Scientific Societies Request Climate Summit with President Obama
February 8, 2013. Today the Society for Conservation Biology, Society for Ecological Restoration, American Fisheries Society, The Wildlife Society, American Meteorological Society, and the Ecological Society of America sent a letter to President Obama requesting that he convene a national summit to address climate change. The letter explains how a potential summit could be designed to identify policies and actions that can be taken by each Federal agency as well as by state and local governments to address the causes and effects of climate change. A considerable number of organizations have now called for a climate change summit and the recent draft report of the National Climate Assessment underscores the need for high-level attention to this issue.
In the letter, the six scientific societies provided ideas for topics to be discussed and considered at a potential climate summit including:
- Bolstering emergency response to climate disasters
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions from land-use activities
- Protecting carbon stores and climate refugia
- Reducing greenhouse gas emissions and black soot from industrial sources
- Coordinating climate adaptation responses
- Maintaining ecosystem benefits from public lands
- Deploying renewable energy in a balanced manner that protects biodiversity.
Read the letter HERE.
Photo: On Aug. 26, 2012, arctic sea ice dropped to the smallest extent ever recorded in more than three decades of satellite measurements, breaking the record from September 18, 2007 (the orange line shows the 1979 to 2000 median sea ice extent for that particular day). Every summer, the Arctic sea ice melts down to its “minimum” before colder weather builds the ice cover back up, usually around mid-September. For three additional weeks beyond August 26, 2012 the sea ice continued to melt. On September 16, 2012 sea ice extent dropped to 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles). The 2012 arctic minimum was 760,000 square kilometers (293,000 square miles) below the previous record minimum extent in the satellite record. The 2012 minimum was 18% below 2007 and 49% below the 1979 to 2000 average. More information on the arctic sea ice is available at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.