I thought it would be useful to borrow the Climate Council’s words and share them with you.
Taking action to address climate change is easier when you know and understand what information is out there from credible sources. One of those sources is this blog site. I have been researching the climate file for more than 12 years and a search request using words and phrases such as “climate change,” “global warming,” “carbon emissions,” “carbon pricing,” “greenhouse gas emissions” and “IPCC” will get you a treasure trove of reading and study material. Try it with the first phrase “climate change” and you’ll find over 1,020 articles. As you read them, don’t ignore the links to source documents from which the information comes.
Other great sources for information on climate change include NASA, NOAA, the American EPA now that Trump is no longer in charge, the United Nations and many university sites around the world
Contacting municipal, county, state, provincial, and federal representatives to voice your concerns about climate change and to ask for action by these various levels of government will convey to them that you and others are serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate the climate crisis. The more people who do this, the higher the profile for this issue. If you need help drafting a letter, let me know and I can supply a number of templates.
In the current pandemic environment, getting together to protest the lack of action by leaders in government is not safe. But using the powerful tools of the online world is an acceptable alternative. Politicians pay attention to social media whether it be Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, or other applications. So share what you learn from legitimate, science-based sources. And share what you discover about net-zero climate solutions by spreading the word as widely as possible.
When talking with friends and family, don’t be shy about the subject of climate change, impacts, and solutions. As an informed person, the more people you engage in this discussion, the more valid knowledge you spread. So use your newfound climate knowledge to chat about where we are, and where we have to go to fight the climate crisis.
Australia has its citizen-based Climate Council. What do you have in your country that is similar? In Canada, we have the Citizens’ Climate Lobby. Around the planet, you can find 591 similar chapters of this growing grassroots citizens’ advocacy organization focused on national policies to address climate change. United States chapters are organizing to promote the passage of the Energy Innovation and Carbon Dividend Act through Congress, aimed at pricing carbon emissions to help achieve net-zero by 2050.
]]>I’m sure I’ve left out a few. For example, I didn’t mention the United States where growing opposition to Donald Trump’s presidency is bringing out protestors regularly.
Nor have I mentioned the youth climate crisis strikes initiated by Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who has galvanized teenagers and their supporters around the world to hold governments and industry polluters to account by quitting the classroom every Friday in many countries around the globe.
So it would seem to protest the government these days is becoming pretty commonplace. Why are they on the rise? Because of:
Again, I am sure I have left numerous other reasons out. But it is increasingly clear that many in our human society feel powerless in the face of governments that appear to not be listening, that fail to act on important issues and that continue to support the existing status quo.
In democracies where we can exercise the ballot every two, four or five years, for many it is deemed not soon enough when governments are perceived to have stopped listening. Social media provides one tool for a populace to express dissenting positions from the government of the day. But as a method of impressing upon government the need for change, social media seems to be doing little with one exception. Where social media has succeeded is as the communication and organizational medium for street protests. Through social media, protests involving crowds of 10 can quickly become tens of thousands. A good example is the influence of social media on North Africa and the Middle East during the Arab Spring of 2010 when the protest of one person who through self-immolation in Tunisia led to the overthrow of dictators right across North Africa and the Middle East.
The protests we are seeing today have at their root one commonality, shared angst and a sense of powerlessness in the face of government overreach. On the street, the solidarity in numbers diminishes fear of government power while the Internet becomes the means by which movements of protest are sustained and popularized.
In a recent article in The Economist, it states, “Probably not since the wave of ‘people power’ movements swept Asian and east European countries in the late 1980s and early 1990s has the world experienced such a simultaneous outpouring of popular anger on the streets.” The difference today, however, is how many of the current protests are specific to parochial grievances whether it is a sudden rise in gasoline and diesel taxes, or an attempt to create extradition processes that diminish the rights of local citizens to remain subject to their national rule of law.
The vast majority of those on the streets in the past, just as it is today are young. But lately protesting has become a multi-generational thing from pro and anti Brexiters from every age group in the United Kingdom, to teachers and parents joining students in climate strike marches and demonstrations.
What we are seeing today is but a harbinger of what is likely to come over the next ten years and beyond. Why? Because of one overwhelming issue, the climate crisis and the upheavals that scientists are predicting. From freshwater scarcity to food security, extreme weather events, rising sea levels, drought, and searing heat, the climate crisis if it has not already, will bring more people into the streets. And what will make these protests different from those that have preceded them is the unifying nature of the common issue. All humanity will be impacted. People of all ages, from different economic and social circumstances, of every religious persuasion and national identity, will be out on the street demanding from their governments, global cooperation, and global solutions.
If you were in Venice this week you came face-to-face with the world of the near future.
Venice has seen sea levels rise 10 centimeters (almost 4 inches) in the last 50 years. It doesn’t seem much but when you add a wind blowing from the south and high tides, you get what this city’s mayor called “climate change in action” and “a wound that will leave a permanent mark” on the city.
Water levels on two consecutive days rose 1.8 and 1.5 meters (approximately 6 and 5 feet). A meeting of the Veneto regional council had just concluded without it passing funding to tackle climate change when the building where it was sitting became inundated.
A bookstore near St. Mark’s Square, aptly named Aqua Alta (meaning high water in Italian) found itself underwater in almost two meters of water.
The city, which was founded in the year 697 CE (AD) will likely completely flood in the next 50 years without technological intervention in the form of a massive investment in protective dikes and seawall gates. Meanwhile the current attempt to do this, known as Project Moses, and designed precisely to protect the city, remains well behind schedule, over budget, fraught with corruption from politicians and contractors, and all of this still on the go sixteen years after the project was approved.
The unhinged political leadership in Australia continues to ignore the climate crisis.
With bushfires threatening the state of New South Wales and the country’s largest city, Sydney, the country’s Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack, described the conflagrations as old news just happening a bit earlier than normal this year.
Not to be outdone, the Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, is trying to outlaw climate protests describing those who go out on the street as “indulgent” and “radicals.” Morrison, who is big on coal, argues that China is the problem and that they need to do more. Meanwhile the country is opening a new coal mine with China the preferred customer for what is produced.
But getting back to McCormack’s comments on a radio talk show this week, he stated: “we know it’s getting drier, we know it’s getting…very warm.” Duh! But what that has to do with global warming….apparently nothing.
Too bad Greta Thunberg can’t get Down Under to shame these fellows to the core of their being.
If you think that climate change is an existential crisis and you live in one of the 175 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, then I hate to tell you, almost every signatory is failing to achieve any of the interim milestones agreed to back then.
The flaw of the Paris agreement was it was non-binding. Countries were left to set their own targets and they did. But according to the Climate Action Tracker, an organization that assesses progress related to the Agreement targets, almost none have succeeded in meeting interim milestones. Climate Action Tracker forecasts we are headed for more than twice the 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) rise in atmospheric mean temperatures. That’s global mean temperatures rising by 4 Celsius (7.2 Fahrenheit). And at the poles expect those numbers to hit double digits.
To make matters worse, greenhouse gas emissions in 2018 rose by 2.7%.
So who among the nations of the world have been on target to meet their Paris pledges?
Morocco, and Gambia on target for a 1.5 Celsius rise, and Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, the Philippines, and believe it or not India for a 2.0 Celsius rise, even though the latter this week has witnessed unprecedented smog enveloping the capital Delhi; the cause, vehicle traffic, cooking fires, and neighbouring farms burning their fields after harvest.
Having seen the previous headline it shouldn’t be a surprise that if a child was born today it would experience a diminished quality of life from that of its parents. Besides extreme weather events, displacement from coastal cities from sea-level rise and sunshine flooding, children will experience respiratory problems from extreme atmospheric heat and pollution, increases in asthma, and exposure to tropical insect-borne diseases in temperate latitudes.
The Lancet states that “the life of every child born today will be profoundly affected by climate change, with populations around the world increasingly facing extremes of weather, food and water insecurity, changing patterns of infectious disease, and a less certain future.”
More frequent heatwaves will have a profound effect on newborns.
One of the authors of the study states:
“We roughly know what [it] looks like from a climate perspective…We have no idea what it looks like from a public health perspective, but we know it is catastrophic. We know it has the potential to undermine the last 50 years of gains in public health and overwhelm the systems we rely on.”
The study looks at 41 climate change indicators and notes that the threat to children will start in the womb and accompany them all the way to adulthood.
They are predicting:
And you thought parents are vigilant about children today. In the decades that follow expect hyper-vigilance in a world where the climate crisis will be in full swing.
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