Al Gore

****************************

****************************

1. For only being at the Conference for 5 hours today, and having to wait outside for the first hour, today was a pretty amazing day. Our day began, like I said, outside in 0° C weather, and of course this was the day I decided to wear a skirt. The line stretched on for a mile, and seemed to consist of all of the lines that we had waited in on this trip combined. But throughout the hour-long wait, we spoke to an extremely interesting woman, Lisa Beal, the director of Environment and Construction Policy at Interstate Natural Gas Association of America. This was her twelfth COP; she had been attending since Kyoto. (Interview Inventory coming soon)

2. When we finally made it through security, Tara and I scurried off to a side event about “renewing the face of the earth,” in which faith-based approaches to climate justice were discussed by a panel representing the World Council of Churches and Caritas Internationalis.

The dialogue’s purpose was to bring ethical principles and voices of faith to the climate change negotiations and examine various faith-based perspectives on policies and action promoting climate justice. An interesting concept that Joy Kennedy, a member of WCC Working Group on Climate Change, brought up was that we must replace our “theology of dominance,” with a “theology of humility” for sustainability, and we must recover who we are as human beings. One man remarked from the audience that we must redefine “rich” to mean a positive relationship with Earth. Also, the president of Caritas Europa, Fr. Erny Gillen, stressed that we share “the human condition” with all other people on this planet, and thus “we are responsible for our brothers and sisters, here and elsewhere, today and tomorrow.”

3. The third and final happening of my day at the Conference was the most thrilling, but since a picture is worth a thousand words…

The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme under the Arctic Council issued a new report synthesizing the latest scientific findings on the Greenland Ice Sheet, “The Greenland Ice Sheet in a Changing Climate”. The report is a preliminary product under the Arctic Council project “Climate Change and the Cryosphere: Snow, Water, Ice and Permafrost in the Arctic” (SWIPA) and has been produced by some of the world’s leading experts and synthesizes peer‐reviewed scientific material up until the spring of 2009. It was presented by the Arctic Council Chair, Danish Minister of Foreign Affairs, Dr. Per Stig Møller, and the lead author, Professor Dorthe Dahl‐ Jensen, at the UNFCCC COP15 side‐event “Melting Snow and Ice, a Call for Action” on December 14, 2009 at the Bella Center. (See more)

Three conclusions:

1. The Greenland Ice Sheet is losing ice mass and the glaciers are discharging more ice. The Jakobshavn Isbræ has retreated 15 kilometres in the past 8 years.

2. Recent projections of global sea level rise, including contributions from the Greenland Ice Sheet and other land‐based ice and thermal expansion of the oceans, indicate that a global sea level rise of around 1 m may occur within this century. Scientists suggest that beyond a certain point the Ice Sheet may enter an ‘irreversible’ destabilization leading to complete melting.

3. Climate change could bring new business opportunities to Greenland, but also hamper traditional subsistence activities.

Stay tuned for more Gore (he`s speaking at the Conference again tomorrow, so maybe we can reschedule our lunch date?)