Last Updated:
February 28, 2007

GCRIO Program Overview

Library 
Our extensive collection of documents.

Privacy Policy

Archives of the
Global Climate Change Digest
A Guide to Information on Greenhouse Gases and Ozone Depletion
Published July 1988 through June 1999

FROM VOLUME 8, NUMBER 4, APRIL 1995

PROFESSIONAL PUBLICATIONS...
OF GENERAL INTEREST: COMMENTARY

Item #d95apr8

"Reducing Greenhouse Gases," Nature, 374(6520), 300, Mar. 23, 1995. Separate comments from D.A. Lashof and from S.E. Subak on a recent article by Victor and Salt on the climate convention.

Item #d95apr9

"Politics of Climate Change," Nature, 374(6519), 208, Mar. 16, 1995. Bert Bolin, Chair of the IPCC, comments on a recent article by S.A. Boehmer-Christiansen.

Item #d95apr10

"Ten-to-One Against Costing People's Lives for Climate Change," D. Wysham (Inst. Policy Studies, Washington, D.C.), The Ecologist, 24(6), 204-206, Nov.-Dec. 1994.

Estimates of the economic costs of climate change impacts being constructed for the 1995 IPCC assessment are using inappropriate methods to arrive at relative values of human lives in different parts of the world. For instance, the German economist Samuel Fankhauser has valued the life of an inhabitant of an industrial country at $1.5 million, and that of an inhabitant of China or Africa at a tenth that amount. These estimates by Fankhauser and other prominent economists dismayed many NGOs and economists from southern countries meeting in Nairobi last July; the implied "right by income" does not account for the impacts associated with the generation of that income.

Item #d95apr11

"The Blue Planet: An Ambiguous Modern Icon," W. Sachs, ibid., 24(5), 170-175, Sep.-Oct. 1994. An edited version of "Der blaue Planet: Zur Zweideutigkeit einer modernen Ikone," Scheidewege, 1993/94. Translated by T. Nevill.

Photographs of the Earth from space have had an unexpectedly significant yet contradictory influence upon the development of "global consciousness." The image inspires Gaia-based philosophies which view humanity as one strand in the web of nature, but the image also distances humans from the Earth, enabling a new role for the human race-that of observer, manager and planner for the planet.

Item #d95apr12

"Global Climate Dynamics as an Interactive Component of Global Change," K.Y. Kondratyev (Res. Ctr. for Ecol. Safety, Russian Acad. Sci., Korpusnaya St. 18, 197042 St. Petersburg, Russia), H. Grassl, Environ. Conserv., 21(3), 256-257, Autumn 1994.

Briefly reviews major developments in climate change science, concluding that we are still far away from any possibility of understanding fully and simulating adequately global and regional climate change.