UN urgently meets with Hollywood, seeks global warming storylines in movies, Ki-Moon cites Lake Chad as Al Gore did and British Court ruled against

UN Ban Ki-Moon cites Lake Chad for global warming (as Al Gore did), but British High Court ruled in 2007 Lake Chad case could not be attributed to global warming:

10/11/2007, UK Times: "The drying of Lake Chad, the judge said, was “far more likely to result from other factors, such as population increase and overgrazing, and regional climate variability”."

• 
  

2/21/11, "Global warming: the United Nations courts Tinseltown," LA Times blogs, Greenspace

"The United Nations has long courted celebrities for its peace-keeping and anti-poverty efforts, from Mia Farrow and Ricky Martin to George Clooney and Angelina Jolie.

• It is a mutually beneficial arrangement.
  

Hollywood stars grasp at gravitas; the U.N. pushes for publicity.

Now the beleaguered multi-national agency, fresh from a disappointing round of climate negotiations in Cancun, wants something more concrete:

• actual story lines in movies,
  

• television and social media drawing attention

to the dangers of global warming.

The push comes at a time when public concern over climate change has plummeted in the polls and Congress has rejected federal legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

“Usually I speak to prime ministers and presidents, but that has its limits” said U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who arrived in Los Angeles on Monday for a high-profile outreach effort.

• “Movie producers, directors, actors — they have global reach.”

Ban will sit down for a conversation with actor Don Cheadle before several hundred entertainment industry invitees at a

• “Global Creative Forum” Tuesday at the Hammer Museum.

The day-long gathering will feature panels titled “The United Nations and Hollywood for a Greener and Better Planet,” “Making Global Warming a HOT Issue” and "Empowering Women and Protecting Children for a Safer World.”

Panelists include such top U.N. brass as the Indian economist Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;

• a Nobel-prize winning group of scientists; and
  

Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who heads the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and chaired the Cancun talks.

The secretary-general will host a lunch and dinner for several hundred writers, directors and producers

• and meet with a handful in private.
  

And he will participate in a "Facebook town hall" with several members of the band Linkin Park, which has used U.N. videos to raise money for Haiti relief efforts.

Ban has made global warming a major priority of the international agency. “The science is clear,” he said in an interview. “Climate change will continue unless drastic measures are taken to stop it.

“I have traveled around the world and seen it for myself from Antarctica to the Brazilian rain forest

• to Lake Chad,
  

once a huge sea that has now dried up and become a small pond.”

Does Ban have in mind something like Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth"? Or the Armageddon-style “The Day After Tomorrow"? He is making no specific recommendations. “I am sure Hollywood can make good stories from this,” he said, adding that the outreach effort “may be a small start.

• We have to educate people
  

who may not have the expertise and the information.”"

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10/11/2007, "British judge finds nine errors in Al Gore's "alarmist and exaggerated" Inconvenient Truth movie," BritainAndAmerica.com

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10/11/2007, "Al Gore's Inconvenient Judgment," UK TimesOnline, Lewis Smith

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10/11/2007, "Gore climate film's 9 'errors'," BBC (mentions 3 of 9 judged errors)

"The nine errors alleged by the judge included:

Mr Gore's assertion that a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet would be caused by melting of ice in either West Antarctica or Greenland "in the near future". The judge said this was "distinctly alarmist" and it was common ground that if Greenland's ice melted it would release this amount of water - "but only after, and over, millennia".

Mr Gore's assertion that the disappearance of snow on Mount Kilimanjaro in East Africa was expressly attributable to global warming - the court heard the scientific consensus was that it cannot be established the snow recession is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change.

Mr Gore's reference to a new scientific study showing that, for the first time, polar bears had actually drowned "swimming long distances - up to 60 miles - to find the ice". The judge said: "The only scientific study that either side before me can find is one which indicates that four polar bears have recently been found drowned because of a storm.""

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10/11/2007, "Judge attacks nine errors in Al Gore's 'alarmist' climate change film," UK Daily Mail. Chart below from Daily Mail

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10/19/07, "35 inconvenient truths: The errors in Al Gore's movie," SPPI blog

"Lake Chad has been dry before: "Over-extraction of water and changing agricultural patterns dried the lake, which was also dry in 8500BC, 5500BC, 1000BC and 100BC. "...
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9/5/2007, "BBC drops climate change special," UK Guardian, John Plunkett

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Reference: 2/21/11, "Green economies for growth, urges UN," BBC

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Many Americans are on food stamps and are starving, the UN says it must have even more of our money. Obama apparently agrees.

via Climate Depot