You won’t see many posts here until the Ride begins in April. At that point, we will make regular posts to this blog. But it’s almost March and we thought we should give an update. The Ride for Climate project is going incredibly well! We now have presentations planned or in the works from Boston to Minneapolis and will continue working our way west. Several new volunteer coordinators are helping to make this happen. Check the Ride for Climate “events” page to see the latest tour schedule.

The timing couldn’t be better. Many significant events are proving 2007 to be a critical year in efforts to address global warming. The global warming film “An Inconvenient Truth” just won an Oscar for best documentary. A group of businesses (including DuPont, Alcoa, General Electric, and Caterpillar Inc.) and environmental organizations have come together to encourage strong national legislation to address global warming. Read more at http://www.us-cap.org/

A coalition including Yahoo, Wal*Mart, the US Dept. of Energy and others have come together to encourage every American to switch to energy efficient lightbulbs. They point out that changing a single light to an energy efficient compact florescent lightbulb (CFL) will prevent more than 450 pounds of global warming pollution over its lifetime (not to mention save you money). And it only takes about 18 seconds to change a lightbulb. Read more at www.18seconds.org

And, perhaps most significantly, the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released in early February. Their scientific reports are prepared by the world’s leading scientists and subjected to extensive peer review. This report concludes that human influences on global warming are “very likely” (> 90% chance). Read more at http://www.ipcc.ch/

The impacts from global warming look particularly bad for some of the poorest nations and poorest people on the earth. We have a choice to continue business as usual or to find new ways to make sure that our children inherit a planet that allows them to continue to be as prosperous as we have been. Over the next few months, we’ll be talking a lot more about global warming, the science, the impacts and what we can do to make necessary changes. We look forward to that discussion and learning from the many people we will meet along the way.

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