Posts Tagged ‘James Gustave Speth’

A 1979 Climate Warning

Wednesday, November 12th, 2008

– A while ago, I wrote a piece about the World Scientists Warning to Humanity 1992.   Now, DotEarth has come up with a similar warning dating back to 1979 which I’ve copied and linked to, below.

– And for those of you who can date your music impressions way back to the 1960’s, how about “Spirit – Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus – Nature’s Way“.   Even back then, I could hear what they were saying:  “It’s nature’s way of telling you; dying trees.”

– It’s not like the writing about the environment hasn’t been on the wall for those who were looking.

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The Cassandra Files: A 1979 Climate Warning

Few things are sadder than looking back and contemplating “what might have been.” It’s certainly not the kind of thing most people want to do at a birthday party.

But that was what happened on Oct. 24 when the Woods Hole Research Center in Woods Hole, Mass., marked the 80th birthday of its founder, the biologist and ecologist George Woodwell, with a symposium on “Ecology and the Public Good.”

One participant, James Gustave Speth, passed out copies of a report he received in July 1979, when he was chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Its title was “The Carbon Dioxide Problem: Implications for Policy in the Management of Energy and Other Resources.” Its lead author was Dr. Woodwell, then the director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory. His coauthors were Gordon J. MacDonald, Roger Revelle and Charles D. Keeling. All were eminent; Dr. Keeling was the first to chart increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere — a rise known today as the Keeling curve. (Click here to download a PDF of the report.)

The report starts off with a blunt warning: “Man is setting in motion a series of events that seem certain to cause a significant warming of world climates over the next decades unless mitigating steps are taken immediately.” It adds, “ Enlightened policies in the management of fossil fuels and forests can delay or avoid these changes, but the time for implementing the policies is fast passing.”

In a forward he wrote for the reprinted report, Mr. Speth, now the dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Science, tells how the group of scientists prepared it for the White House, and how the Carter administration asked the National Academy of Sciences for guidance on its grim conclusions. While factors like the possible climate buffering influence of the oceans are imperfectly understood, the academy panel said, “if carbon dioxide continues to increase, the study group finds no reason to doubt that climate changes will result and no reason to believe that these changes will be negligible.”

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– Thanks to Dot Earth

– This article is from the NY Times and they insist that folks have an ID and a PW in order to read their stuff. You can get these for free just by signing up. However, a friend of mine suggests the website bugmenot.com :arrow: as an alternative to having to do these annoying sign ups. Check it out. Thx Bruce S. for the tip.

World `Squandered’ Decade in Climate Debate, Top Scientist Says

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

– This reminds me of something James Gustave Speth said in, Red Sky at Morning:

The results of two decades of international environmental negotiations are disappointing. It is not that what has been agree upon is wrong or useless. But, the bottom line is that these treaties and their associated agreements and protocols do not drive the changes that are needed. Thus far, the climate convention is not protecting the climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and even the older and stronger Convention on the Law of the Sea is not protecting fisheries. Nor are they poised to do so in the immediate future. On the big issues the trends of deterioration continue. With few exceptions, our instruments of choice, international environmental law, is not yet changing them, and the hour is late.

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March 11 (Bloomberg) — World leaders wasted a decade debating whether global warming is happening, and now need to act quickly to limit its effects, a former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.

The pace of greenhouse-gas emissions risks locking in thousands of years of higher sea levels, as well as damaging marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, melting sea-ice and acidifying the oceans, said Robert Watson, now chief scientific adviser at the U.K. environment ministry.

European nations, which have taken a lead in reducing output of pollution linked to global warming, have “failed miserably” to get the U.S., the largest industrialized emitter, to follow suit, or to work well with China and India, Watson said. China’s emissions growth will swamp pollution cuts planned by the U.K., Germany and other developed nations, U.S. researchers said.

“Have we squandered the last 10 years? Largely yes,” Watson told delegates today at the Oceanology International conference in London. “We should have been acting far more to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 10 years, especially trying to get technology transfer with developing countries and bringing the United States on board.”

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