UN’s Ban Says Global Warming Is “An Emergency”
EDUARDO FREI BASE, Antarctica - With prehistoric Antarctic ice sheets melting beneath his feet, U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon called for urgent political action to tackle global warming. 
The Antarctic Peninsula has warmed faster than anywhere else on Earth in the last 50 years, making the continent a fitting destination for Ban, who has made climate change a priority since he took office earlier this year.
“I need a political answer. This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action,” he said during a visit to three scientific bases on the barren continent, where temperatures are their highest in about 1,800 years.
Antarctica’s ice sheets are nearly 1.5 miles thick on average — five times the height of the Taipei 101 tower, the world’s tallest building. But scientists say they are already showing signs of climate change.
Satellite images show the West Antarctic ice sheet is thinning and may even collapse in the future, causing sea levels to rise.
Amid occasional flurries of snow, Ban flew over melting ice fields in a light plane, where vast chunks of ice the size of six-story buildings could be seen floating off the coast after breaking away from ice shelves.
“All we’ve seen has been very impressive and beautiful, extraordinarily beautiful,” he said late on Friday. “But at the same time it’s disturbing. We’ve seen … the melting of glaciers.”
MELTING
Ban is preparing for a U.N. climate change conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December, which is expected to kick off talks on a new accord to curb carbon emissions after the Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012.
Ban has focused strongly on the environment and held a climate change summit at the United Nations on the eve of the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders.
On Saturday, he continued his South American tour at Chilean national park Torres del Paine, taking a helicopter tour over Patagonian ice fields that scientists say are melting fast. Ban was flown over a glacier marked by large cracks from ice that has melted and broken away.
“(Climate) change is progressing much faster than I had thought,” he said, calling on developed countries in particular to do more.
Ban, the first U.N. chief to visit Antarctica, was also due to visit the Amazon rain forest in Brazil, a leading force in developing biofuels from crops as an alternative to fossil fuels. Fears about climate change have fueled a boom in biofuels.
Despite the controversy of diverting food crops into fuel production, Ban has said alternative energy sources are vital to addressing climate change.
Antarctica — a continent with only about 80,000 temporary residents — is 25 percent bigger than Europe and its ice sheets hold 90 percent of the fresh water on the Earth’s surface.
© Reuters 2007
Over 75% of all of the fresh water on this planet, is locked up in the ice of the Anarctic. We need lots of fresh water, and we are gonna get lots. These calls for action are about thirty years too late.
Except for lower valleys and north slopes that have gotten harder frosts on calm night, much of my area still looks like September. My backyard is still green and any raking is almost a month away. Never seen anything like it…
I spent last year in my childhood home of upper Michigan. I was very disturbed that we had a green Christmas, considering in my youth, by the middle of November there was a foot of snow and by Christmas there was so much that travel was often limited. Stacked with the persistant summertime droughts that have been occuring in the area, it is hard to believe that there are still those that scoff at the idea of global warming.
Imagine that we all cut our emissions by 1/3, but the world’s population grows by that much. Net improvement: zero. Sorry folks. It’s too late. But we’ve got tens of years before the rising temperatures, water scarcity, rising seas, extreme weather and droughts start killing people in earnest. And that includes the inevitable resource wars and the growing scarcity of easy to get oil.
Tens of years folks, enjoy your time while it lasts. Your grandkids will be fighting over land in Canada and Siberia. The planet is set to start trimming down an irritating species: humans.
hubcap_halo - You’re overly optimistic. We haven’t got “tens of years” - we are really out of time. Surely you’ve noticed that people all over the world are already dying from drought, floods, landslides, raging fires, you name it - and masses of people are already leaving their own contries for others where they think they might be able to grow something that might be fit to eat. And as for the “easy to get oil” you mention - it’s all been got.
All is not what you think it is:
I heard on the radio a gentleman (can’t remember his name) who was studying Eugenics, and he said that the U.S. had exploded a bomb in the upper atmosphere and this had warmed up the earth and had changed the weather patterns. He said that bomb was exploded deliberately to cause this affect and for the people of the world to believe they need a One-World government that takes care of concerns just like this (The New World Order).
“The UN is but a long range, international banking apparatus clearly set up for financial and economic profit by a small group of powerful One-World revolutionaries hungry for profit and power. The One-World Government leaders and their ever close bankers have now acquired full control of the money and credit machinery of the U.S. via the creation of the privately owned Federal Reserve Ban.” – Curtis Hall, FDR’s Son-in-law.
Just remember this: Hitler, Lenin and Mao were financed through the Federal Reserve and Pres. John Kennedy tried to reform it and look what happened to him. Watch: The Money Masters, Part I and Part II on Google Video
Here are the top controllers of the Federal Reserve (and many control the media) of the United States and Europe:
1. Rothschild banks of London and Berlin,
2. Lazard Brothers Banks of Paris,
3. Israel Moses Seif Banks of Italy,
4. Warburg Bank of Hamburg and Amsterdam,
5. Lehman Brothers Bank of New York,
6. Kuhn, Loeb bank of New York,
7. Chase Manhattan Bank of New York, which controls all of the other 11 Federal Reserve Banks - is a Rockefeller controlled bank; and
8. Goldman, Sachs Bank of New York.
Reuters is owned, I believe, by the Rothchild family.
These bankers own our governments and our media. They want “The New World Order, they benefit from wars - now do you get the picture?
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DEAD CANARIES
How many more dead canaries in the coal mine will be required before its too late.
Unless the USA, the largest emitter of carbon pollution, seriously undertakes the meaningful measures necessary to curtail our contribution to greenhouse gasses, the less industrialized & third world nations will have no incentives to control their emissions.
This can never happen until Americans render ineffective the special interests and their supporting administrations that have prevented the necessary reforms through deception and fabricated science–albeit with the aid of an apathetic populace and defaulting legislators.
Contrary to their assertions, the measures to reduce carbon pollution can only improve our economy and security by reducing our oil imports while improving our health & quality of life.
By placing unlerned and corrupt individuals in the presidency over intelligent and principled candidates, those apathetic Americans deserve the worst government and environment that money can buy –ie such as Regan the great communicator to the ignorant) over Jimmy Carter; and Bush (chartered by God and oil) over Al Gore.
Need I say more?
It is here now, the “perma” frost in the Arctic is already thawing, it is no longer perma. Locked up in that perma frost for the past fifty million years, is rotted vegatation and of course billions of tons of methane gas. When just a portion of that methane gas gets up into our atmosphere, as it is now doing, the greenhouse effect will be ten times what it is today. GRANDMA is correct.
Who am I supposed to believe? This UN apparatchik or the founder of The Weather Channel? Those “dastardly” scientists with (horrors) an “environmental agenda” have sucked poor Ban into their web.
Well, seriously, what are non-scientists to believe? I, as one member of the great unwashed (no Ph.D.), can only fall back on (shudder) common sense: everything which is proposed to ameliorate global warming is a good idea anyway.
Let’s also not forget that tending to the raising of meat for human consumption is also an enormous source of methane, which is much more harmful that carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming gases.
We need to cut back on our meat consumption if we want to save ourselves.
wishfullthinker - You say “We haven’t seen repeated mega-hurricanes, huge wildfires, super-extended drought etc. We haven’t seen millions of refugees forced to flee because the environment where they used to live can no longer support them.” Actually, we have seen all those things (and recently) and I fear there are more to come.
twoblueday - You ask “Who to believe?” Try Tim Flannery for a start, his book “The Weather Makers” presents it all clearly, accurately, and readably. For the long term disasters that environmental breakdown can cause, try Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” Maybe we should start making statues to the gods, like the poor doomed Easter Islanders.
And Kem Patrick is right - the permafrost is thawing and releasing all that methane into the atmosphere and the speed of this is increasing exponentially.
I have to believe that we can still stop this, but we have to take it seriously and act fast to change our wasteful ways.
people please, this planet is like 5 billion years old and you really think that a few hundred thousand years of man has made global warming.im sorry but ice ages are very common on this planet, and you cant stop it.celtic2 hit on the truth, its just another system of control.