UN climate science chief Rajendra Pachauri welcomed today's announcement of an outside audit that could help scientists win back public and political support for the battered consensus on human-caused climate change.
"It is critically important that the science we bring into our reports — and that we disseminate on a wide scale — is accepted by communities across the globe, by governments, by businesses, by civil society," Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said at UN headquarters.
The remark followed UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon's formal announcement that an independent review of the IPCC would be carried out by the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (ICA), a multinational organization of the world's science and engineering academies.
When will the time come that climate change talks will start considering human rights over business rights?
There is a growing group of people in our world who are in a legal limbo — environmental refugees. Even though there are hundreds to thousands currently being displaced by climate change, they do not have a defined status as a group, hence they are not officially "refugees."
Yet, according to current predictions by Oxfam International, by 2050 there will be 75 million people displaced due to climate change. Other models are predicting up to 250 million people.
Morally, we must look at who is responsible for the millions who will lose their homes and way of life and find solutions.
The United Nations -- the most cumbersome, bloated bureaucracy on the planet and bastion of embarrassing jet-setting excess -- has vowed carbon neutrality!
It's starting by offsetting the carbon footprints of the representatives of the twenty UN agencies, funds and programs who are attending the two-week climate conference in Bali. The offsets will cost about $100,000, accounting for the 3,370 tons of carbon dioxide that will be emitted during their air travels. The money will be invested in the Kyoto adaptation fund to help poorer nations adapt to climate change.
Day one of the much anticipated two-week Bali climate change conference kicked-off with quite a bang yesterday: Australia ratified the Kyoto Protocol, and stole the show.
The decision has left the US as the only industrialized nation to continue to rebuff the global treaty with clearly no intention to change its status.
