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Our grandchildren face a future with the awful if not disastrous consequences of climate change. How can we help them to reduce their ecological footprint and adopt more sustainable lifestyles?
Perhaps we have seen Leonardo Di Caprio's film, The 11th Hour, featuring interviews with over 50 of the world's authorities on climate change or Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth or read George Monbiot's Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning, along with many other films, T.V. programs, articles, papers, etc.
If we have, we will no doubt conclude:
1) There are solutions to the Earth's crisis,
2) But we need ACTION immediately.
Almost everyone agrees that it is the lack of political will which is preventing us from taking the necessary measures to combat climate change...
What We Can Do
Our endangered planet needs our help and energy. Our civilization is threatened by global warming from greenhouse gases.
One thing we can do is contact important decision-makers by letter, email, telephone, fax or in person. We can commit ourselves to a minimum of one contact per month in which we require the person we contact to reply - and we continue the dialogue if appropriate.
A record can be kept of letters sent with dates, and a folder of replies received.
The information below applies to Canada only. Please contact your own government for addresses.
M.P.'s in Ottawa can be reached at the House of Commons, Ottawa, ON K1A 0A6
Emails to the P.M.'s office:<pm@pm.gc.ca>
(Letters to our Prime Minister and Members of the House of Commons do not require postage. And if you mark a letter "Private" or "Confidential" it will be more likely to get the decision-maker's attention.)
Excerpts from an editorial in the November Ecologist
www.theecologist.org
A year ago the Stern Review studied three scenarios for a world being driven by climate change:
(1) Business as usual (2) Stabilising CO2 at 450 ppm and (3) Stabilizing it at 500 - 550 ppm .
We were told that at 450 ppm we had a 50 - 50 chance of avoiding the 2 degree temperature rise that would send the polar ice caps into terminal meltdown, dry up the rain forests and raise sea levels enough to drive 200 million people from their homes.
At 500 - 550 ppm we might mitigate some of the worst effects of a changing climate, but not escape them completely. Business as usual would lead to catastrophe (economic collapse akin, in today's money, of the cost of fighting the two world wars and the 1930's stock market collapse combined.
One year on and we are told that stabilising CO2 at 450 ppm is no longer feasible. The forthcoming IPPC's Fourth Report will, we understand, tell us that the level of climate-changing gases in the atmosphere has already edged past that critical level of 450 ppm.
These numbers determine the future of every living thing on the planet. Once we cross the numerical threshold we can't go back. Such news should focus the agenda at the annual UN climate convention and Kyoto Protocol meeting in Bali in December. How do any of us act when the situation is already past a critical tipping point? Decisively would be the only sane answer.
If we refuse to act immediately and without any further fannying about - politically, economically, individually - our only choices will be the kind of painful, terrifying ones about the future of the world's people that none of us want to think about, let alone make. The stark choices we will face will be as black and white as:
Who lives, who dies? Who will be allowed to b e born, and who will not?
Who eats, who starves? Who swims, who sinks? Who drinks, who is thirsty
Who sits in the shade, who burns in the sun? Who has heat in the winter, and who must we leave to freeze to death?
These are the heart-breaking dilemmas we will bequeath to our children and grandchildren unless we take positive, and effective steps to turn things around.
Pat Thomas
Editor
Leonardo Di Caprio's film, "The 11th Hour", Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth" (now available on DVD) and his book and Tim Flannery's The Weathermakers all present the facts. These films are a 'must see' and Tim Flannery's book has received the highest praise from a Nobel Prize winner, the British Prime Minister and eminent ecologists and scientists in various countries.
The world's top climate scientists tell us that in less than a decade, planetary warming may well be so far advanced that nothing will be able to halt a catastrophe in this century - UNLESS we take major steps to reduce carbon emissions before 2016. This is especially true in North America, the source of half the planet's greenhouse gases; thus, Canadian and American leaders need contacting urgently and continuously.
In ten years time, if our grandchildren ask us why their world is falling apart, let's hope we can all say that we did as much as we could to influence our decision-makers to take action.
Remember the 1930's
When fascism was gaining ground in the 1930's, the free world stood by. The consequence of not acting was World War II and the appalling suffering and horrors from 1939 to 1945. However, we learned from that experience that the economy could convert to war production in an amazingly short time.
Remember the Montreal Protocol re the Ozone Layer
Most of us would have died or had cancer today today if the nations of the world had not agreed in 1974 to ban the CFC's which were destroying the ozone layer. It was not until ten years after the agreement was signed that scientists realized how very close we had come to disaster. Yet, agreement was reached in time, demonstrating that it is possible for us to do the same regarding the climate crisis.
The climate crisis brings many other immediate crises and reasons to reduce greenhouse gases. If we have a grandchild in the Toronto area today, he or she will now have a one in four chance of developing asthma. Today we have the technology and the resources to rapidly reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases.
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