Virgin's Branson Offers $25 Mln Global Warming Prize
by: Jeremy Lovell 9 February 2007
Airline tycoon Richard Branson announced on Friday a $25 million prize for the first person to come up with a way of scrubbing greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere in the battle to beat global warming.
Flanked by climate campaigners former U.S. Vice President Al Gore and British ex-diplomat Crispin Tickell, Branson said he hoped the prize would spur innovative and creative thought to save mankind from self-destruction.
"Man created the problem and therefore man should solve the problem," he told a news conference to reveal the Virgin Earth Challenge.
"Unless we can devise a way of removing CO2 (carbon dioxide) from the earth's atmosphere we will lose half of all species on earth, all the coral reefs, 100 million people will be displaced, farmlands will become deserts and rain forests wastelands."
Branson rejected suggestions that he, as an airline owner, was being hypocritical in announcing the prize.
"I could ground my airline today, but British Airways would simply take its place," he said, noting that he was investing heavily in cleaner engines and fuels.
Top scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century due to human activities like burning fossil fuels, putting millions at risk from rising sea levels, floods, famines and storms.
Gore, whose campaign film "An Inconvenient Truth" has helped spread the message, said all science showed something was drastically wrong but that Armageddon was not inevitable.
"We are now facing a planetary emergency. The planet has a fever," he said. "This is an initiative to stimulate someone to do something that no one knows how to do. This is right at the cutting edge."
The prize will initially only be open for five years, with ideas assessed by a panel of judges including Branson, Gore and Tickell as well as U.S. climate scientist James Hansen, Briton James Lovelock and Australian environmentalist Tim Flannery.
The winner will have to come up with a way of removing one billion metric tons of carbon gases a year from the atmosphere for 10 years -- with $5 million of the prize being paid at the start and the remaining $20 million at the end.
If no winner is identified after five years the judges can decide to extend the period.
"This is the world's first deliberate attempt at planetary engineering," Flannery said via videolink from Sydney. "We are at the last moment. Once we reach the tipping point it will have been taken out of our hands.
He said 200 metric gigatons of carbon had accumulated in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution, raising concentrations by 100 parts per million. The challenge was to find ways of bringing that back down again.
from : stopglobalwarming.org
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Comments (4) 12.02.2007. 10:56
New Alliance to Save the Planet
Science + Religion = New Alliance to Save the Planet
by: Clayton Sandell and Bill Blakemore 17 January 2007
A coalition of scientists and religious leaders often at fundamental odds over the issue of the planet's age and how it came to be are now pledging to set aside their disagreements over the origin of life in pursuit of a common goal: protecting the world from global warming, pollution, extinctions, and other "reckless human activity."
"We believe that the protection of life on Earth is a profound moral imperative," according to the "call to action" issued in Washington today by 28 scientists and evangelical Christian leaders in a coalition called Saving the Creation.
Notably, the coalition includes the endorsement of the National Association of Evengelicals, which represents 45,000 churches in the United States. Just one year ago, the group refused to endorse the "Evangelical Climate Initiative" signed by 86 religious leaders that called global warming a real and urgent moral problem.
At the time, NAE officials said it was because there was disagreement among the membership about the importance of global warming.
Now, those same officials say things are changing.
"It's important to understand the profound changes ocurring in the evangelical community in just the last year," said Richard Cizik, Vice President of Governmental Affiars for the NAE.
Cizik says that the NAE board unanimously approved the new alliance between science and religion, and that he's also seeing more concern about climate and environmental issues coming from the local church level.
Saying there is "no excuse for further delays," the statement calls on scientific, religious, business and political leaders to "work toward the fundamental change in values, lifestyles, and public policies required to address these worsening problems before it is too late."
Representatives of the group are meeting with members of Congress today and tomorrow, and they have requested a meeting with President Bush.
The new joint statement is a first of its kind on many fronts, say those who signed it. Some had worried the two sides were simply too far apart.
"I think it is fair to say that most of us were not just surprised but astonished by the depth of our shared moreal committment, despite the obvious theological differences that exist," said participant David Gushee, a Christian studies professor at Union University.
Scientists agree.
"The two most powerful social institutions -- science and religion --normally seen as being at odds are now forming an alliance on this," said Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson.
A Lot in Common
Considered the "father of biodiversity studies," Wilson is a scientist and author of "The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth."
His book was designed to reach out to Christians who reject evolutionary science based on the theories of Charles Darwin in favor of more literal interpretations of the Bible.
Wilson asked readers to put differences about the origin of life aside in order to form an alliance to solve the world's problems.
The book was a critical first step that led to a November meeting convened by the Harvard Center for Health and the Global Environment, and the National Association of Evangelicals, which represents 45,000 churches around the United States.
The two sides found they had a lot in common.
"We agree that our home, the Earth, which comes to us as that inexpressibly beautiful and mysterious gift that sustains our very lives, is seriously imperiled by human behavior," said a copy of the statement provided to ABC News.
In the statement, both sides also agreed that they were motivated by concern for the "poorest of the poor, well over a billion people, who have little chance to improve their lives" in devastated environments.
"Unless we care for the vulnerable, we are not representing Jesus well," said Joel Hunter, senior pastor at the Northland Church in Orlando.
Cooperation Is Vital
Setting aside differences is imperative to action, say organizers.
"Great scientists are people of imagination," Cizik said. "So are people of great faith. We dare to imagine a world in which science and religion cooperate, minimizing our differences about how it got started, to reverse its degredation."
Rita Colwell, a professor at the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University who studies infectious diseases, called today's agreement "historic".
"We have made some remarkable discoveries about each other," she said. "The most significant being that we agree that we must act and must do so quickly."
Colwell is joined on the initiative by James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and is considered one of the world's top climate scientists.
"We must keep global warming from taking climate far outside the range that has existed for the past several thousands of years," Hansen said, adding: "It is still possible to avoid dramatic climate change."
Organizers hope the new alliance will be felt "in the pulpit" and will spur others to join the fight to save the planet.
According to the statement, saving the creation will require nothing short of a new moral awakening "clearly articulated in Scripture and supported by science, that we must steward the natural world in order to preserve for ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment."
source from stopglobalwarming.org
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22.01.2007. 02:24
