Help Think A World Beyond Climate Change
A conference of up to two and a half thousand top scientists from 80 countries have warned that the world is on the brink of environmental disaster as worst-case IPCC scenarios were being exceeded.
The conference, at the University of Copenhagen, 10-12 March 2009, sought to update climate change knowledge since the 2007 IPCC report. Timely, in view of the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December and because the 2007 report used three years of data analysed up to mid 2006.
Growing Pace Of Climate Change
Climate appears to be happening at an accelerated rate. Environmental tipping points could be reached which would magnify climate change effects and make them much harder to deal with. Irreversible global changes could result.
This conference heard that the overall prognosis on climate change is worse than previous estimates have suggested.
Grave Effects Of Climate Change
- A 4C rise could turn swaths of southern Europe to desert.
- Sea levels will rise twice as fast as official estimates predict.
- Modest warming could unleash a carbon “time bomb” from Arctic soils.
- A failure to cut emissions could render half of the world uninhabitable.
- Rising temperatures could kill off 85% of the Amazon rainforest.
What’s Happening Now
The IPCC 2007 report estimated the most likely global warming rate to be 3% by the end of this century. But British economist Nicholas Stern warned that policymakers now need to consider the consequences of global temperature rises of 6°C or more.
And climatologist Konrad Steffen of the University of Colorado at Boulder estimates that sea levels could rise as much as 1 metre by 2100, according to new analyses of ice loss from Greenland. The top estimate from the IPCC’s 2007 report was a rise of 0.59 metres by the end of the century.
A New Thinking
The Kyoto treaty’s first phase ends in 2012 and a greatly more effective agreement must be reached. Essentially we can no longer talk about preventing global warming. We must plan how to live with the effects of it.
Part of that planning must be about technology and different ways of doing things. Most of all it must be about transformation of thinking about ourselves and our role on Mother Earth. Because the underlying thinking that got us into this mess is clearly redundant in getting us out of it.
The new thinking must be about genuine care for each other and our planet.
New thinking starts with you and me. Cause you and I are intimately connected and all of us are intimately connected to our Planet Earth.
The oxygen you breathe has been breathed by dinosaurs (No, c’mon. Of course I don’t mean certain politicians) and the water you drink is the same water that has passed through the depths of the Earth’s geological structures and has been metabolised by billions of life forms before you.
Every change you can make, affects all of us. Any small caring act goes towards a tipping point of global transformation of consciousness. I can do that. So can you.
I recommend Eckhard Tolle’s book A New Earth and Bradley Nelson’s book The Emotion Code for practical knowledge towards a new way of Being. You can also attend training seminars on The Emotion Code to learn to released “trapped emotions” yourself. What! Yes, read the book. It does make a lot of sense.
Why do I recommend these books? We are facing a new world: new economics, newly caring for the planet and each other, and ways to live through the transitional turmoil. This must start with you and me. These are quite amazingly practical books for these times.
Cognitive Dissonance
Still, a new Gallup Poll showed that more Americans than ever in the past decade believed the seriousness of climate change was exaggerated.
In the face of growing evidence, of a melting North pole and glaciers and rising temperatures this result could be described as cognitive dissonance. Global warming is such an overwhelmingly uncomfortable issue that one way to live with it may be to rationalise it away, rather than make behavioral changes.
It is one choice you could make.
Copenhagen Zero-Emission City
On a bright note the city of Copenhagen has launched a plan for it to be a zero-emission city by 2025. In view of current trends we may only hope many cities will follow in its footsteps – a governments lose valuable time negotion trade-offs and protections for their economies.
Why not aim to be a zero-emission zone all by yourself? Think about it!
