Glaciers that provide drinking water for hundreds of millions of people are disappearing more rapidly than originally predicted. According to the United Nations, 325 million people are already affected by drought, disease, floods, loss of livestock, decline of fish stock and loss of agricultural productivity. Ninety-eight per cent of the people who will be most affected by rising sea levels live in the world’s poorest countries, those least responsible for increased carbon emissions (created primarily by the burning of fossil fuels).
According to a September, 2009, report by the United Nations Environment Program, climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the most ambitious climate pledges are fulfilled. This is a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Significant global temperature rise is likely even if developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed to date.
With the approach of the December 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark (referred to by some as Hopenhagen), individuals are urged to advocate to national leaders for policies to decrease carbon emissions so that atmospheric carbon dioxide will be at or below 350 parts per million, a figure that the eminent climatologist James Hansen and other scientists say is the maximum compatible with human life on Earth. Currently the number is 389 ppm, with a 2 ppm increase each year. Although Earth will probably do much better without human bungling, many of us would like to leave a healthy planet and the continuation of our species.
Many concur that the current treaty’s plans are far too weak to decrease carbon emissions to an acceptable level. This week, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown warned, “once the damage from unchecked emissions growth is done, no retrospective global agreement, in some future period, can undo that choice.”
Wide-ranging and vocal support is needed so that world leaders realize the public urgency for more dramatic policies, including those that put a high price on carbon emissions while ensuring that poor countries have an opportunity for development. That is why on Saturday, Oct. 24, the International Day of Climate Action, Springfield will host two of the 3,714 actions planned to take place in 162 countries across the planet.
From 10 a.m. to noon, Jubilee Farm will present a Powerpoint on global climate
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