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Hi

I notice a few people have posted about the Climate Change Congress in Copenhagen -- well here's my take on this impressive meeting.
SIX Key Messages from this Copenhagen Climate Congress as I heard them. They are:

RAJENDRA PACHAURI, CHAIR of the INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE says, Even for a range of zero to one degree Celsius we have problems with water availability. We also have problems with ecosystems. Food security would certainly be at growing risk. Coastal areas are particularly vulnerable. And human health would also be affected by the impacts of climate change.

What a fantastic Guy!
The Danish Prime Minister, Mr. Anders Fogh Rasmussen, addressed the IARU Climate Congress, Copenhagen, Denmark on Thursday 12 March, 2009. Those of us who heard him and watched his intelligent interaction with top climate change scientist were deeply impressed. He said:

Civilisation triage is referred to on a web site about climate change and the peak oil issue ( http://www.futurescenarios.org/) This describes the processes by which remaining social capacity (beyond meeting immediate basic needs) are focused on conserving technology and culture that could be useful to a future society, once energy descent is stabilised after a precipitous but limited collapse process. This is not the dominant process of the scenario but the most significant in terms of future cultural capacity.

ABC Climate Change Consulting this week headlines an article by its 'profiled person' on "What the IPCC Lead Authors didn't get to say" -- go to http://abccarbon.com/

A short article on transparency in climate change communication by Professor Henderson-Sellers recently published and available on the Environmental Research web site:
The IPCC report: what the lead authors really think

Both Russian and British scientists have this week reported discovering hundreds more methane "plumes" bubbling up from the Arctic seabed. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/hundreds-of-methane-plumes-dis... ). The methane is being released from clathrates - crystal like cages of ice water molecules which trap methane molecules. As methane is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas this finding in an area of the globe which is already warming faster than virtually any other is cause for serious alarm.

Hello
I've noticed a couple of folks have picked up on the Sacramento Delta / San Francisco Bay study Public Policy Institute of California (http://featured.matternetwork.com/2008/9/triage-for-flood-prone-lands.cfm ). I think its important to point out (contrary to the sense in some of the posts here on this web site) that in act this triage recommendation was made by CONSENSUS.

It is now said that the Earth's climate system was about twice as sensitive to carbon dioxide pollution as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had found. This means that there is already enough greenhouse gas pollution in the atmosphere to cause 2 degrees of warming, bringing about conditions not seen on earth for 2 to 3 million years and constituting, according to Jim Hansen and colleagues (Hansen, 2007), "a degree of warming that would surely yield dangerous climate impacts".

A report posted just a few days ago talks about how triage decisions are already being made for low lying coastal regions. This article has links to a UC Davis report and can be found at http://featured.matternetwork.com/2008/9/triage-for-flood-prone-lands.cfm