The Session was Chaired by Geofrey Carr, the Science Editor for The Economist. He specializes since 1995 in topics covering disease, climate science, evolution, genetics, neuroeconomics, neuroscience, and synthetic biology.

The panel included:

Ken Drinkwater of the University of Bergen, Senior Scientist at the Centre for Climate Research. He worked on marine-ecosystems for over 35 years. His recent research has focused on the Barents and Norwegian Seas as part of the ongoing 2007-2008 International Polar Year (IPY);

Grete K. Hovelsrud, Senior Research Fellow, Center for International Climate and Environmental Research, Oslo. She works now on impact, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change developing theoretical and methodological frameworks for multi-factor interdisciplinary studies;

Eystein Jansen, Professor, Dept. of Geology and Director, Bjerkness Centre for Climate Research, University of Bergen works now on defining water mass structures, rates of change, and variability of the climate system with different natural forcings;

Peter Schlosser, Professor, Columbia University, with Earth and Environmental Engineering, Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science , Associate Director and Director of Research, The Earth Institute. His interests are in aqueous geochemistry, physical oceanography, climate and contaminant transport.

Daniel M. White, Director, Institute of Northern Engineering (INE), Civil and Environmental Engineering, U of Alaska at Fairbanks. He works on Climate Change impacts in the Arctic on Drinking Water and Water Resources.

We are posting the above as we were intrigued by the heavy Norwegian involvement which makes sense in the light of Norway’s direct interest in the changes of the Arctic geography, but as we did not get to listen to the discussions we will have to come back after we obtain transcripts.

Further, the first “after lunch” speaker was Mr. Jonas Gahr Store, the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Norway.

The Keynote Speaker of Session 2 was Mr Jan Egeland of Norway, now Director of te Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, and Special Assistant to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, former USG under the Previous UNSG Kofi Annan.

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State of the Planet is a bi-annual event - so next one will be in 2010. By definition these meetings are intended as multi-disciplinary bringing in thinkers to assess the state of natural and human systems with the goal being SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT.

The other three Sessions at this two-day Conference, March 27 and 28, 2008, were:

Session 1: Eradicating Poverty As The poor population Expands;

Session 2: Addressing Areas of Conflict in our Changing World;

Session 3: identifying Energy Solutions for Sustainable Development.

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The Keynote Speaker, after the opening remarks, March 27, 2008, was Former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

Mr. Kofi Annan serves now as President of the Geneva based, UK backed, Global Humanitarian Forum launched on June 30, 2007,

and chairs - The Africa Progress Panel (APP) launched in Berlin on April 24, 2007 including Peter Eigen of Transparency International, Bob Geldorf, Graca Machel, Michel Camdessus, Robert Rubin, and Muhammad Yunus, funded by Bill Gates it will demand accountability on promises made on supporting development and fight poverty in Africa;

also The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA), established by The Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in September 2006 ;

and The Prize Committee of the Mo Ibrahim Foundation - an African initiative that has been established to “Stimulate debate on good governance across sub-Saharan Africa and the world” - the first award was given to former President of Mozambique, Joaquim Chissano, on 22nd October 2007, he was awarded US$5 million over 10 years and US$200,000 annually for life thereafter, plus up to US$200,000 a year for 10 years towards the winner’s public interest activities and good causes, and this is the largest monetary award in existence.

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Session 1 included Mr. Kemal Dervis, the Administrator of UNDP, as its Keynote Speaker.

Session 2, besides Jan Egeland of Norway, who was under UNSG Kofi Annan the Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, appointed in 2003 to succeed Kenzo Oshima of Japan, included from the UN also the USG for Peacekeeping Operations, Jean-Marie Guehenno, of France.

Session 3 included as Keynote Speaker Paula Di Perna, Executive VP, Corporate recruitment and Public Policy, Chicago Climate Exchange.

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After Session 4, we listened to Professor Jeffrey D. Sachs summarize the two days of the conference:

“We saw that the challenges are now global and interconnected. With a world Economy growing at 5%/year - the World Production doubles in 40 years. The stress on the planet is unmanageable and growing. Without global action we will have very large problems” he said.

The scientists are absolutely vital. The mechanisms of change require most ingenuous analysis. Sometimes we encounter problems that we do not understand to the last moment - this was the case of ozone layer depletion. We could not have imagine that the inert refrigerant could do it. Linking the science to what has to happen requires Government leadership and Civil Society involvement. Nobody is in charge because we do not have a global government. Property rights incentives and the markets. Much of what is discussed here does not lend itself to privatization. You cannot privatize water ….

America is based on “You don’t have to like your neighbor,” but these problems involves us and the neighbor.

The Earth Institute found that “we need to create a new Climate Center to include it all - water, Climate Change Science, Engineering, Food Production.” Minister Roberto Rodrigues (Former Brazilian Minister of Agriculture, now Coordinator of the Getulio Vargas Foundation Agrobusiness Center, President of the Superior Agriculture Council of Sao Paulo’s Federation of Industries and Co-Chairman, Interamerican Ethanol Commission) who spoke in Session 3 - spoke on biofuels - human land use - the changes will be highest in the global food production. Rodrigues saw an intensification of the agriculture.

Professor Sachs told the audience that the Earth Institute has initiated a global classroom with 15 campuses simultaneously participating. He expects by 2010, next State of the Planet Conference, that the Conference could also become a global event with participants in many places in the world.

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Also, on Thursday night, March 27, 2008, there was a special “Economist Debate.” Moderator was Vijay Vaitheeswarran, Global Correspondent of the Economist.

The Topic was “The United States and Climate CHange.” The Proposition for the Debate was: “THE UNITED STATES WILL SOLVE THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM.”

The United States is the world’s largest consumer of oil and largest producer of greenhouse gases. Its consumption of resources is unmatched, even in nations with quadruple the population. And despite a broad international consensus about climate change, the US has refused to adopt serious domestic emission’s-control measures or to support international efforts to curb climate change such as the Kyoto Protocol. Will this stance continue when President George Bush leaves office? Will the bipartisan addiction to oil in the Us prove impossible to cure? Will the US continue to be a bigger part of the problem than the solution? Or will technological innovation and entrepreneurship change the dynamics of this issue?

It was announced that Vijay Vaitheeswarran will monitor a debate about leadership on climate change, and will have two teams, of two experts each, that will participate in an Oxford-style debate on the proposition - “The United States Will Solve The Climate Change Problem.”

IN FAVOR of the Proposition:

David Victor, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and Director of the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies (FSI).

Vinod Khosla, formerly a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins and Founder of Sun Microsystems, founded the Khosla Ventures in 2004.

AGAINST the Proposition:

Daniel Esty, Hillhouse Professorof Environmental Law and Policy, Yale Law School and Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. He is also the Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy.

Michael Grubb, Chief Economist at UK Carbon Trust and Senior Research Associate in the Cambridge University Faculty of Economics. He is a leading international researcher on economic, technology and policy aspects of climate change and related energy issues.

The Moderator - Vijay Vaitheeswarran is an MIT-trained engineer who spent ten years covering energy and environment issues for the Economist. he is the author of “Power to the People: How the Coming Energy Revolution Will Transform an Industry, Change our Lives and maybe Even Save the Planet” from Farrar, Straus & Giroux . Also, “Zoom: the Global Race to Fuel thye Car of the Future.”

Again, we are sorry for only posting now the outline of an event. It sounded interesting and we will fill in when further information becomes available.

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Also, for the sake of the interest in the arctic - something we just picked up from www.DotEarth.com -

March 29, 2008, 10:27 pm The New York Times Blog on Climate Science Touched the Arctic from an original angle:
 http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/0…

March 30, 2008, 1:27 am

Polar Cities a Haven in Warming World?

By Andrew C. Revkin

One vision of a “polar city” in an overheated world. (Illustration by Deng Cheng-hong)

Danny Bloom, a freelance writer, translator and editor living in Taiwan, is on a one-man campaign to get people to seriously consider a worst-case prediction of the British chemist and inventor James Lovelock: life in “polar cities” arrayed around the shores of an ice-free Arctic Ocean in a greenhouse-warmed world.

Dr. Lovelock, who in 1972 conceived of Earth’s crust, climate and veneer of life as a unified self-sustaining entity, Gaia, foresees humanity in full pole-bound retreat within a century as areas around the tropics roast — a scenario far outside even the worst-case projections of climate scientists.

After reading a newspaper column in which Dr. Lovelock predicted disastrous warming, Mr. Bloom (a frequent comment poster on Dot Earth these days) teamed up with Deng Cheng-hong, a Taiwanese artist, and set up Web sites showing designs for self-sufficient Arctic communities.

Mr. Bloom told me his intent was to conduct a thought experiment that might prod people out of their comfort zone on climate — which remains, for many, a someday, somewhere issue.

I interviewed Dr. Lovelock two years ago on his dire climate forecast and prescriptions — and also his ultimately optimistic view that humans will muddle through, albeit with a greatly reduced population. There’s a video of my chat with Dr. Lovelock here.

“At six going on eight billion people,” Dr. Lovelock told me, “the idea of any further development is almost obscene. We’ve got to learn how to retreat from the world that we’re in. Planning a good retreat is always a good measure of generalship.”

The retreat, he insists, will be toward the poles.

It’s a dubious scenario, particularly on time scales shorter than centuries. But — as we’ve written extensively in recent years — there is already an intensifying push to develop Arctic resources and test shipping routes that could soon become practical should the floating sea ice in the Arctic routinely vanish in summers.

Sensing the shift, the Coast Guard has proposed establishing its first permanent Arctic presence, a helicopter station in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost town in the United States.

It’s not a stretch to think of Barrow as a hub for expanding commercial fishing and trade through the Bering Strait.

The strategic significance of an opening Arctic recently made the pages of Foreign Affairs magazine, in an article by one of my longtime sources on this issue, Scott Borgerson, a former Coast Guard officer who is now a scholar at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“It is no longer a matter of if, but when, the Arctic Ocean will open to regular marine transportation and exploration of its lucrative natural-resource deposits,” he wrote.

So even if humanity isn’t driven to Arctic shores by climate calamity at lower latitudes, it’s a sure bet that the far north will be an ever busier place. Urban planners, get out your mukluks.

In the meantime, scientists, marathon runners, and others are already making the North Pole a busy place.