{"id":766,"date":"2019-11-09T17:15:30","date_gmt":"2019-11-09T06:15:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/?p=766"},"modified":"2019-11-09T17:15:50","modified_gmt":"2019-11-09T06:15:50","slug":"call-for-anti-greenhouse-action-26-jan-1989-another-utterly-preposterous-and-failed-prediction-from-30-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/?p=766","title":{"rendered":"Call for anti-greenhouse action. 26 Jan 1989 Another utterly preposterous and failed prediction from 30 years ago."},"content":{"rendered":"

Call for anti-greenhouse action (1989, January 26). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995)<\/i>, p. 7. Retrieved November 9, 2019, from https:\/\/trove.nla.gov.au\/newspaper\/article\/120906718?searchTerm=call%20for%20anti%20greenhouse%20action&searchLimits=#<\/a><\/p>\n

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From JOHN ARDILL,<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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in London. (What are the chances John Ardill or Sir Shridath have done a singe thing to make themselves less comfortable?)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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GOVERNMENTS must yield national sovereignty to multilateral authorities able to enforce laws “across environmentally invisible frontiers” if the greenhouse effect, which threatens the<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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future of whole nations, is to be overcome, the Commonwealth Secretary-General, Sir Shridath<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Ramphal, said on Tuesday.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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A Commonwealth Expert Group set up to look at climate change estimated there was a 90 per cent certainty that the planet would become warmer by at least 1-2 degrees, perhaps much more, and that sea levels would rise by between one and four metres, by the year 2030.<\/div>\n
Global warming and sea level rises would continue for<\/span> decades, perhaps centuries.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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There was a prospect of wide-spread, perhaps catastrophic flooding across large areas of Egypt, India, China, the United States, Britain and Holland, and atolls in the Indian<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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and Pacific oceans.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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“Surveys of some of these areas conducted for<\/span> the Commonwealth Group suggest brutal options.<\/div>\n
One is the large scale abandonment of land; conceivably whole countries,” Sir Shridath said.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Who would house the displaced populations of low lying areas like the Maldives, a chain of 1200 islands barely above sea level? Current attitudes to refugees and immigrants in most countries did not suggest that large population movements were feasible.<\/div>\n
Acceptance of an enhanced risk of large scale drowning was clearly not an option. Building de-<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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fences was simply beyond the means of most poor countries.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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“The cost of doing nothing to prevent climate change is simply unacceptable,” he said. “But the<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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problems of progressing from collective study to collective action<\/span> are immense.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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“The need to curb emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, has prompted many environmentalists to advocate a world of slower economic growth. So long as large-scale poverty and rapid population growth remained, this was no solution.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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He added, “A large and growing number of environmental issues are cross-border problems which simply cannot be solved nationally. Unless there is a regional or global framework for<\/span> handling such issues we will see them escalating dangerously, in some cases to conflict”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Sir Shridath was giving the first of a series of Cambridge lectures on the theme of the Brundtland Report on environment and development. He was a member of the UN commis-<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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sion headed by the Norwegian Premier, Gro Harlem Brundtland, whose 1987 report argued that environmental problems could be tackled successfully only in parallel with economic growth.<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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“Underlining the report’s message of a common future,” he said, “Is the unspoken premise… that we must be ready to nurture tomorrow’s concepts of global governance.”<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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This required a change of habit by some of the major powers, which were undermining embryonic forms of multilateral control.<\/div>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Call for anti-greenhouse action (1989, January 26). The Canberra Times (ACT : 1926 – 1995), p. 7. Retrieved November 9, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[744,742,437,150,143,745,138,743,139,137],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=766"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":768,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/766\/revisions\/768"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=766"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=766"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.realclimaterecords.com.au\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=766"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}