Two senior foreign policy officials from the European Union says in a new report that the EU should “brace itself” for a new and much larger wave of migration, caused by the effects of climate change. According to their report climate change “threatens to severely destabilise the planet” and will make a fifth of the worlds population homeless.

Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s chief foreign policy coordinator and the European commissioner for external relations, says that within a decade “there will be millions of environmental migrants, with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon,” and that “Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

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Dr James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and one of the worlds most prominent climate scientist, says in an article on the WorldWatch Institute website that climate change liars “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

“Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.”

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The world is starting to realise that the goal of 450 ppm as a reasonable level to balance and stabilize the CO2 in our atmosphere is based on wrong and outdated science and won’t be enough to stop man-made climate change.

More and more scientific reports show that the older science has been too “soft” in their climate change calculations. For example, we can already now see a never ending and rapid melting of the Arctic ice, something that “would happen in 20-30 years” according to the older science reports. Scientific reports earlier projected that the Arctic would become ice-free by year 2050. But newly released reports suggest it could happen as early as 2013.

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An extraordinary admission by the Australian Federal Government has passed unnoticed by the Mainstream media in the “look away” Land of Oz, the Antipodean Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths), the Murdochracy called Australia.

However from the Green Senator Christine Milne’s blog of the June 4, 2008 entitled “Rudd Treasury not modelling real climate protection scenarios” we read that “Treasury is only modelling global emissions scenarios with a very high risk of triggering runaway climate change, Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, discovered today in Senate Estimates hearings … On questioning from Senator Milne in today’s [Senate] Estimates hearings, [public servant] Meghan Quinn revealed that her Department [Treasury] is only modelling scenarios leading to global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 and 550 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent. Treasury had not been asked to model lower concentrations, Ms Quinn said.”

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Martin Parry, Jean Palutikof, Clair Hanson and Jason Lowe, all four respected and known scientists from the IPCC, have written on The Nature about the dangers of false optimism regarding climate change. They warn that the “damages will be large” if we continue to believe that we have climate change under control.

“We have lost ten years talking about climate change but not acting on it. Meanwhile, evidence from the IPCC indicates that the problem is bigger than we thought. A curious optimism […] pervades the political arenas of the G8 summit and UN climate meetings. This is false optimism, and it is obscuring reality. The sooner we recognize this delusion, confront the challenge and implement both stringent emissions cuts and major adaptation efforts, the less will be the damage that we and our children will have to live with.”

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According to a newly released study from the FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, the deforestation in Burma have exposed coastal communities and worsen the effects of the cyclone.

Jan Heino, the Assistant Director General of the FAO Forestry Department, said in the report that “mangroves have been converted to agricultural land and fish ponds. Settlements have been established closer to the sea and the combination of proximity to coastal hazards and lack of a protective forest buffer has increased the risks to human populations in many countries.”

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By now I guess everyone has seen Al Gore’s movie and slide show, or at least understands the severity of climate change.

Now Al Gore has updated his slide show and “presents evidence that the pace of climate change may be even worse than scientists were recently predicting, and challenges us to act with a sense of “generational mission” — the kind of feeling that brought forth the civil rights movement — to set it right.”

You can see his presentation of the new slide show over at TED (or after the jump). The video is 27 minutes long but worth every second of your time.

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Did you participate in Earth Hour this weekend? Yes? Great, cause now its time to take it to the next level. It’s time to actually make a difference.

Earth Hour has teamed up with Zerofootprint, a Canadian not-for-profit organisation, to provide two carbon calculators so that Earth Hour participants (and anyone else for that matter) to measure their carbon footprint and “make ongoing changes to their individual lifestyles in a bid to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

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