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Climate Report Ignored by Chinese Media
Agence France Presse via Common Dreams
China’s media largely ignored a landmark report on global warming on Saturday as Beijing sweated through an unseasonal heatwave.
The China Daily, an English-language newspaper aimed largely at foreigners, ran a front-page story on the report released in Bangkok outlining measures needed to avert potential disaster brought on by global warming. 0506 01
However, China’s most influential press, including the People’s Daily, the mouthpiece of the ruling Communist party, overlooked it entirely.
Weather information indicates that China is already feeling the effects of global warming.
(5 May 2007)
Bjorn Lomborg gets confused about global warming
Kurt Cobb, Resource Insights
Bjorn Lomborg styles himself as the “skeptical environmentalist.” The one thing that he seems most skeptical about is that environmental problems such as global warming are of paramount importance. He recently laid out his thinking in an interview on The News Hour with Jim Lehrer.
Lomborg’s main point was that global warming is just one among many problems that we face in the 21st century. Since we can’t address all of those problems with equal attention, we should prioritize. So far, so good. But instead of putting global warming near the top of his list, Lomborg places it far below other problems such as the spread of AIDS and malaria, malnutrition, agricultural research and strangely, free trade. (Lomborg, incidently, doesn’t see free trade as causing some of the problems we face, but rather as a solution to those problems.)
Now, most doctors know that to cure an illness, one should treat the cause of the disease rather than merely addressing the symptoms. But even though Lomborg acknowledges that global warming will be a leading cause of the problems he seeks to address–problems such as reduced harvests and the spread of disease–he opts for focusing on the symptoms rather than the cause.
(29 April 2007)
Is Global Warming a Sin?
Alexander Cockburn, Counter Punch
In a couple of hundred years, historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then, as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet’s rapid downward slide.
Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church was a bank whose capital was secured by the infinite mercy of Christ, Mary and the Saints, and so the Pope could sell indulgences, like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in “carbon credits” is in formation. Those whose “carbon footprint” is small can sell their surplus carbon credits to others, less virtuous than themselves.
The modern trade is as fantastical as the medieval one. There is still zero empirical evidence that anthropogenic production of CO2 is making any measurable contribution to the world’s present warming trend.
(28-29 April 2007)
Also at Znet. Rebuttals from:
Mike Byron
George Monbiot
