Wash Post - New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures.

Climatologists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculated the record-breaking global average temperature, which now surpasses 1998's record by a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, from readings taken at 7,200 weather stations scattered around the world.

October 18, 2005
Scientist at Work | David Suzuki
'Environmental Conscience' Urges Canadians to Tread Softly
By CORNELIA DEAN
When Prince Charles asked David Suzuki a few years ago about the state of the environment, Dr. Suzuki told him, "We are in a big car heading at a brick wall at 100 miles an hour." The assessment he offered to the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment last month was just as gloomy. "We are going right down the chute," he said.

Dr. Suzuki, a zoologist turned environmental activist, has been sounding this alarm for years - in books, on television and radio, in newspaper columns and in coast-to-coast campaigns in his native Canada. He has "seeped into the minds of virtually every one of the 31 million Canadians," said Joseph R. Foy, campaign director for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, a conservation group. "He is the environmental conscience of the people."

*snip*

His foundation's latest effort, Sustainability Within a Generation, recommends an array of government, business and individual efforts, none of them enormously painful and all of them on a timetable, that would greatly reduce Canadians' collective impact on the natural world.

And even though the marsh he explored as an adolescent is now a shopping mall, and he does not see too many signs of environmental progress, he is hopeful.

The challenge, he says, is "to put the world back together again, to think holistically, in geological time, not corporate time or political time."

This is not an impossible dream, he says in one of his videos, citing the end of the cold war and the abolition of apartheid as seemingly impossible dreams that came to pass and adding, "No one has the right to say what cannot be done."

[ 18 October 2005: Message edited by: Yonge Street Blue ]

[ 18 October 2005: Message edited by: Yonge Street Blue ]