Al Gore’s new book.. Our Choice: A Plan to solve the climate crisis

Our Choice

So, Al Gore has just released his new book as a sequel to An Inconvenient Truth. A couple of days ago I did an entry on Timothy Luke’s critique of An Inconvenient Truth, which happens to be one of many around. In any case, if any of you were to pick up this book, I’d like to offer some guidelines as to how you may read it critically so that you are not “green washed” without knowing the political knowledge being deployed through such publications.

1. Anglo-American centricism: Look out for the context in which Al Gore has written about solving the climate crisis. We need to apply the solutions somehow to the Asia-Pacific context and better suit solutions to the developing world.

2. Gender: Males and females orientation of this world is different and women are generally more inclined to attach emotions to their actions. Usually such publications, because of its underlying political agenda, neglects to acknowledge the differences between genders or recognize other forms of genders.

3. Photos: Take a good look at the photos used in this publication if you pick it up. I bought An Inconvenient Truth publication because I wanted to take a better look at the photos shown by Al Gore on his slides in the film version. However, these photos are well deployed and used cleverly. We must learn to be critical of these photos and apply our understanding of natural climate change/glacial interchanges when looking at popularist films and videos like this. It is important to understand that photographers may be employed to take photos of a certain sort to represent climate crisis as urgent.

Having said this, it is not that the climate crisis isn’t urgent or that we should not embark on climate action today but that the media can often distort information and cause skepticism among the masses. Images of polar bears drowning is one such example. See the article below:

Polar bears would stand a greater chance of avoiding extinction if people stopped shooting them than if they reduced greenhouse gas emissions, according to a book by a leading environmental sceptic.

Bjorn Lomborg, the Danish professor who achieved international fame with his previous book, The Skeptical Environmentalist, examines and rejects claims by environmentalists and the former president Al Gore that polar bears are drowning because the sea ice they hunt on is melting.

Lomborg says the story about drowning bears is taken from a single sighting of four dead bears the day after an abrupt windstorm. The bears came from a population that was actually increasing, which has been the overall trend in the polar bear population since the 1960s.

He provides evidence that 11 out of 13 distinct populations of polar bears in Canada are either stable or increasing in number.

In his new book, Cool It: the Skeptical Environmentalist’s Guide to Global Warming, he quotes a Canadian government biologist who said: “They are not going extinct or even appear to be affected at present.”

Prof Lomborg points out that over the past decades, the global polar bear population has increased dramatically from about 5,000 members in the 1960s to around 25,000 as a result of the regulation of hunting.

Even if a decline in the bear population has taken place since the 1980s, he says, if we try to help them by cutting greenhouse gases we can at the very best avoid 15 bears dying, with realistic option meaning that it is probably only around 0.06 bears per year.

But he says, if we care for stable populations of polar bears, dealing with the 49 polar bears from the same population around Hudson Bay that get shot each year might be a smarter and more viable strategy.

(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/3309397/Bjorn-Lomborg-Save-polar-bears-by-not-shooting-them.html)

Thus, we must remain critical of popularist notions of climate action and embark on real and material action today!

Executive Secretary with Civil Society Session

During every session, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (in this case Mr Yvo De Boer) will have a session with the civil society on his point of view about the negotiation. Also an opportunity for the civil society and especially the major groups to share or seek clarification on what has happened so far or going to happen.

So for the session here in Barcelona, before the civil society session, the youth (with 350) and TckTckTck movement (under GCCA) decided to hand over a significant instruments to Yvo to remind him of the target we are asking for and how much time we have respectively.

It was a great picture opportunity as shown:

And thanks to Sena for scripting what happened during the session. The first part below is a sum up of what happened. And for those who has time, read further down below for a fuller transcript.

African Union making a stand for Kyoto Negotiations

Sure many have read up about the African walking away from the negotiation here.

This kind of created a whole big hoo-ha all around the negotiation. While many of us thing it is about time that someone has the guts to make a stand, there are some who took the opportunity to say that the Africans are stalling the negotiation. The fact is, they are not.

What they are merely doing is to demand from the Annex 1 countries to keep the promise they had done so in 1997 and being at the end of the spectrum that has not benefited out of anything so far, its no doubt they are doing this.

There is a Chinese saying, “If you force a dog to one corner, it will turn back and bite at you.” I’d say this is pretty much what had happened.

After the statement by the African representative, on behalf of G77 and China, China made a statement saying urgent focus and meaningful response to the Kyoto Protocol agenda is required, especially the numbers. This was again supported in the statements made by Sudan and Egypt representatives.

Bolivia shared that what was happening here is that countries are feeling the frustrations where they firmly believes that clarity of numbers would assist in reducing such emotions that are triggered among the countries.

Interestingly, many countries spoke up but most, if not all, of them were from G77+China. Last I heard, Australia had meant to say something, but it didn’t happen. And neither of the Annex one countries spoke as well.

Well, the conditions from here on is this:

1. 60% of the sessions in Barcelona about the Kyoto Protocol must be committed to talk about clear number targets to achieve, based on the 1997 commitment.

2. No beating around the bush and delay tactics.

If either of the above is breached, the African Union is firm to walk out again. And along with them, solidarity with several nations in other parts of the developing or non-Annex 1 countries.

This pretty much marks an exciting, but short, week of negotiations.

Wilson (From Barcelona, with Love)

A critical look at An Inconvenient Truth

An Inconvenient Truth

Today in my Development of Geographic Thought class in NUS, we had presentations on three different strands of thought namely Political Economy, Social Theory and Nature & Society. These three strands of thought have been significant in the development of geographic thought in Human Geography and are  taught only during the Honours Year. There were 10 groups in all and 3 were set to present on Nature and Society. The reading/article they were supposed to critique as part of the assignment was Timothy Luke’s ‘2008 paper on ‘The politics of true convenience or inconvenient truth: struggles over how to sustain capitalism, democracy, and ecology in the 21st century’ found in Environment and Planning A, Vol.40(8), pp.1811-824.

Shoot Out at Botanical Gardens

Nothing as grisly as the title suggests (although it took place on the morning of Halloween), but continuing from Amira’s update a few posts down, an outdoor shoot it was. Highly successful, I must say.

I’m not going to bore you with more details about it, or about the party itself. So I’d leave you with some photographs from behind-the-scenes – because voyeurism’s always the coolest bit, isn’t it?

10am on a Saturday once again; this time with hot models in various states of undress. Makes getting out of bed alot easier!