Introduction

Concerned Citizens against Climate Change is circulating an appeal: Global warming threatens the future of the earth. Act now, before it is too late, which we invite you to sign. We believe that the immediacy of this threat has been grossly underestimated in the international negotiations devoted to it until now. Our appeal is to be sent to the highest political authorities in Asia, the United States, the European Union and the United Nations, because we believe the key to halting the menace to the human future of excessive warming lies in swift and effective political action.

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While global public opinion – jolted by Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth as well as by numerous official reports by climate scientists – is increasingly aware of the menace of climate change, much of the global media and many in the world’s business and political elites are in an acute state of denial about the seriousness of the situation we face. This ostrich-like rejection of a dangerous reality by some of the most powerful people on our planet, has been manifested in the failure of the Bali Conference in December 2007 to agree on any measures to follow and strengthen those proposed a decade ago in the Kyoto protocol, which ends in 2012, and in the weakening, under the pressure of European industrial lobbies, of the European Communities’ multi-decade plan for curbing CO2 emissions, the major cause of the warming trend. The “denial” mentality in the media is also reflected in the failure of those media in the United States to press the Republican and Democratic candidates for their parties’ presidential nomination to discuss what they might do, if elected, to stop global warming from reaching nightmarish proportions.