Former Vice President Asks Congress to Move Quickly to Stem Climate Change
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, January 28, 2009; 5:00 PM
Former vice president Al Gore urged lawmakers today to adopt a binding carbon cap and push for a new international climate pact by the end of this year in order to avert catastrophic global warming.
Appearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gore delivered a short slide show that amounted to an update of his Oscar-winning documentary "An Inconvenient Truth," lecturing some of his former colleagues that even if the world halted greenhouse gas emissions now, it could experience a temperature rise of between 2.5 to 7.5 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100.
"This would bring a screeching halt to human civilization and threaten life everywhere on Earth, and this is by the end of this century," Gore said.
The high-tech display included a graphic illustration of how the Arctic's permanent summer ice cover has melted in recent decades, a pulsating image the Nobel Peace Prize winner described as "30 years in less than 30 seconds," and a short video clip of a scientist who ignited the methane gas seeping out of the melting Arctic permafrost.
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Frankly, the science is screaming at us," said the committee's chairman, John Kerry (D-Mass.), who added the United States would not make the mistake of leaving emerging economies out of any future climate agreement.
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more:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2009/01/28/ST2009012802716.html
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