Group items tagged

"Floods and drought highlight summer of climate truth Published: 31/07/2012 at 01:46 AMNewspaper section: News For years, climate scientists have been warning the world that the heavy use of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) threatens the world with human-induced climate change. The rising atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels, would warm the planet and change rainfall and storm patterns and raise sea levels. Now those changes are hitting in every direction, even as powerful corporate lobbies and media propagandists like Rupert Murdoch try to deny the truth. In recent weeks, the United States has entered its worst drought in modern times. The Midwest and the Plains states, the country's breadbasket, are baking under a massive heat wave, with more than half of the country under a drought emergency and little relief in sight. Halfway around the world, Beijing has been hit by the worst rains on record, with floods killing many people. Japan is similarly facing record-breaking torrential rains. Two of Africa's impoverished drylands _ the Horn of Africa in the East and the Sahel in the West _ have experienced devastating droughts and famines in the past two years: the rains never came, causing many thousands to perish, while millions face life-threatening hunger. Scientists have given a name to our era, the Anthropocene, a term built on ancient Greek roots to mean "the Human-dominated epoch" _ a new period of earth's history in which humanity has become the cause of global-scale environmental change. Humanity affects not only the earth's climate, but also ocean chemistry, the land and marine habitats of millions of species, the quality of air and water, and the cycles of water, nitrogen, phosphorus, and other essential components that underpin life on the planet. For many years, the risk of climate change was widely regarded as something far in the future, a risk perhaps facing our children or their children. That

"Climate change is likely to be a factor in the extreme weather that has hit much of the UK in recent months, the Met Office's chief scientist has said. Dame Julia Slingo said the variable UK climate meant there was "no definitive answer" to what caused the storms. "But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change," she added. "There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.""

"Tackling climate change is a global issue and in the run up to the UN climate change conference in Paris most of the world's countries have put forward proposals to do their bit. In the second of this series Roger Harrabin looks at the solutions to the emissions problem. How can the world meet the need for energy for a growing population without creating dangerous levels of CO2 emissions?"

"Mary Robinson, former Irish president and U.N. high commissioner for human rights. She now heads the Mary Robinson Foundation-Climate Justice, where her efforts include campaigning for the divestment from fossil fuels. "We can no longer invest in companies that are part of the problem of the climate shocks we're suffering from," Robinson says. "To me it's a little bit like the energy behind the anti-apartheid movement when I was a student. We were involved because we saw the injustice of it. There's an injustice in continuing to invest in fossil fuel companies that are part of the problem.""

"Because trees help absorb greenhouse gases, forest preservation plays an important role in controlling climate change. When forests are destroyed or degraded that harms our ability to control climate change. The problem is primarily concentrated in tropical developing nations. "

"Maintaining the planet's stable climate would seem like a good idea. Scientists have now identified what they think are the nine Earth systems that do just that. But their analysis suggests we have already crossed three of the boundaries that keep us a safe distance from dangerous thresholds. Maintaining the planet's stable climat"