Sunday, August 9, 2009

Digital Insurgency

This morning I was reading the New York Times coverage of the new position being taken by the Department of Defense that climate change is a threat to US Security. This reflects the evolving change in the US position on this issue, which I discussed earlier with respect to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and its efforts to negotiate world consensus on climate action. This collaborative process has been attacked by the Cato Institute, among others, who attempt to deny the impacts of carbon emissions on climate.

Checked in at the UN Portal for IPCC, and found that it's been hacked, supposedly from an individual in Brazil, with some message about "those who do nothing" as a quote from Einstein. Well, an attack is an attack, this is direct and illegal, even if it's draped in sentiments about slow-moving global political processes. Until the site top page is corrected, information on the IPCC is still available here, and the other subpages on the site are still functional.

In the meantime, as the NYT goes on to point out, the need for a real climate bill is becoming far more urgent as science data comes in showing the progressive acceleration of change.