Earth Protect Blog

For nearly any major disaster—natural, economic, or military—there was a moment when tragedy could have been prevented. In just the last decade, experts warned that a subprime mortgage bubble could lead to financial collapse and that a hurricane could devastate New Orleans. But our leaders failed to head off disaster, and the public knew little until it was too late.

Now we face the largest potential Katrina the world has ever seen, an imminent catastrophe we refer to blandly as “climate change.” Neither your mayor, nor your senator, nor certainly, your president has declared a climate emergency. But in the time since you may have watched An Inconvenient Truth, global emissions have worsened, and the scientific predictions have become much more frightening.

 The carbon dioxide that we have already put into the atmosphere makes it a near certainty that our oceans will become steadily more acidic, eventually destroying coral reefs and sea life. Glaciers will continue to melt year by year, eventually threatening the water supply of as much as 25 percent of the human population. Sea levels are already rising, and will continue to rise for hundreds of years.

Bangladeshi villagers look for safe refuge after Cyclone Aila floods villages in the low-lying coastal southwest.

Photo by Jonathan Munshi.

In many parts of the world, the climate emergency has already arrived. An estimated 26 million people have already been displaced by the increases in hurricanes, floods, desertification, and drought brought on by climate change. In the North Atlantic, Category 5 hurricanes, the most destructive kind, occur three to four times more often than they did a decade ago.

While no single weather event can be tied directly to global warming, droughts, dust storms, and wildfires are becoming more common worldwide, and climate models predict that trend will accelerate. Southern California’s worst wildfire in 30 years scorched 20,000 acres last spring [1]. And in September, Sydney, Australia, choked on its own version of the Dust Bowl: More than 5,000 tons of orange dirt swirled around the city during one of the region’s worst droughts.

We’re no longer talking about future generations; it’s about us.

Why haven’t our leaders responded? They have been relying on old, conservative estimates of global warming effects. The 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections used baseline scenarios from the 1990s, when scientists and government leaders assumed that by now, popular and political support would have led us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That means politicians and the people they represent have been looking at optimistic projections based on improvements that didn’t happen.

In fact, global fossil-fuel and industrial carbon emissions have grown by 3.5 percent a year since 2000, faster than the worst-case scenario predicted by the Nobel Prize-winning IPCC. Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are now at their highest levels in the last 15 million years, since before humans walked the earth.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/climate-action/climate-action-what-will-it-take-to-avert-disastrous-climate-change