Scientists Await Toothless, Meaningless Greenwash From G8 Meeting

[hatrack]

"Climate scientists fear that this week’s G8 talks in Gleneagles, Scotland, will not hear the truth about the “clear and present danger” of climate change. In 2004, UK prime minister Tony Blair said that action to halt climate change would be a top priority, along with poverty in Africa, for the UK's chairmanship of the G8 in 2005. To update politicians, he called a conference of scientists in February 2005 to discuss the risks of “dangerous” climate change and how to prevent it happening.

The meeting - held in Exeter, southwest England - concluded that the risks were “more serious than previously thought". UK environment secretary Margaret Beckett said she believed “the conference will be seen as a turning point in the perception of climate change. It underlines the need for urgent action”. But Will Steffen, chief scientist at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, who helped organise the conference, says he fears the message has not got through to the leaders. “It is clear that the risk of dangerous climate change is higher than we thought even a year ago,” he told New Scientist. “World leaders should be made aware of these developments in the scientific community.”

Another organiser of the Exeter meeting, John Schellnhuber, research director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in Norwich, UK, said: "Our great dilemma is that climate change policy lags behind climate change dynamics in a most dangerous way." He adds: "Gleneagles should acknowledge the urgency by coming up with a G8 initiative - for instance 25% emissions reductions for G8 countries by 2025." The G8 nations account for about 45% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

EDIT

The fears of scientists that their message has been lost intensified in June 2005 when a draft of the negotiated text of the Gleneagles declaration included the phrase “our world is warming” in square brackets, indicating that not all the eight leaders agreed to it. But even “a simple statement that climate change is happening and that we will have, sometime, to do something, would represent a step backwards,” says Myles Allen, at climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, who presented a study in Exeter suggesting climate change could be twice as bad as previously feared. The government’s main representative at the Exeter conference was chief scientist David King, but he will not be making any presentations at Gleneagles. “He has a full diary of other activities,” his spokesman told New Scientist."

EDIT/END

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7632

[funflower]

1. Fuck the G8. This is something that WE THE PEOPLE must do with or

without the involvement of our corrupt "leaders."