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Thursday, June 4, 2015

From An Editor of the Guardian

I received an informative email from an editor of The Guardian newspaper.

It is a British newspaper, so I wanted to share the message since it was sent to thousands of Guardian readers (not a private email).

Check out today's video following the email.

Dear Dredd,

On Friday, I stepped down as editor of the Guardian. Six months ago, when I announced my decision, I said I had only one regret – that we had not treated climate change with the gravity and impact it deserves. Keep it in the Ground has been our attempt to change that.

When I started 20 years ago, creating such a project would not have been possible. At the time, we were debating whether we should switch to using colour photography in the paper. Now with two-thirds of our readership outside the UK, virtually all our readers can be publishers themselves – while we publish continuously.

Of course, the Guardian is much bigger than any one editor. A rival kindly took me out to lunch soon after I started and reassured me: "If I take a day off, there are six assistant editors who have a completely different view of what my paper should be. If you take the day off, the building itself would produce the Guardian."

In many ways, it is the readers that have produced this campaign. You have signed petitions, written heartfelt letters to the Wellcome Trust and filmed yourself for inspiring videos asking Bill Gates to take a lead on climate change.

However you have contributed, I wanted to write and thank you. Your voices have have brought far more insight, energy and diversity than we could have hoped to achieve on our own. They have been one of the trademarks of Keep it in the Ground.

There are now more than 216,000 of you, from 170 countries around the world. That's quite a movement. The team would like to see your photos, videos and stories about how you continue to campaign against climate change. You can send them in here.

In six months time, leaders from around the world will meet in Paris to negotiate a new global deal on climate change. As we head towards that, we hope your voices will remain strong. In the coming weeks, the campaign team will be in touch about what Keep it in the Ground will look like as we head towards Paris.

But from me, thank you. It has been remarkable.

Alan

A video which supports Alan's thoughts:



2 comments:

  1. Nice.

    (H/T Leslie Graham commenting at Robert Scribbler's)

    http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL063902/abstract

    An increase in the rate of global mean sea level rise since 2010

    [from Geophysical Research Letters]

    Abstract

    The global mean sea level (GMSL) was reported to have dropped 5 mm due to the 2010/2011 La Niña and have recovered in 1 year. With longer observations, it is shown that the GMSL went further up to a total amount of 11.6 mm by the end of 2012, excluding the 3.0 mm/yr background trend. A reconciled sea level budget, based on observations by Argo project, altimeter, and gravity satellites, reveals that the true GMSL rise has been masked by El Niño–Southern Oscillation-related fluctuations and its rate has increased since 2010. After extracting the influence of land water storage, it is shown that the GMSL has been rising at a rate of 4.4 ± 0.5 mm/yr for more than 3 years, due to an increase in the rate of both land ice loss and steric change.

    Tom

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Those Spanish kids can lift a lot of water from oceania, and it can take a while for some of it to find its way back with the help of Mr. Grover Gravity.

      At the level of permanent dynamics, beware of old SLR models which are notoriously and habitually under-estimators.

      They are like old insurance adjusters.

      And remember that GMSL is a mathematical concept generated by the averaging of numbers, not by hands on measurements of the oceans.

      Oceans are higher here and lower there, the highest being on the East Coast between Cape Cod and Cape Hatteras..

      Thanks primarily to the Ice Bank of Greenland and some thermal helpers.

      Delete