Nobel Peace Prize Awarded for Work to Raise Awareness About Global Climate Change

Sentido.tv :: Climate change is no longer controversial; it has been accepted as scientific fact by a global consensus of researchers and policy makers, including the Bush White House, which resisted acknowledging human activities were a vital contributing factor, until recently. Now the Nobel committee selecting the Peace Prize laureate has raised the issue of warming posing a major international security crisis.

At a September conference he hosted on 'Energy Security and Climate Change', Pres. Bush acknowledged the validity of the IPCC's research, stating "A report issued earlier this year by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded both that global temperatures are rising and that this is caused largely by human activities. When we burn fossil fuels we release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, and the concentration of greenhouse gases has increased substantially."

And now, the political class in the US liberal-conservative hot-bed must grapple with the fact that climate change will be, when its most serious repercussions are felt, an international security issue, pushing millions of refugees across borders in search of basic sustenance, like water and food. And policy-makers in the US must come to terms with their very real role in shaping the global capacity to confront these adverse consequences.

The Sudan is cited as a first-case. It's long civil war, in which the Khartoum-based regime fought against rebellions in the east, south and west of the country, had a lot to do with food and water scarcity, and the need to control natural resources like oil in order to have the wealth to import sufficient amounts of those vital commodities or to build needed irrigation. Khartoum would not allow local control in any part of the country. Further desertification, the "advance of the Sahara", threatens to return Sudan to multi-party civil war.

More global cases involve countries like China, India and Pakistan, three nuclear powers, which could find themselves engaged in a brutal life and death struggle to provide water to their immense populations, as snow-melt from the Himalayan Plateau becomes scarce. The world cannot afford to allow such a war, or its causes, to burst forth.

The IPCC, which shares the award with Mr. Gore, the world's most visible climate campaigner, has issued several reports this year alone putting top-line consensus climate science into the public domain and forcing governments to keep dealing with the issue publicly and diplomatically. [Complete Text]

Project Quipu: Integrated Economic Atlas for the 21st Century

. . . INTRODUCTION

Examining the manner in which financial news is reported in the popular media, THINK proposes to create a system whereby live-update, rss-technology, and financial and editorial expertise, come together to produce a reliable up-to-the-minute resource for evaluating broad economic trends and engagements, without limiting analysis to single-parameter references like GDP or individual stock indices.

It is often thought that in order to organize ideas or to put some kind of order to any analysis, one needs uniformity, a limited number of generic categories and a single system of uncomplicated parameters by which to categorize each subject under review. But the truth is, this uniformity is not and will not be the rule of any part of lived reality.

To emerge from the fog of flawed, incomplete and opportunistically limited economic and financial analysis, means we need to come to grips with the fact that all resources, all functions or 'services', be they natural or the product of human ingenuity, figure somehow in economic values at all levels. There may be no clear way to quantify their contribution or mercantilize them, but they are there, and nothing can be fully understood in economic terms without seeing this. [Complete Text]

Darfur Scene of Ongoing Ethnic Cleansing, Largest UN Peacekeeping Force Deployed

Sentido.tv :: Darfur, beset by years of bloody internecine violence, with the Khartoum-backed janjaweed militia killing civilians in numbers the US government has officially declared to be genocide, is still struggling to find a real beginning for peace. For years, human rights groups have pleaded with the international community to intervene, with or without the support of the Khartoum government. Finally, in August, the UN Security Council ordered the world's largest peacekeeping mission to secure Darfur.

Estimates at the time suggested that at least 200,000 people have been killed in Darfur, with more than 2 million refugees unable to return home, some since 2003. UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has noted the scale of the mission is "unprecedented" and told the Security Council "You are sending a clear and powerful signal of your commitment to improve the lives of the people of the region, and close this tragic chapter in Sudan's history".

After years of staunch opposition and threats, the government in Khartoum said it would "support" a UN force to police Darfur, but only after intense negotiations, the backing of China, a key Sudan ally, and the "toning down" of language attacking Khartoum for involvement in a deliberate campaign of genocide. China's backing allowed for a unanimous vote in favor of the peacekeeping mission.

But cooperating has been spotty, and human rights groups are now calling for a comprehensive probe of the murder of 10 peacekeepers and police, allegedly by the same groups accused of carrying out the slaughter of Darfur civilians. It remains unclear whether the Khartoum government is committed to peace, and the rebel groups have not all signed up to the framework for peace.

The world community is facing in the case of Darfur a grave challenge to the rule of law and the right of people to live free of state-backed killing. Issues of national sovereignty, state policing powers, interventionist diplomacy and regional unity have made resolving the fractious crisis a political hot-button among security council powers, so for now, much depends on the success of the peacekeeping mission in overseeing tenuous peace.

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Sentido.tv, Darfur Humanitarian Crisis Special Report