Stanford Law School (photo: Wikimedia Commons)
The Government Accountability Project's American Whistleblower Tour: Essential Voices for Accountability is at Stanford University in California this week. We'll be speaking today at the law school along with Kathryn Bolkovac, the brave whistleblower who discovered and disclosed U.N. peacekeepers' involvement in human trafficking and forced prostitution in Bosnia. Continue reading
The Obama administration has once again postponed a decision on the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, likely delaying a final decision until after the November 2014 elections. It seems clear that the anti-pipeline campaign initiated in the heartland and sparked as a national issue by our civil disobedience demonstrations at the White House in 2011 continues to have an impact. On Saturday, April 26, the Cowboy-Indian Alliance will spearhead another demonstration against the pipeline on the National Mall in Washington, DC -- another chance to keep the pressure on. Continue reading
University of Virginia
The Virginia Supreme Court has rejected the American Tradition Institute's demand for email correspondence between former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann and his colleagues. In upholding a higher education research exclusion from freedom of information access in this case, the Court cited the potential for "harm to university-wide research efforts, damage to faculty recruitment and retention, undermining of faculty expectations of privacy and confidentiality, and impairment of free thought and expression." This is the result we have advocated in this case for the past three years.
"Our University invests in the fossil fuel industry: this is for us the central issue," 100 Harvard faculty members have written in a letter to the President of the university. They say: "Our sense of urgency in signing this Letter cannot be overstated. ... Divestment is an act of ethical responsibility, a protest against current practices that cannot be altered as quickly or effectively by other means. ... [N]ot only must research and education be pursued with vigor, pressure must also be exerted. If there is no pressure, then grievous harm due to climate change will accelerate and entrench itself for a span of time that will make the history of Harvard look short." Continue reading
James Cameron, legendary film director and producer (Titanic, Avatar...) and innovative deep-sea explorer, brings his extraordinary ability to telling the story of global climate change. The first in a 9-part documentary series called Years of Living Dangerously, featuring well-known correspondents (Harrison Ford, Matt Damon...) and journalists (Chris Hayes, Tom Friedman, Lesley Stahl...) and the expertise of leading scientists, premieres on Showtime, the premium U.S. cable service, on Sunday, April 13, at 10pm EDT. The producers of the series are led by veteran journalists from "60 Minutes" who have won 18 Emmys. As an introduction, here's the first hour-long episode:
From an open letter on April 7: "A critical first step is to stop making climate change worse by tapping into disproportionately carbon-intensive energy sources like tar sands bitumen. The Keystone XL pipeline will drive expansion of the energy-intensive strip-mining and drilling of tar sands from under Canada's Boreal forest, increasing global carbon emissions. ... [T]he State Department environmental review [used] business-as-usual energy scenarios that would lead to a catastrophic six degrees Celsius rise in global warming. ... Six degrees Celsius of global warming has no place in a sound climate plan." Full text and list of signers below. Continue reading
A new editorial in the Wall Street Journal distorts and cherry-picks quotations from the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, asserting that the report walks back on climate alarm. In fact, we’re in more climate trouble than we’ve ever been, and the report makes this clear. Any fair reading of the report itself leaves an indisputable conclusion: Neither economic growth nor adaptation will solve the climate change problem on its own.
The Economist offers a watered-down reading of the recently released IPCC assessment report on climate change Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. The article discusses the report’s dire warnings about the impacts of climate change if current trends continue. But it draws conclusions that misrepresent and minimize the level of agreement among scientists and the urgency of our need for climate action. Continue reading
"We're now in an era where climate change isn't some kind of future hypothetical," said Chris Field, co-chair of the IPCC Working Group II 2014 climate change assessment report on Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. "We live in an era where impacts from climate change are already widespread and consequential." 115 governments accepted the report, unanimously approved the text of the "Summary for Policymakers," and released the report on March 31 in Yokohama. The summary mentions the word "risk" an average of about 5 1/2 times per page, according to a report in the Associated Press. That sounds about right. The scientists do risk assessment; it's up to the rest of us to do risk management commensurate with the global problem they have characterized and warned us about with increasing urgency. Continue reading
The IPCC climate change assessment report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, to be released in Japan on March 31, highlights the grave risks we face as the climate changes. But some news coverage previewing the release has focused on the views of Richard Tol, an IPCC author who opted to withdraw from the author team drafting the report summary to seek a larger spotlight for his outlier views. Continue reading
