inel

Brown Wood Owl strix leptogrammica of Asia
had wise words for those who would listen at yesterday’s falconry display

meanwhile …

Here are three things Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, wants the public to know about climate change:

1. Persuading polluters to pay for the damage they cause elsewhere, in the interest of helping those worst affected, will be a major challenge in coming decades. “Burden sharing is a very complex issue, and frankly I don’t see much sign of it happening yet,” Pachauri says.

2. Technology may ultimately resolve the challenges of a changing climate, but it must be fueled by political will and policy, he said. “You can develop the best technology in the world, but if prices of gasoline and [inefficient] cars remain where they are, people are going to merrily continue running their SUVs and filling up the tank and not bothering about it,” he says.

3. Climate change won’t necessarily create unmanageable disaster if people begin now to plan how to prepare and adapt. “People are resilient. Confronted with [problems] they’ll find ways of managing them, provided they don’t come as a sudden shock.”

– Laurie Goering

My summary for kids:

• Offenders prefer to spend money fighting rather than paying for damage
• Technology solves nothing if people don’t use it
• Take advantage of scientists’ advance advice

The rest of the article on Rajendra Pachauri is in the Chicago Tribune, somewhere ~ though not easy to find without being handed the link below on a plate!

Having grown up in a rural area, my thoughts are in tune with Mr. Pachauri’s with respect to the natural world in terms of its effects on us and our responsibilities towards it.

Warming to the challenge of climate change

Having helped seize the world’s attention on global warming, a UN expert is uniquely placed to map the fight against it

By Laurie Goering
Tribune foreign correspondent

Published April 29, 200

NEW DELHI — Rajendra Pachauri grew up in the foothills of the Himalayas, spending quiet winters contemplating the snowy mountains that loomed near his home. The beauty, he says, changed him.

“It never leaves you,” he said recently, shifting for a moment in a chair in his crowded urban office in New Delhi. “It creates a deep impact on your thinking and your very psyche. When you see the destruction of nature, it bothers you.”

Pachauri, an engineer, scientist and economist, now finds himself in a unique position to try to save what he loves. As chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the top body of climate change scientists in the world, he is overseeing the creation of a series of reports this year that are rapidly moving global warming — and man’s role in causing it — into the realm of accepted reality.

Read more in the Chicago Tribune …

P.S. Mr. Pachauri also wrote a report for India to address climate change issues and today an article from the region says a new expert group will be announced in early May in India, which will be tasked with producing a report for India similar to the Stern Committee report for the United Kingdom. Read more hot off the press from New Delhi here.