David Adam writes: At
a high-level academic conference on global warming at Exeter University
this summer, climate scientist Kevin Anderson stood before his expert
audience and contemplated a strange feeling. He wanted to be wrong.
Many of those in the room who knew what he was about to say felt the
same. His conclusions had already caused a stir in scientific and
political circles. Even committed green campaigners said the
implications left them terrified.

Anderson, an expert at the
Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at Manchester University,
was about to send the gloomiest dispatch yet from the frontline of the
war against climate change.

Despite the political rhetoric, the
scientific warnings, the media headlines and the corporate promises, he
would say, carbon emissions were soaring way out of control - far above
even the bleak scenarios considered by last year’s report from the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Stern review.
The battle against dangerous climate change had been lost, and the
world needed to prepare for things to get very, very bad.

“As an
academic I wanted to be told that it was a very good piece of work and
that the conclusions were sound,” Anderson said. “But as a human being
I desperately wanted someone to point out a mistake, and to tell me we
had got it completely wrong.”

Nobody did. The cream of the UK
climate science community sat in stunned silence as Anderson pointed
out that carbon emissions since 2000 have risen much faster than anyone
thought possible, driven mainly by the coal-fuelled economic boom in
the developing world. So much extra pollution is being pumped out, he
said, that most of the climate targets debated by politicians and
campaigners are fanciful at best, and “dangerously misguided” at worst.

In
the jargon used to count the steady accumulation of carbon dioxide in
the Earth’s thin layer of atmosphere, he said it was “improbable” that
levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm).

The
CO2 level is currently over 380ppm, up from 280ppm at the time of the
industrial revolution, and it rises by more than 2ppm each year. The
government’s official position is that the world should aim to cap this
rise at 450ppm.

The science is fuzzy, but experts say that could
offer an even-money chance of limiting the eventual temperature rise
above pre-industrial times to 2C, which the EU defines as dangerous.
(We have had 0.7C of that already and an estimated extra 0.5C is
guaranteed because of emissions to date.)

The graphs on the
large screens behind Anderson’s head at Exeter told a different story.
Line after line, representing the fumes that belch from chimneys,
exhausts and jet engines, that should have bent in a rapid curve
towards the ground, were heading for the ceiling instead.

At
650ppm, the same fuzzy science says the world would face a catastrophic
4C average rise. And even that bleak future, Anderson said, could only
be achieved if rich countries adopted “draconian emission reductions
within a decade”. Only an unprecedented “planned economic recession”might be enough. The current financial woes would not come close. (12/10/08)
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Ellen Brown writes: As our 45th President prepares to enter the Oval Office, bank lending
has seized up, some of the nation’s largest banks are on life support,
and the big three automakers are bankrupt. Housing continues to crash,
and so does the economy.

Little wonder that Obama
is being compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, who entered the White House
in similar financial straits in 1932. Even before taking office, Obama
has started his version of the “fireside chats” (updated from radio to
online video) given by Roosevelt nearly weekly to reassure the public.
He said on November 22 that he plans to create 2.5 million new jobs by
2011 and kick-start the economy by building roads and bridges,
modernizing schools, and creating technology and infrastructure for
renewable energy. These are excellent ideas, but what will they be
funded with—more government debt?

Obama has
pledged to honor the commitments of the outgoing administration to
rescue financial markets, on the theory that if we don’t, our credit
system could freeze up completely. But as noted by Barry Ritholtz in a
December 2 article, the bailout
has already cost more than the New Deal, the Marshall Plan, the
Louisiana Purchase, the moonshot, the savings and loan bailout, the
Korean War, the Iraq war, the Vietnam war, and NASA’s lifetime budget combined.(1) Increasing the debt burden could break the back of the taxpayers and plunge the nation itself into bankruptcy.

How
can the new President resolve these enormous funding challenges? Thomas
Jefferson realized two centuries ago that there is a way to finance
government without taxes or
debt. Unfortunately, he came to that realization only after he had left
the White House, and he was unable to put it into action. With any
luck, Obama will discover this funding solution early in his upcoming
term, before the country is declared bankrupt and abandoned by its
creditors. (12/10/08)
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BBC Medical Science — Taking vitamin C or E does not reduce the risk of prostate cancers - or other forms of the disease, two large US studies suggest. Both trials were set up following some evidence that taking supplements might have a positive effect. But one study of 35,533 men, and a second of 15,000 doctors, found no evidence that cancer rates were any lower in those taking supplements.

Both studies feature in the Journal of the American Medical Association. A number of trials had suggested that taking vitamins could cut the risk of certain cancers by boosting levels of beneficial antioxidants which work to minimise damage in the tissues, but the results were mixed.

The latest studies set out to come up with more definitive results, by involving large numbers of volunteers. In the first study, researchers from University of Texas and the Cleveland Clinic Lerner College of Medicine gave healthy men either the trace mineral selenium, vitamin E, both or a dummy pill. The team intended to monitor all the participants for at least seven years but the trial was stopped early because the results were so disappointing.

The researchers found there were no statistically significant differences in the numbers of men who developed prostate cancer in the four groups. In all cases the proportion of men diagnosed with prostate cancer over a five-year period was 4% to 5%.

In the second study, researchers at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital tested the impact of regular vitamin E and C supplements on cancer rates among 14, 641 male doctors. Over eight years, taking vitamin E had no impact at all on rates of either prostate cancer, or cancer in general. Vitamin C had no significant effect. (12/10/08)
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BBC Environmental Science — People in developing countries will need to make big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions if “dangerous” climate change is to be avoided, a report warns. Researchers at the Third World Network calculate that even if rich nations make deep cuts, the developing world will face per-capita reductions of 60%. It suggests this would pose challenges to these countries’ development.

Meanwhile, another report warns that current proposals for cutting developed world emissions do not go far enough. …

Ewah Eleri, executive director of the International Centre for Energy, Environment and Development based in the Nigerian capital, Abuja, said there were some obvious easy ways for the poorest developing countries to reduce emissions. One would be to replace traditional open wood-burning stoves with more efficient models.

“Being able to introduce efficient wood stoves is not rocket science,” he told BBC News. “But it holds a lot of promise in terms of reducing the health hazard to men, women and children who work in the kitchen.”

Making the switch across Nigeria could probably reduce the country’s emissions by 20-30%. …

The clear message from putting these two reports together was, he said, that richer nations will have to get finance and clean technology into the developing world if they want to turn the goal of a 50% cut into reality. (12-10-08)
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Gideon Rachman writes: I have never believed that there is a secret United Nations plot to
take over the US. I have never seen black helicopters hovering in the
sky above Montana. But, for the first time in my life, I think the
formation of some sort of world government is plausible

A “world
government” would involve much more than co-operation between nations.
It would be an entity with state-like characteristics, backed by a body
of laws. The European Union has already set up a continental government
for 27 countries, which could be a model. The EU has a supreme court, a
currency, thousands of pages of law, a large civil service and the
ability to deploy military force.

So could the European model go global? There are three reasons for thinking that it might.

First,
it is increasingly clear that the most difficult issues facing national
governments are international in nature: there is global warming, a
global financial crisis and a “global war on terror”.

Second, it
could be done. The transport and communications revolutions have shrunk
the world so that, as Geoffrey Blainey, an eminent Australian
historian, has written: “For the first time in human history, world
government of some sort is now possible.” Mr Blainey foresees an
attempt to form a world government at some point in the next two
centuries, which is an unusually long time horizon for the average
newspaper column.

But – the third point – a change in the
political atmosphere suggests that “global governance” could come much
sooner than that. The financial crisis and climate change
are pushing national governments towards global solutions, even in
countries such as China and the US that are traditionally fierce
guardians of national sovereignty.

Barack Obama, America’s president-in-waiting, does not share the Bush
administration’s disdain for international agreements and treaties. In
his book, The Audacity of Hope, he argued that: “When the
world’s sole superpower willingly restrains its power and abides by
internationally agreed-upon standards of conduct, it sends a message
that these are rules worth following.” The importance that Mr Obama
attaches to the UN is shown by the fact that he has appointed Susan Rice, one of his closest aides, as America’s ambassador to the UN, and given her a seat in the cabinet. (12/10/08)
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