Kert Davies, over at the ever-vigilant Exxon Secrets site, writes:
Finally. After years of denying its role in the campaign of climate denial, Exxon has revealed a dirty secret, that it has and likely still is DIRECTLY funding junk scientists.
Thanks to Exxon’s revealing this little secret, we now have a direct link between the Exxon black bag o’ cash and two scientists who have made their careers as global warming deniers.
With a BBQ hosted by Lucy Lawless, a lifeboat named Copenhagen, and poem by Rhys Darby titled Global Warning (watch this space for the video) we launched a new campaign called Sign On over the weekend.
With a host of big name climate ambassadors including Stephen Tindall, Geoff Ross, Robyn Malcolm and Francesca Price to name a few, we kicked off what could be our most important campaign to date.
So not the usual Greenpeace approach but these are unusual times.
Climate change is now happening faster than anyone expected. Normally reserved scientists are raising the alarm. In December this year world leaders will gather in Copenhagen to Sign On to a global agreement for action. For NZ to do its bit to help avoid catastrophic impacts, Prime Minister John Key needs to go to Copenhagen and Sign On to reduce New Zealand’s emissions by 40 per cent by 2020.
This is the message the Sign On ambassadors echo and it is what thousands of New Zealanders are already supporting via the Sign On website www.signon.org.nz
We need you to Sign On and we need you to tell your friends and family to Sign On too. This year is our window of opportunity to turn climate change around.
By December we need hundreds of thousands of kiwis standing alongside us and our climate ambassadors in supporting John Key to do the right thing at Copenhagen.
All the ambassadors made videos which you can watch here
An important Public Service Announcement from Your Government and The Biotech Industry (represented here by chemical giant Bayer) pronouncing the benefits of Genetically Modified Rice strain – LL62. Barely tried and barely tested this GE Rice is coming to your dinner plate nevertheless!
One day, if we get it right, and we’re lucky, humans will be able to look back and talk about ‘the carbon age’. Starting with the industrial revolution, and ending at the end of this century, well be able to count the total amount of carbon we released during the carbon age. And if we’ve successfully managed the tricky situation we’re in, that amount will be less than 1 trillion tonnes.
According to new research, that’s the limit on what we can burn, ever, as a species, without severely messing up the planet. If we burn more than a trillion tonnes, well probably be too busy dealing with the effects of climate change to spend much time looking back into history. Normally, we talk about targets for reducing emissions – for NZ to do its bit globally we need to reduce our emissions here by 40% by 2020. But in a paper in the science journal Nature, a group of researchers decided to describe how emissions have to change in another way – in terms of a ‘carbon budget’.
So what is a carbon budget, exactly?
Broadly, once carbon is in the atmosphere it stays there for centuries. How hot the planet gets is controlled by the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – not how much were emitting at the moment. So, for a temperature rise of 2 degrees, there’s a total amount of carbon we can put into the atmosphere. If you like, it’s a carbon budget to buy us 2 degrees of warming.
Before most of us even had our first cup of coffee this morning, 32 activists from Finland and Sweden were up and taking action at a palm oil diesel refinery in Porvoo, Finland. Neste Oil, an oil refining company that is largely owned by the Finnish government, has plans to rapidly expand over the next three years – to become the world’s largest consumer of palm oil. Read more »
Today the Greenpeace ship Esperanza arrived in Auckland. It’s always good to see one of the ships, catch up with old friends aboard, hear their tales from the high seas and share a beer in the mess. But before any of that can happen we always try and give them a fitting welcome with a waiata and a haka.
The crew now knows the flavour of the welcome they’re likely to get in Auckland and usually prepare a bit of a song themselves. We’ve heard a great selection of sea shanties over the years but this one was one to remember. The crew on the Esperanza created their very own version of a classic Pink Floyd song complete with a guitar and drums!
Here’s the words …
In a nice mix of cutting-edge and good ole traditional bearing witness, Greenpeace launched a 43 minute documentary this past weekend on the Canadian Tar Sands called Petropolis. It is a non-traditional documentary (less than 5 minutes of dialogue) that lets the stunning images speak for themselves.
This is a worth a watch. Gareth Morgan investigates “who is right about climate change”. It’s no surprise that his conclusion is that human caused global warming is the cause but it’s good to see someone from the conservative finance sector coming out with strong statements like this:
NZ is an absolute joke, the home of double standards. New Zealand’s record on this is terrible. We’re a joke. If it’s anything like economics, you really need people to have their heads banged against the wall before they wake up and say; shivers, this is for real.
Much of the piece os focused on Takuu, a low-lying remote atoll that is sinking at an alarming rate. Here’s a couple of links if you want to find out more about Takuu.
http://www.takuufilm.blogspot.com
http://www.thereoncewasanisland.com
