesterday brushed aside a new White House veto threat and handily approved a comprehensive energy bill that would raise automobile fuel-efficiency standards for the first time in 32 years and require increased use of renewable energy sources to generate electricity.  

The 235 to 181 vote sends the measure to the Senate today. There, Republicans hope to strip it of tax increases on the oil industry and the renewable-source requirement before a final version goes to President Bush.

The White House objects to the bill on multiple fronts, including the prospect of tax boosts on oil companies, saying Bush would veto it.  

But with energy prices soaring, lawmakers from both parties expressed strong support for fuel-efficiency standards, which Congress has not changed since the end of the muscle-car era in the mid-1970s.

House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) called the package "nothing less than our nation's declaration of independence from foreign sources of energy." 

Broad Energy Bill Passed By House 

I suppose we shouldn’t be too critical, given that they at least have a standard …..

US to set 'binding' climate goals
By Richard Black
Environment correspondent, BBC News website

The US is ready to accept "binding international obligations" on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, officials say, if other nations do the same.

The comments came in a news conference in Paris given by James Connaughton and Daniel Price, environmental and economics advisers to President Bush.

The US hopes the world's major economies will conclude a "leaders' declaration" before the July G8 summit.

There was no indication of how much the US might be prepared to cut emissions.

But the Bush administration is clearly looking for some kind of binding commitment from major developing countries such as China, India and Brazil.

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Gus: Gingerly, like a drunk to the pub... or a kid dragged along to the dentist... the US of A is getting there, as long as everyone else suffers "equally-more"...