[greenyes] Mr. Bush's Record on Global Warming

["Peter Anderson" <anderson@no.address>]

Global warming approaching point of no return, warns leading climate expert
By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor
23 January 2005
Global warning has already hit the danger point that international attempts 
to curb it are designed to avoid, according to the world's top climate 
watchdog.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the official Intergovernmental Panel 
on Climate Change (IPCC), told an international conference attended by 114 
governments in Mauritius this month that he personally believes that the 
world has "already reached the level of dangerous concentrations of carbon 
dioxide in the atmosphere" and called for immediate and "very deep" cuts in 
the pollution if humanity is to "survive".

His comments rocked the Bush administration - which immediately tried to 
slap him down - not least because it put him in his post after Exxon, the 
major oil company most opposed to international action on global warming, 
complained that his predecessor was too "aggressive" on the issue.

A memorandum from Exxon to the White House in early 2001 specifically asked 
it to get the previous chairman, Dr Robert Watson, the chief scientist of 
the World Bank, "replaced at the request of the US". The Bush administration 
then lobbied other countries in favour of Dr Pachauri - whom the former 
vice-president Al Gore called the "let's drag our feet" candidate, and got 
him elected to replace Dr Watson, a British-born naturalised American, who 
had repeatedly called for urgent action.

But this month, at a conference of Small Island Developing States on the 
Indian Ocean island, the new chairman, a former head of India's Tata Energy 
Research Institute, himself issued what top United Nations officials 
described as a "very courageous" challenge.

He told delegates: "Climate change is for real. We have just a small window 
of opportunity and it is closing rather rapidly. There is not a moment to 
lose."

Afterwards he told The Independent on Sunday that widespread dying of coral 
reefs, and rapid melting of ice in the Arctic, had driven him to the 
conclusion that the danger point the IPCC had been set up to avoid had 
already been reached.

"..."

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