In a speech to the UN General Assembly, Gordon Brown said that we could not hope for a second chance if we missed this opportunity to protect our planet.
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This, however, required funding. The richest part of the world would have to fund the developing nations’ path towards a low-carbon economy. Otherwise, developing nations would not cooperate. He concluded his speech on a hopeful note:
And as we learn from the experience of turning common purpose into common action in this our shared global society, so we must forge a progressive multilateralism that depends on us finding within ourselves and together the qualities of moral courage and leadership that for our time and generation can make the world new
again—and
for the first time in human history, create a truly global society.
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(Gordon Brown)
On October 24, 2009, 350.org organised the International Day of Climate Action
with 5,200 synchronised demonstrations in 181 countries to influence the delegates at the upcoming COP15.
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It was a joint manifestation between a large number of green NGOs, including Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. Media also helped whip public sentiments into a frenzy.
The Copenhagen Climate Summit
On December 10, 2009, President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize, “for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples.”
The following week, he landed in an exceptionally cold Copenhagen (the so-called “Al Gore effect”) to join the other world leaders at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15).
Prospects were bleak. Several nations stubbornly refused so sign the agreement. The far-reaching demands for emission reductions had to be removed from the text. The Grand Finale, with President Obama as the world’s Climate Saviour,
was not to be.
The summit finally agreed on what came to be called the Copenhagen Accord, with the goal of limiting global mean temperature rise to 2 degrees, and a proposal to create a green climate fund.
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The green NGOs found this compromise a huge disappointment and a death warrant for millions of people.
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Their reaction was an echo of the environmental activists’ after the Stockholm Conference 1972.
The “failure” was, however, not that surprising. Climate negotiations followed the Fabian strategy of gradualism, where smaller subgoals are reached step by step. The new climate regime would not be built in a day. The efforts to reach a binding agreement, complete with binding implementation measures, had to be given enough time for final success.
China, among others, was viewed as an obstacle due to its unwillingness to reduce emissions as radically as the West wished. RBF and Blue Moon Fund (previously W. Alton Jones Foundation) sponsored a dialogue between China and the U.S. (Track II) to bridge earlier misunderstandings and strengthen the climate collaboration. Such collaboration was a priority for RBF. Their
Annual Review 2009
was solely dedicated to this subject and stressed the good relations with China nurtured by the Rockefeller family since the early 1900s.
Richard Chandler, IPCC-author from Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, leading the dialogue, expressed RBFs gradualist strategy:
A global climate policy, if it is to work, must eventually be truly binding and include enforcement mechanisms for all countries. Incremental steps, though short of perfection, will help persuade governments and their citizens that the costs of climate action are manageable and worthwhile. Several steps can be taken to increase confidence and trust both officially and outside official channels. (Richard Chandler, Rockefeller Brothers Fund,
Annual
Review
2009
)
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Climategate – Hide the Decline
Just as the Copenhagen Summit climate conference started, the “Climategate” scandal occurred. Leaked e-mail conversations from a number of leading climate scientists at the
Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia
in Norwich, England (the same institute that had organised the 1975 WMO conference, which paved the way for the carbon dioxide theory as the major force driving climate change).
According to critics, the e-mails appeared to show irregularities such as manipulation of climate data in order to create the so-called “hockey stick” by combining data sets from different sources and trying to “hide the decline” of one of the proxies), and preventing skeptics from being published.
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The incident, which got some media coverage and was highlighted by skeptical science blogs, did not have any major impact on the negotiation process at the Copenhagen Summit. It did, however, raise som eyebrows and concerns both within and outside the scientific community.
Several committees were appointed to investigate the case, which either toned down or dismissed the seeming irregularities as misinterpreted quotes taken out of context. The chairman of one of the inquiries was Baron Oxburgh,
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earlier director of GLOBE International, who was accused by critics of having a vested interest in alternative energy.
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NEW AGE TRANSHUMANISM
The Noosphere Congress
In July 22, 2009, a peculiar conference Bali, Indonesia, called Noosphere Congress, was organised by Foundation for the Law of Time, founded by Dr. José Argüelles, a University of Chicago-educated art teacher and New Age prophet and one of the originators of the Earth Day concept.
The conference declaration of the Noosphere Congress spelled out the challenges the world was currently facing:
Today many voices are speaking about the state of affairs of our planet. The consensus is that we are in a crisis: Climate change, environmental degradation, economic collapse, social disorder, war and the potential for mass destruction. It is a crisis because no one really seems to have a solution, much less does it seem that anyone understands the whole situation and can communicate clearly how and why it got to be this way.
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But this, according to Argüelles, was only part of the plan.
One important factor rarely discussed is that the mega crisis is actually the function of an evolutionary shift—we are about to enter a new geological era called the noosphere. Yes, the noosphere, the planetary sphere of mind.
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Barbara Marx Hubbard, who saw Argüelles as a genius,
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explained with her typical blissful smile that the world was in a state of global emergency, and that this was good news. It would bring about the birth of a new era with “a global awakening of conciousness."
We celebrate the “planetary birthing experience” as we come together as one planetary body embracing the next epoch of human evolution as a Universal Humanity.
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The Global Brain
The noosphere concept, a membrane with humanity's collective thoughts and experiences enveloping the world, originated with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher Edouard Le Roy, and Russian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, in turn inspired by esoteric teachings on spiritual evolution. These ideas were then further developed by philosophy professor Oliver Reiser, Buckminster Fuller, and Peter Russell. Russels book
The Global Brain
(1982) was also made into a film (titled
Awakening Earth
in the UK
)
.
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Again, mankind was portrayed as a cancer on the planet, while at the time on the threshold to the next stage in evolution, connected by electronic networks into a unified global consciousness (the Internet did not yet exist).
Argüelles felt that he had formed a synthesis of the work of these pioneers.
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According to their theory, the world would soon be entering a new geological era. It had been preceded by a period in which man, over the last 200 years, had affected the planet in a negative way, resulting in chaos and destruction. The creation of the technosphere had escalated into a global mega-crisis. But there was now a chance for redemption. According to Argüelles, the cybersphere with its electronic communication network – the Internet – was the road to the noosphere and the future paradise.
This is the prelude to the manifestation of the noosphere, which is dependent on these two factors: technospheric breakdown and a worldwide electronic communications network. How we respond to the global crisis and at the same time utilize and learn from the cybersphere is of the greatest importance. To meet the challenge requires an effort of the human mind and will that is virtually super mental in nature.
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The Mayan Calendar
Argüelles had spent much of his life interpreting the secrets of the Mayan Calendar. He was obsessed with time keeping and had created a new Mayan-inspired calendar for the new galactic era, which he unsuccessfully tried to get adopted globally by sending an ultimatum to the
UN
and the Vatican in 1995.
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The Gregorian calendar, in his opinion, gave an erroneous and artificial concept of time. Instead he proposed a 13-month year with 28-day months and the uniting of all of humanity into a shared galactic consciousness.
Argüelles is probably best known for initiating the synchronised global meditation event Harmonic Convergence on August 16–17, 1987, to mark the countdown to the end of the Mayan Calendar in 2012. According to
Argüelles, t
his was the beginning of an energy shift (the Biosphere–Noosphere Transition) which would bring universal peace. All evils such as war, violence, injustice, and oppression would magically disappear when “the fifth earth” and “the sixth sun” were born on December 21, 2012.
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These ideas had been spreading in New Age circles during the 1990s. Now the magic date was fast approaching and a number of influential spiritually minded people, such as Ervin László, Ashok Gangadean (initiator of World Commission on Global Conciousness and Spirituality), Roger Nelson (Global Conciousness Project), Boris Petrovic (Tesla Academy), Barbara Marx Hubbard (World Future Society), and Russian scientists from Institute for Scientific Research in Cosmic Anthropoecology, had joined his mission.
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Argüelles considered himself a reincarnation of the Mayan King Pacal Votan and assumed the name Volum Votan. On March 3, 2002, he was honoured by nine Indigenous Elders atop the Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán, Mexico as Valum Votan, Closer of the Cycle and bringer of new knowledge. He was awarded a ceremonial staff to be used to wake humanity up to the meaning of 2012, the conclusion of the 5,125-year Great Cycle of the Mayan Calendar.
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Technospirituality
Behind the New Age façade – with a José Argüelles seemingly stuck in a drug-related psychosis from experimenting with LSD in the 1960s and becoming a visionary – one finds a futurist high-tech plan for building a new “Temple of Solomon” comprised of a global satellite system for interconnecting all of mankind, described in Oliver Reiser’s book
Cosmic Humanism
(1975) as Project Prometheus and Krishna.
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Argüelles would spread Reiser's ideas of a World Sensorium (a World Brain) to a New Age audience, with illustrations of a future man, upgraded with brain implants and connected to a central database (the Global Mind). The Internet was only the first phase.
Argüelles’ version of history also included the story of Arcturus and the Arcturian involvement with the development of our solar system, their creation of life on Mars, and the battle between the two kingdoms Atlantis and Elysium.
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He claimed that the Mayans had been in contact with the “Galactic Brotherhood" on Sirius (also referred to by Theosophists
H. P. Blavatsky
and
Alice A. Bailey
as “the Masters from Sirius”).
In his
Intergalactic Bulletin
, Argüelles describes how the Sirius Star Council, which “oversees the development of mankind” and had chosen Earth for their evolutionary experimentation in biochemical engineering, would send a beam to Earth to activate the noosphere and telepathically impress certain codes upon man's new mental body, The Holomind Perceiver.
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The Holomind Perceiver (HMP) is to be telepathically imprinted as an act of self-evolution. Its origin is in the beam codes of the Sirius Star Council in their activation of Earth's noosphere.
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Surreal as these visions might seem, there were strong connections to the ruling élite. On June 26, 2009, the President of the United Nations General Assembly, Miguel d'Escoto Brockmann, officially declared the advent of the noosphere and praised Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.
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