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Pope to make climate action a moral obligation
James Macintyre, The Independent (UK)
The Pope is expected to use his first address to the United Nations to deliver a powerful warning over climate change in a move to adopt protection of the environment as a “moral” cause for the Catholic Church and its billion-strong following.
The New York speech is likely to contain an appeal for sustainable development, and it will follow an unprecedented Encyclical (a message to the wider church) on the subject, senior diplomatic sources have told The Independent.
…A Papal tour of America will be particularly potent during election year in the US, where Catholics number around 73 million, and is being discussed in Rome after Pope Benedict accepted an invitation from the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. For the Pope to take his climate-change message to the high-profile UN platform will be considered hugely influential to the fifth of the world’s population who are Catholics, and will act as a rallying call for action in Africa and Asia, which have seen a rise in Catholics in recent years.
News of the speech comes as Vatican City has become the first fully carbon-neutral state in the world, after announcing it is offsetting its carbon footprint by planting a forest in Hungary and installing solar panels on the roof of St Peter’s Basilica in Rome.
It also follows a series of interventions by the Pope on the environment.
(22 September 2007)
New Zealand to introduce a greenhouse gas trading scheme for industry
Associated Press
New Zealand will begin introducing a system next year to cap greenhouse gas emissions and allow trading of emissions credits, aiming to cut pollution at the lowest cost to economic growth, senior officials said Thursday.
Under the plan, an agreed level of greenhouse gas emissions will be allocated to each industry in the country’s economy. Businesses can either reduce emissions to the agreed levels, or buy “credits” that allow them to keep polluting at higher levels
(21 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
Temporary absorption of CO2 by the biosphere only puts the problem off into the future, when it will inevitably be released again. Only truly permanent sequestration -permanent removal from the biosphere- makes any real difference. Meanwhile we’re idiotically congratulating ourselves, taking the “credits”, scheming for profits. Duped into demise.
Carbon’s New Math:
To deal with climate change, the first step is to do the numbers
Bill McKibben, National Geographic
The CO2 from fossil fuels lingers in the atmosphere, so global warming can’t be undone. But catastrophe can still be averted.
Here’s how it works. Before the industrial revolution, the Earth’s atmosphere contained about 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide. That was a good amount-“good” defined as “what we were used to.” Since the molecular structure of carbon dioxide traps heat near the planet’s surface that would otherwise radiate back out to space, civilization grew up in a world whose thermostat was set by that number. It equated to a global average temperature of about 57 degrees Fahrenheit (about 14 degrees Celsius), which in turn equated to all the places we built our cities, all the crops we learned to grow and eat, all the water supplies we learned to depend on, even the passage of the seasons that, at higher latitudes, set our psychological calendars.
Once we started burning coal and gas and oil to power our lives, that 280 number started to rise. When we began measuring in the late 1950s, it had already reached the 315 level. Now it’s at 380, and increasing by roughly two parts per million annually. That doesn’t sound like very much, but it turns out that the extra heat that CO2 traps, a couple of watts per square meter of the Earth’s surface, is enough to warm the planet considerably. We’ve raised the temperature more than a degree Fahrenheit (0.56 degrees Celsius) already. It’s impossible to precisely predict the consequences of any further increase in CO2 in the atmosphere. But the warming we’ve seen so far has started almost everything frozen on Earth to melting; it has changed seasons and rainfall patterns; it’s set the sea to rising.
No matter what we do now, that warming will increase some-there’s a lag time before the heat fully plays out in the atmosphere. That is, we can’t stop global warming. Our task is less inspiring: to contain the damage, to keep things from getting out of control. And even that is not easy. For one thing, until recently there’s been no clear data suggesting the point where catastrophe looms. Now we’re getting a better picture-the past couple of years have seen a series of reports indicating that 450 parts per million CO2 is a threshold we’d be wise to respect.
(October 2007 issue)
