Tuesday 27 November 2007

Human Development Report 2007/2008: Fighting climate change: Human solidarity in a divided world

The latest global Report on the theme of climate change has been launched on 27 November 2007.

The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Human Development Report 2007/2008, which this year focuses on fighting climate change: human solidarity in a divided world, will be launched in more than 100 countries, with the main launch hosted by President Lula da Silva in Brasilia, Brazil, on 27 November. The information contained in the Report was under embargo until 27 November, 13:00 hours, European Time.


The UN Development Programme (UNDP) report coincides with next week's key UN climate negotiations in Indonesia. The two-week gathering on the island of Bali is set to debate what shape the global agreement to curb greenhouse gas emissions should take after 2012, which is when the current Kyoto Protocol ends.

The lead author of the report - Fighting Climate Change: Human Solidarity in a Divided World - is Kevin Watkins. He said he hoped the report would act as an incentive for the conference's delegates.
"We are issuing a call to action, not providing a counsel of despair. Working together with resolve, we can win the battle against climate change."
Kevin Watkins is Director of the UN Development Report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). He served for 13 years with Oxfam UK, most recently as Head of Research. He also managed Oxfam‘s campaigns on education and fair trade. He is a Senior Research Fellow at Oxford University’s Global Economic Governance Programme, board member of the Centre for Global Development, UNICEF’s Innocenti Centre, and the Journal of International Development.

The Human Development Report 2007/2008 shows that climate change is not just a future scenario. Increased exposure to droughts, floods and storms is already destroying opportunity and reinforcing inequality. Meanwhile, there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that the world is moving towards the point at which irreversible ecological catastrophe becomes unavoidable. Business-as-usual climate change points in a clear direction: unprecedented reversal in human development in our lifetime, and acute risks for our children and their grandchildren.

As the Human Development Report 2007/2008 argues, climate change poses challenges at many levels. In a divided but ecologically interdependent world, it challenges all people to reflect upon how we manage the environment of the one thing that we share in common: planet Earth. It challenges us to reflect on social justice and human rights across countries and generations. It challenges political leaders and people in rich nations to acknowledge their historic responsibility for the problem, and to initiate deep and early cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Above all, it challenges the entire human community to undertake prompt and strong collective action based on shared values and a shared vision.

See also: Early lessons from implementation of climate change adaptation projects in South-Eastern Africa: workshop report (SouthSouthNorth; Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation; International Institute for Environment and Development)

1 comment:

  1. Global warming has stopped!

    Recent scientific studies may make 2007 go down in history as the "tipping point" of man-made global warming fears. A progression of peer-reviewed studies have been published which serve to debunk the United Nations on climate change.

    Paleoclimate scientist Bob Carter, who has testified before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works (LINK), noted in a June 18, 2007 essay that global warming has stopped.

    "The accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2. Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 %)," (LINK)

    In August 2007, the UK Met Office was finally forced to concede the obvious: global warming has stopped. (LINK) The UK Met Office acknowledged the flat lining of global temperatures, but in an apparent attempt to keep stoking man-made climate alarm, the Met Office is now promoting more unproven dire computer model projections of the future. They now claim climate computer models predict "global warming will begin in earnest in 2009" because greenhouse emissions will then overtake natural climate variability.

    Southern Hemisphere is COOLING

    UN scientist Dr. Madhav L. Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist and an expert IPCC reviewer in 2007, explained on August 6, 2007 that the Southern Hemisphere is cooling. "In the Southern Hemisphere, the land-area mean temperature has slowly but surely declined in the last few years. The city of Buenos Aires in Argentina received several centimeters of snowfall in early July, and the last time it snowed in Buenos Aires was in 1918! Most of Australia experienced one of its coldest months of June this year. Several other locations in the Southern Hemisphere have experienced lower temperatures in the last few years. Further, the sea surface temperatures over world oceans are slowly declining since mid-1998, according to a recent world-wide analysis of ocean surface temperatures," Dr. Khandekar explained. (LINK)

    Meteorologist Joseph Conklin, who launched the skeptical website www.ClimatePolice.com in 2007, recently declared the "global warming movement [is] falling apart."

    "A few months ago, a study came out that demonstrated global temperatures have leveled off. But instead of possibly admitting that this whole global warming thing is a farce, a group of British scientists concluded that the real global warming won't start until 2009," Conklin wrote in an August 10, 2007 blog post on his website. (LINK)

    Climate models made by unlicensed 'software engineers'

    But the credibility of these computer model predictions took a significant hit in June 2007 when Dr. Jim Renwick, a top UN IPCC scientist, admitted that climate models do not account for half the variability in nature and thus are not reliable. "Half of the variability in the climate system is not predictable, so we don't expect to do terrifically well," Renwick conceded. (LINK)

    Another high-profile UN IPCC lead author, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, recently echoed Renwick's sentiments about climate models by referring to them as "story lines."

    "In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers 'what if' projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios," Trenberth wrote in journal Nature's blog on June 4, 2007. He also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because "they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess." (LINK)

    IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand, an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990 and author of The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of "Climate Change 2001," declared "The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense" in an April 10, 2007 article. (LINK)

    "All [UN IPCC does] is make 'projections' and 'estimates'. No climate model has ever been properly tested, which is what 'validation' means, and their 'projections' are nothing more than the opinions of 'experts' with a conflict of interest, because they are paid to produce the models. There is no actual scientific evidence for all these 'projections' and 'estimates,'" Gray noted.

    In addtion, meteorologist Dr. Hendrik Tennekes, a scientific pioneer in the development of numerical weather prediction and former director of research at The Netherlands' Royal National Meteorological Institute, recently compared scientists who promote computer models predicting future climate doom to unlicensed "software engineers."

    "I am of the opinion that most scientists engaged in the design, development, and tuning of climate models are in fact software engineers. They are unlicensed, hence unqualified to sell their products to society," Tennekes wrote on February 28, 2007. (LINK)



    Should we spend a trillion dollars on "Global warming" when, in fact, the earth is cooling?

    ReplyDelete

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