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Dear Friends of Wisdom, While some irresponsible and ignorant crackpots (and apologists for unfettered greed) will no doubt continue to try to confuse the issue and maintain a state of denial, there is overwhelming evidence of human culpability for creating the conditions leading to global warming through industrial pollution. While we cannot predict the consequences of our industrial practices, it is evident that we are causing irreversible and unpredictable climate change, and the melting of polar icecaps and glaciers, increasing the intensity of storms and incidents of flooding, eroding coastlines, and threatening both the future of humanity and the environments upon which many other complex animals and plants depend and are an intricate part. We are causing global warming in the sense that the pollutants that have been artificially pumped into the atmosphere by our factories, transport, and power stations have caused an average rise in average climate temperature. It is time that human beings took responsibilty for how we are living in this world and how, due to our ignorance, foolishness, and greed, we are destroying the very complex structures that sustain us and other forms of life. It is time that we began to change many our industrial practices in the light of the knowledge that our actions have consequences. For a start, as consumers of industrial products, we can examine our lifestyles, what kind of world do we wish to live in and leave to our children, what products do we actually need, and whether there are better alternatives. But, beyond confronting the irrationality and shallowness of consumerism, we should publicly make a stand in favour of building sustainable and ecologically balanced industrial and agricultural practices, allowing the Third World to have access to modern technologies and scientific knowledge, and engaging in a rigorous debate about the role of education in developing sustainabity and ecological sensitivity. None of these things are meaningful unless we first admit that we are responsible for the consequences of our actions, and use our intelligence to actually change our practices when they lead to undesirable consequences. Karl Rogers. If any Friends of Wisdom are interested in seeing the reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, they are to be published soon and made available via the IPCC site, as well as many other interesting documents and papers, then vist their site: http://www.ipcc.ch/ --------------------------------- The all-new Yahoo! Mail goes wherever you go - free your email address from your Internet provider.