Bill Clinton - Climate Change World's #1 Problem

[hatrack]

DAVOS, Switzerland -- Former U.S. President Bill Clinton told corporate chieftains and political bigwigs Saturday that climate change was the world's biggest problem _ followed by global inequality and the "apparently irreconcilable" religious and cultural differences behind terrorism.

Clinton's comments provided something a freewheeling and philosophical finale _ ahead of Sunday's formal wrap-up _ to several days of high-powered discourse on the state of the world, and the mostly admiring audience seemed to hang on his every word.

"First, I worry about climate change," Clinton said in an onstage conversation with the founder of the World Economic Forum. "It's the only thing that I believe has the power to fundamentally end the march of civilization as we know it, and make a lot of the other efforts that we're making irrelevant and impossible."

Clinton called for "a serious global effort to develop a clean energy future" to avoid the onset of another ice age.

EDIT

http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/newyork/ny-bc-ny--worldforum-clinto0128jan28,0,379601.story?coll=ny-region-apnewyork

[bloom]

1. "Stark warning over climate change" - today's BBC

Climate report: The conclusions
Rising concentrations of greenhouse gases may have more serious impacts than previously believed, a major scientific report has said.

The report, published by the UK government, says there is only a small chance of greenhouse gas emissions being kept below "dangerous" levels.

It fears the Greenland ice sheet is likely to melt, leading sea levels to rise by seven metres over 1,000 years.

The poorest countries will be most vulnerable to these effects, it adds.

The report, Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change, collates evidence presented by scientists at a conference hosted by the UK Meteorological Office in February 2005.

The conference set two principal objectives: to ask what level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was too much, and what the options were for avoiding such a level.

In the report's foreword, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair writes that "it is now plain that the emission of greenhouse gases... is causing global warming at a rate that is unsustainable."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4660938.stm


Guardian "interactive"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/flash/0,,1267004,00.html

more - http://www.guardian.co.uk/climatechange/0,,782494,00.html