Freedom or Tyranny.com

Remarks to the Global Environment Forum

Honourable Ahn Sang-Soo, Mayor of Incheon Metropolitan City,Honourable Mr. Ko Kun, Co-Chairman of the global Enviroment Forum,

Honourable Mr. Lee Man-yi, Minister of Environment,

Distinguished guests, Ladies and gentlemen, Dear Friends,

It is a great privilege for me to participate in this global Environment Forum.

Let me begin by offering my sincere congratulations to Mayor Ahn and the the citizens of the Metropolitan City of Incheon.

Environment Forum as well as the Global Fair and Festival 2009, you show true global vision ? vision that underlines the importance of local government and cities in coping with the challenges of the 21st century.

Ladies and gentlemen,

As you know, Incheon is famous as the gateway to Korea.

But here today, I am especially proud as UN Secretary-General – and a Korean citizen – to be able to say that Incheon is also a gateway to our common future.

The very fact that this most important Forum meets here today testifies to that.

The Songdo Convensia is one of the world’s most green convention centres. And it is located in one of the world’s most eco-friendly cities.

Songdo is remarkable not only for what it has become but for what it used to be.

People who grew up here remember the smokestacks and toxic fumes.

In a few short decades, these have given way to clean buildings and clear skies.

We are here today to recognize the connections between us and deal with a common problem. Of this, too, Songdo is a symbol and key.

I understand that Songdo modeled itself on the Swedish sister city of Hammarby Sjostad (SCHÖ-stad).

That city, too, used to be an industrial site before it transformed itself through ecofriendly development.

These two cities – one in Europe, the other in Asia – show visionary civic leadership. They understand that we have a choice: adapt or perish.

full text here

by William Kininmonth
Quadrant Online
August 8, 2009

In computer models we trust!

The coming Senate vote on the badly misnamed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) is the culmination of intense propaganda spanning more than three decades. The Senate Bill aims at restricting emissions of carbon dioxide, a colourless, odourless gas essential to life, and has nought to do with smokestack carbon particles and other pollutants that have been regulated since the 1950s. The basis of the Bill is an unsustainable hypothesis that dangerous global warming will be an outcome of continued burning of fossil fuels and the rising concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

It is nearly 20 years since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) in 1990 gave its first assessment of the likelihood and potential magnitude of human-caused global warming. In their first report in 1990 they confirmed that humans would have an impact on global temperatures as carbon dioxide levels increased. Importantly, the magnitudes of impacts were considered conjectural and subject to large uncertainty, because computer models of the time were rudimentary in their ability to represent the complex processes in the climate system.

The IPCC’s second report in 1995 was more confident, saying that the balance of evidence suggested a discernible human influence on global climate. By the time of the 2001 third report the IPCC was concluding that the ability of computer models to project future climate had increased and ‘the warming over the past 100 years is very unlikely to be due to internal variability alone, as estimated by current [computer] models’.

In its most recent 2007 report the IPCC has gone so far as to claim that most of the warming of the last half century was very likely due to human activities, especially the emissions of carbon dioxide. Moreover it was claimed that unconstrained emissions of carbon dioxide would lead to a dangerous global temperature rise of between 2^oC and 6^oC by the end of the century.

Unfortunately the more recent pattern of global temperature does not fit the IPCC scenario. Carbon dioxide levels have continued to rise but global temperatures have flat-lined since 1997.

full text here