News Forum Archives: February 2004
Taming the automobile in Montreal’s core
City cordons off 10 downtown blocks in symbolic attempt to combat pollution
ByIngrid Peritz
Tuesday, Sep. 23, 2003
MONTREAL—Montreal loves a street party and finds almost any excuse to hold one. Streets are routinely shut to traffic for jazz concerts and antiwar protests, for Santa Claus parades, Grey Cup parades and parades of glistening Ferraris.
But yesterday, as summer closed with a last gasp of sunshine, the city decided to hold one of its most audacious street parties of the year: a downtown celebration to ban cars.
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The Pentagon’s Weather Nightmare
The climate could change radically, and fast. That would be the mother of all national security issues.
Monday, January 26, 2004
By David Stipp
FORTUNE
Global warming may be bad news for future generations, but let’s face it, most of us spend as little time worrying about it as we did about al Qaeda before 9/11. Like the terrorists, though, the seemingly remote climate risk may hit home sooner and harder than we ever imagined. In fact, the prospect has become so real that the Pentagon’s strategic planners are grappling with it.
The threat that has riveted their attention is this: Global warming, rather than causing gradual, centuries-spanning change, may be pushing the climate to a tipping point. Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world’s climate can lurch from one state to another in less than a decadelike a canoe that’s gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists don’t know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future. If it does, the need to rapidly adapt may overwhelm many societiesthereby upsetting the geopolitical balance of power.
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