The Guardian quotes a statement from the UK Met Office, one of the world’s leading providers of environmental and weather-related services:

“Anyone who thinks global warming has stopped has their head in the sand. The evidence is clear, the long-term trend in global temperatures is rising, and humans are largely responsible for this rise. Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last.”

Read more: Met Office says climate change deniers deluded

Rajendra Pachauri, who currently chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) since 2002 and who recently won the Nobel Peace Price along with Al Gore, said at a speech in London on Monday evening that “meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport” and that “changing diets is something one should consider”.

“The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has estimated that direct emissions from meat production account for about 18% of the world’s total greenhouse gas emissions,” he told BBC News.

“So I want to highlight the fact that among options for mitigating climate change, changing diets is something one should consider.”

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Today the Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama spoke in front of over 200 000 people in Berlin. In the speech he talked about everything from human rights to free markets, nuclear weapons and global citizenship, and of course about the climate crisis:

“As we speak, cars in Boston and factories in Beijing are melting the ice caps in the Arctic, shrinking coastlines in the Atlantic, and bringing drought to farms from Kansas to Kenya.

[...]

This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands. Let us resolve that all nations - including my own - will act with the same seriousness of purpose as has your nation, and reduce the carbon we send into our atmosphere. This is the moment to give our children back their future. This is the moment to stand as one.”

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In an interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now leading scientist John Holdren says the term “global warming” is wrong. He rather prefer to use the term “global disruption.”

“I don’t like the term “global warming,” because it’s misleading. It implies something that’s mainly about temperature, that’s gradual, and that’s uniform across the planet. And in fact, temperature is only one of the things that’s changing. It’s a sort of an index of the state of climate. The whole climate is changing: the winds, the ocean currents, the storm patterns, snow packs, snowmelt, flooding, droughts. Temperature is just a bit of it.”

“It’s also highly non-uniform. The largest changes are occurring in the far north in the Arctic, in the Antarctic Peninsula in the far south. It is certainly not gradual, in the sense that it is rapid compared to the capacity of ecosystems to adjust. It’s rapid compared to the capacity of human systems to adjust.”

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Nidhi Jamwa from the Centre for Science and Environment India asks in the organisations journal Down to Earth “why green projects in India are hot favourite of international NGOs?”

Nidhi Jamwa focuses on a recently started green Sierra Club initiative in India that will try “to explore other ways of creating a robust dialogue on developing a green economy” and to “network, collaborate and share information”:

“There it goes again. It is always India and China that are the two emerging villains of climate change. The developed world has built their infrastructure and created wealth, based on technologies that are high on carbon emissions. Even now, it refuses to deliver on its promise to bring down carbon emissions. Yet goes about patronising the developing world on the need for green economy.

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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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Mohan Munasinghe, vice-president of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), said during a lecture at Cambridge University that climate change will lead to a “fortress world in which the rich lock themselves away in gated communities and the poor must fend for themselves in shattered environments.”

Climate change is, or could be, the additional factor which will exacerbate the existing problems of poverty, environmental degradation, social polarisation and terrorism and it could lead to a very chaotic situation.[...]

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“Emissions are growing much faster than we’d thought, the absorptive capacity of the planet is less than we’d thought, the risks of greenhouse gases are potentially bigger than more cautious estimates and the speed of climate change seems to be faster.”

“People who said I was scaremongering were profoundly wrong.”

Lord Stern of Brentford have realised, just like many other scientists are beginning to do, that the predictions in the IPCC reports have been too soft and that climate change will be “stronger than expected and sooner than expected.”

Stern is known for the Stern Review that showed it would be much cheaper to act on climate change than doing nothing.

Turn off your lights for one hour at 8pm March 29 (that’s tomorrow) “to deliver a powerful message about the need for action on global warming.”

Households and businesses around the world are urged to turn off their lights and non-essential electrical appliances for one hour in an international event called Earth Hour 2008.

Earth Hour started out in Sydney, Australia between 7:30 p.m. and 8:30 p.m. on 31 March 2007. That year it was a local event in Australia, this year they are going bigger than ever. Over 11,900 businesses and over 200,000 individuals have signed up to take part in this event. Cities worldwide like Dubai (UAE), Bangkok (Thailand), Örebro (Sweden), San Francisco (USA), Toronto (Canada) and many others will also participate.

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Kansas Governor Katherine Sebelius said this when she vetoed a bill last week that would have allowed the construction of two new coal fired power plants:

Of all the duties and responsibilities entrusted to me as governor, none is greater than my obligation to protect the health and well-being of the people of Kansas.

Stephanie Cole, a Sierra Club spokeswoman, said that this…

…sends a message that Kansas is willing to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.

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