Imagine a world where poverty is history! The End of Poverty meetup Group Mission Statement; "To ensure that ours is the last generation to know poverty." On September 6 the year 2000 an unprecedented attendance of all the heads of state and world leaders got together at the U.N. to make a millenium declaration to eradicate world hunger, extreme poverty halved by the year 2015. "The End Of Poverty" is a book written by economist Jeffrey Sachs (voted amongst the top 100 most important people on the planet today)of the Earth Institute at Columbia university.(Bono wrote the foward to this book). Which spells out an economic plan to end poverty by the year 2025. Currently five countries have fulfilled their commitment. Seven more have created a timeline. We are not one of them. Bono said "In 1963 president Kennedy talked about putting a man on the moon. It seemed an impossibility then, it was not. THIS IS OUR GENERATIONS MAN ON THE MOON!" We do not want your money just your signature, your voice. We need an army to hold our government accountable to keep the commitment they made at the U.N. If we stand united we have the power to remind our government of their commitment and hold them accountable. For the record there is enough money in the sate and national GNP for education,saving lives...! Every five seconds a child starves to death! 15,000,000 million will die every year of extreme poverty related causes. And all we have to do to change the paradigm is stand united! Again your signature is what we need. This is an online petition, and a plea to sign up. If you like you can participate by giving us your input on our message boards, and or attend meetings. I would be proud to say that MALIBU is a city that stands united against extreme poverty, it's a start. Imagine an End Of Poverty MEETUP GROUP IN EVERY CITY IN THE COUNTRY! You can start one in your home town! Why did I start this meetup group? Becauase after reading Jeff Sachs book "End Of Poverty" I was inspired. It's my belief that we have a window of opportunity,a tipping point right now to turn things around. Those poverty related causes of death are very real. They are not going away. With global warming this could snowball into a much bigger problem, what if the window closes? Then someday our ancestors will say "and all they had to do was sign a petition?" Objective: to help realize the millennium promise goals and raise awareness of these issues and remedies as suggested in Jeffrey Sachs book "End Of Poverty" Suggestion: Instead of attempting a perhaps overwhelming task of signing up over 50% of the entire country: Think global act local: suggestion is: Create a referendum in Malibu that can be an example and can be duplicated throughout the state and the country. There is lots more but please join us! Much love and light ! Diana Nicholson

"I am rebelling against the idea that the world is the way the world is, and there's not a damned thing I can do about it." Bono http://www.millenniumpromise.org/site/PageServer?pagename=home http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/documents/JDSEconomistMay202004.pdf "We wish things were different. But wishfull thinking is not only unhelpful here: it's dangerous." Bono in the book "End Of Poverty" by Jeffrey Sachs." From The One Blog Live Post from Nairobi, Kenya January 22, 2007 Launched yesterday with a rousing speech by Desmond Tutu, the World Social Forum here in Nairobi, Kenya, was in full, colorful swing today. I wish you were all here with me and could experience first hand this incredible display of the depth and diversity of the global poverty movement. Though with a billion dollars of poverty assistance hanging in the balance in the U.S., I am glad you are there to continue raising your voices. I'll do my best to convey some of the sense of the activities with regular updates here on the ONE Blog. Today, I helped to introduce a forum on ONE partner campaigns in Africa as part of the Global Call to Action Against Poverty. I was blown away as Sarah, the campaign coordinator in Nigeria, talked about how in just two years they have built a coalition of over 700 Nigerian organizations. Even more importantly, their mobilization has already had enormous victories, including the establishment an official Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) office in the Nigerian government. They're certainly not letting down, however. The Nigerian elections are slated to take place in April and they refuse to miss this important opportunity to hold their leaders accountable. They have collected the platforms of all 15 national parties and are rating them and mobilizing their supporter base to vote based on how their plans to fight poverty and corruption. In Malawi, their efforts to establish MDG clubs in schools and churches paid off when 1.5 Malawians took park in the Global Day of Action on October 17th. As a result of their mobilizations, their government agreed to one of their core demands and established a policy against gender-based violence. All over the world people are rising up to hold their leaders accountable to the promises they have made to end extreme poverty, but while I was truly struck by the historic achievements of global poverty movements across Africa, their honest discussion of the challenges they are facing is a stark reminder of how much work there is left to do. Deo, from the Ugandan campaign, talked about how lack of basic infrastructure (roads, cars, electricity, computers, etc.) and the increasing crack downs on civil society activity are making it extremely difficult for them to organize. Not to mention the hard fact that Africa and global leaders have a long way to go if we are to actually achieve the Millennium Development Goals by 2015. But we are indeed just getting started and it was an encouraging reminder when the session closed with an announcement that tomorrow we will launch this year's dates for global mobilization dates around the G8 Summit and the October 17th Day of Action Against Poverty. There is much to do before tomorrow to prepare, so for now, I wish you all good night from Nairobi.

NASA Study Finds World Warmth Edging Ancient Levels Sep. 25, 2006 A new study by NASA scientists finds that the world's temperature is reaching a level that has not been seen in thousands of years. Because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels seen in the last 12,000 years. This color-coded map shows average temperatures from 2001-2005 compared to a base period of temperatures from 1951-1980. Dark red indicates the greatest warming and purple indicates the greatest cooling. Credit: NASA "In 39 years, I have never written these words in a movie review, but here they are: You owe it to yourself to see this film. If you do not, and you have grandchildren, you should explain to them why you decided not to."—Roger Ebert The study, led by James Hansen of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, N.Y., along with scientists from other organizations concludes that, because of a rapid warming trend over the past 30 years, the Earth is now reaching and passing through the warmest levels in the current interglacial period, which has lasted nearly 12,000 years. An "interglacial period" is a time in the Earth's history when the area of Earth covered by glaciers was similar or smaller than at the present time. Recent warming is forcing species of plants and animals to move toward the north and south poles. The study used temperatures around the world taken during the last century. Scientists concluded that these data showed the Earth has been warming at the remarkably rapid rate of approximately 0.36° Fahrenheit (0.2° Celsius) per decade for the past 30 years. "This evidence implies that we are getting close to dangerous levels of human-made pollution," said Hansen. In recent decades, human-made greenhouse gases have become the largest climate change factor. Greenhouse gases trap heat in the Earth's atmosphere and warm the surface. Some greenhouse gases, which include water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone, occur naturally, while others are due to human activities. The study notes that the world's warming is greatest at high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, and it is larger over land than over ocean areas. The enhanced warming at high latitudes is attributed to effects of ice and snow. As the Earth warms, snow and ice melt, uncovering darker surfaces that absorb more sunlight and increase warming, a process called a positive feedback. Warming is less over ocean than over land because of the great heat capacity of the deep-mixing ocean, which causes warming to occur more slowly there. Hansen and his colleagues in New York collaborated with David Lea and Martin Medina-Elizade of UCSB to obtain comparisons of recent temperatures with the history of the Earth over the past million years. The California researchers obtained a record of tropical ocean surface temperatures from the magnesium content in the shells of microscopic sea surface animals, as recorded in ocean sediments. Data from this study reveal that the Earth has been warming approximately 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 Fahrenheit) per decade for the past 30 years. This rapid warming has brought global temperature to within about one degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) of the maximum estimated temperature during the past million years. Credit: NASA One of the findings from this collaboration is that the Western Equatorial Pacific and Indian Oceans are now as warm as, or warmer than, at any prior time in the Holocene. The Holocene is the relatively warm period that has existed for almost 12,000 years, since the end of the last major ice age. The Western Pacific and Indian Oceans are important because, as these researchers show, temperature change there is indicative of global temperature change. Therefore, by inference, the world as a whole is now as warm as, or warmer than, at any time in the Holocene. According to Lea, "The Western Pacific is important for another reason, too: it is a major source of heat for the world's oceans and for the global atmosphere." In contrast to the Western Pacific, the researchers find that the Eastern Pacific Ocean has not shown an equal magnitude of warming. They explain the lesser warming in the East Pacific Ocean, near South America, as being due to the fact this region is kept cool by upwelling, rising of deeper colder water to shallower depths. The deep ocean layers have not yet been affected much by human-made warming. Hansen and his colleagues suggest that the increased temperature difference between the Western and Eastern Pacific may boost the likelihood of strong El Ninos, such as those of 1983 and 1998. An El Nino is an event that typically occurs every several years when the warm surface waters in the West Pacific slosh eastward toward South America, in the process altering weather patterns around the world. The most important result found by these researchers is that the warming in recent decades has brought global temperature to a level within about one degree Celsius (1.8°F) of the maximum temperature of the past million years. According to Hansen, "That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable. During the warmest interglacial periods the Earth was reasonably similar to today. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 meters (80 feet) higher than today." The "greenhouse effect" is the warming of climate that results when the atmosphere traps heat radiating from Earth toward space. Certain gases in the atmosphere resemble glass in a greenhouse, allowing sunlight to pass into the "greenhouse," but blocking Earth's heat from escaping into space. The gases that contribute to the greenhouse effect include water vapor, carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxides, and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Credit: U.S. EPA Global warming is already beginning to have noticeable effects in nature. Plants and animals can survive only within certain climatic zones, so with the warming of recent decades many of them are beginning to migrate poleward. A study that appeared in Nature Magazine in 2003 found that 1700 plant, animal and insect species moved poleward at an average rate of 6 kilometers (about 4 miles) per decade in the last half of the 20th century. That migration rate is not fast enough to keep up with the current rate of movement of a given temperature zone, which has reached about 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) per decade in the period 1975 to 2005. "Rapid movement of climatic zones is going to be another stress on wildlife," according to Hansen. "It adds to the stress of habitat loss due to human developments. If we do not slow down the rate of global warming, many species are likely to become extinct. In effect we are pushing them off the planet." http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20060925/ Sincerely, Diana Nicholson "End Poverty Malibu Meetup"