Global Warming

A Follow-On International Agreement to the Kyoto Protocol

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[ Global Warming Generally ]

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Texts

• Framework Convention on Climate Change (Rio Treaty) {Rio Signatories and Ratifiers}

• Protocol to the Rio Treaty (Kyoto Protocol) via CNN or the Fletcher School {Kyoto Signatories and Ratifiers}

• Report of the Fourth Conference of the Parties (COP-4) (Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read the COP-4 report.  Acrobat is already installed on many machines.  If it's not installed on your machine, you should be prompted to install it when you try to read the document, or you can go here to download it.)

• National Communications from both Annex I and Non-Annex I Countries (Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read the COP-4 report.  Acrobat is already installed on many machines.  If it's not installed on your machine, you should be prompted to install it when you try to read the document, or you can go here to download it.)

Signatories and Ratifiers for both the Rio and Kyoto texts are per the UN Treaty Service (last checked on 3/17/99).

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Information on Global Warming

Basic

• The World Book has a short, general article about global warming from eminent scientist George M. Woodwell.  {You can read a profile of George M. Woodwell in which he says that he hasn't discovered the Web yet.  The profile also includes the passage:

BIGGEST ENVIRONMENTAL MILESTONE
When we discovered in the mid-1960s that we could take the government to court on major environmental issues -- and succeed. That brought basic ecology to the front pages of the newspapers and into everybody's house and consciousness.

And people say that lawyers are just social parasites .... }

• CNN has a special report on global warming from 1997 entitled "Our Changing Climate".

• Scientific American has an on-line article from May of 1997 entitled "The Coming Climate".

Somewhat More Advanced

• The Atmospheric Research and Information Centre—it's British, so they misspell "center"—has two useful fact sheets that are fairly technical but not impenetrable, one covering greenhouse gases and one covering atmospheric aerosols. (You may think of aerosols as a gas, but they are actually very small solid particles suspended in a gas.)

• The US Global Change Research Information Office has a FAQ about climate change.  (According to the header of the FAQ, it was copied from the United Nations Environment Programme—it's not American, so they misspell "program"—or from the World Meterological Organization, a UN Specialized Agency.)

• A guy who used to be a financial-futures trader who used to be a physicist now makes a really cool historical atlas and, on the side, made these maps on the assumption that the polar ice-caps have melted, leading to a 150-meter rise in sea levels.  (If you want, you can see the Web page about the really cool historical atlas.  Professor Setear owns a copy of this atlas and found out about its maker's past when a call to the Support Line yielded--in strict contrast to calling, say, Microsoft--the person who both ran the company and had programmed the atlas.)

• The Washington Post had a story on March 15, 1999, about pre-historic fluctuations in atmospheric carbon dioxide and about glacial-interglacial transitions in which rises in temperature precede rises in carbon dioxide.  The article included a graphic about carbon flows and a graph showing estimates of atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels.

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Links to Pages with Many Links

Your Tax Dollars at Work

• The State Department's "Hot Topics" List includes "Global Climate Change".  (See the Hot Topics list if you don't believe us..)

• You'll be comforted to NOAA that the Department of Commerce's oceanic and atmospheric specialists have a FAQ on global warming, which they call "[o]ne of the most hotly debated topics on Earth".

• The EPA's global-warming page, apparently marching to a different drummer, used to feature prominently some snow-covered trees--but has recently replaced that picture with some lovely spring flowers.

• NASA, sober scientists that they are, eschew any subliminal verbal or graphical commentary for a graph of surface-temperature trends, although they also have a no-equations Fact Sheet on Global Warming.   (Note: You'll need Adobe Acrobat to read the Fact Sheet.  Acrobat is already installed on many machines.  If it's not installed on your machine, you should be prompted to install it when you try to read the document, or you can go here to download it.)

• The Climate Change Secretariat of the United Nations resides in the generally cool clime of Germany.  (Your tax dollars are increasingly not at work for the UN, actually.   We're about a billion dollars behind in our payments to the UN.   Take a look at the third bullet in the third paragraph in this testimony before Congress by the Acting US Ambassador to the UN.)

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Your Pre-Tax Dollars at Work

• The not-for-profit NRDC has a site that I generally find awkward to navigate, but it does allow you to select "global warming" as a topic from among its "Worldview" topics.

• The not-for-profit Climate Action Network knows that there's no "I" in CAN.

• This site, which appears to be run by an individual, focuses on skepticism about global warming from the scientific and political perspective, as does this page on the site of the pro-profit but not-for-profit collectivity known as the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

• Yahoo has two different big lists of links related to global warming, one here and another here

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  Miscellany from CNN

• Global warming may slow ozone-layer healing - March 29, 1999
• Clinton wants $4 billion to fight global warming - January 26, 1999
• Wind power capacity grew rapidly in 1998 - January 5, 1999
• Some U.S. businesses warming to global emissions treaty - November 9, 1998
• Researchers solve evaporation paradox - December 4, 1998
• West Antarctic ice sheet not in jeopardy - December 1, 1998

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General Information on Individual Nations and Leaders

Textual Information

• Atlapedia

• CIA World Factbook

• Yahoo Countries Page (go to individual country, try the Government link)

Maps and Flags

• Maps by country

• A Glob(e)al Perspective (includes scientific info) (can be slow to load)

• The (Infra-Red) Earth from Space (no more than 30 minutes ago)

• Flags

Leaders (lists, but no statement of positions)

• The "Rulers" site (head of state or government only, typically)

• CIA Political Leaders site (includes cabinets, typically)

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For corrections, comments, and questions, please e-mail John Setear.

This page was last updated on04/14/99.