Climate 411

What is needed now is a strong, sustained, and well-coordinated effort between governments at all levels, businesses, civic institutions, and individuals to adopt policies, programs, and practices that accelerate the adoption of clean, efficient energy choices. The costs of delay are high. For every year of delay in beginning significant emissions reductions, global concentrations of heat-trapping gases rise higher and the goal of avoiding dangerous climate change becomes more difficult and more costly to achieve.

From Confronting Climate Change in the U.S. Northeast [PDF 8MB], prepared by the Northeast Climate Impacts Assessment Synthesis Team. July 2007.

For more on the toll of global warming in the Northeast, visit our New York City page.

Today’s post is from Sam Parry, Environmental Defense’s manager of online membership.

As we prepare for July 4th festivities, I wanted to share an inspiring conversation we’ve had with our online supporters over the past several weeks. We asked the question, how do people who love this country approach the crisis of global warming? We must have struck a nerve because we got thousands of passionate responses.

We used these responses to craft a Declaration of New Patriotism. To date, almost 56,000 people have added their “John Hancock.” Last week, we delivered the message to Congress with an ad in Roll Call, one of the most widely read newspapers on Capitol Hill.

So before you head out to celebrate tomorrow, take a look at our Declaration of New Patriotism and add your signature. Happy Fourth of July!

The RealClimate blog has great information on the science behind global warming. Recently they posted a resource page with links about climate change. They plan to update the page as they discover new resources, so you might want to bookmark it.

In browsing around the internet this week I found some sites with good information about global warming:

Reporting on Climate Change: Understanding the Science – A 100-page book, free to download or $30 in print form, that does an excellent job summarizing the science behind climate change.

Celsias (Blog) – Great background essays on climate science, also some very funny posts.

Woods Hole Research Center – Excellent resource with background articles, links for further reading, and more.

MarketWatch Special Report: An Investor Guide to Global Warming – A five-part series that ran each day this week covering everything from green investments to the role of insurers.

Do you have favorite sites for information on climate change? Post the links!

“Governments have a crucial supportive role in providing appropriate enabling environment, such as, institutional, policy, legal and regulatory frameworks, to sustain investment flows and for effective technology transfer – without which it may be difficult to achieve emission reductions at a significant scale.”

From IPCC Working Group 3, Summary for Policymakers [PDF]

“Who are the fanatics now? The ones that live in denial – political denial, economic denial, and environmental denial.”

– Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, speaking on “Twenty-First Century Environmentalism: How Protecting Our Environment Will Create Economic Growth” for the Council on Foreign Relations, April 12, 2007.