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The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N. sanctioned group of thousands of scientists from all over the world who have been studying climate change for over twenty years, has released its final two reports. The first report, published in February, 2007, concluded that climate change was a fact, and that it was caused by Human activity. This report eliminated any controversy on these two points.
The second report, published April 13, 2007, addressed the present and future impact of climate change on Earth and its inhabitants. This report concluded that significant detrimental effects are being experienced right now, and that things will only get worse. Here are a few excerpts from that report:
Many millions more people are projected to be flooded every year due to sea-level rise...
...climate change related exposures are likely to affect the health status of millions of people.
By 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to an increase of water stress due to climate change.
...species extinction in many areas of tropical Latin America
Disturbances from pests, diseases, and fire are projected to have increasing impacts on forests, with an extended period of high fire risk and large increases in area burned.
In the Polar Regions, the main projected biophysical effects are reductions in thickness and extent of glaciers and ice sheets, and changes in natural ecosystems with detrimental effects on many organisms including migratory birds, mammals and higher predators.
Very large sea-level rises that would result from widespread deglaciation of Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets imply major changes in coastlines and ecosystems, and inundation of low-lying areas, with greatest effects in river deltas. Relocating populations, economic activity, and infrastructure would be costly and challenging.
Adaptation will be necessary to address impacts resulting from the warming which is already unavoidable due to past emissions.
Even the most stringent mitigation efforts cannot avoid further impacts of climate change in the next few decades, which makes adaptation essential, particularly in addressing near-term impacts. Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt.
In other words, we're in trouble right now, and will have to adapt, or perish. But if we don't make serious attempts at mitigating climate change, it will ultimately overcome our ability to adapt, and our future as a species will be dark.
The third and final report by the IPCC, published May 4, 2007, recommends specific actions necessary to mitigate (diminish) climate change.
With current climate change mitigation policies and related sustainable development practices, global greenhouse gas emissions will continue to grow over the next few decades.
In other words, what we are doing right now isn't working.
Changes in lifestyle and behaviour patterns can contribute to climate change mitigation across all sectors. Some corporations, local and regional authorities, NGOs and civil groups are adopting a wide variety of voluntary actions. These voluntary actions may limit greenhouse gas emissions, stimulate innovative policies, and encourage the deployment of new technologies. On their own, they generally have limited impact on the national or regional level emissions.
Although independent actions by individuals and non-governmental organizations make a difference, they will not be enough to save our planet and ourselves. Only when governments step in with mitigation controls and incentives, will we have a chance. The report recommends specific actions that governments can take, including...
Reduction of fossil fuel subsidies, and taxes or carbon charges on fossil fuels.
The report even goes so far as to recognize that Resistance by vested interests may make them difficult to implement.
The vested interests are, of course, the big oil companies (and all their shareholders), who would gladly trash our planetary home to satisfy their short-sighted financial greed. And you can bet they will be shoving some well paid stooges in front of the cameras in the coming days in a last ditch desperate attempt to dispute this inconvenient truth, and keep their huge profits rolling in.
And finally, the report clearly states that we are all in this together, and recommends many options for achieving reductions of global greenhouse gas emissions at the international level through cooperation. Greater cooperative efforts to reduce emissions will help to reduce global costs for achieving a given level of mitigation, and will improve environmental effectiveness.
So there you have it folks. After twenty years of working on the problem, the best scientists in the world have told us what to do - namely to take personal responsibility for our own individual contributions to global warming, and to elect politicians who actually care about the future of our planet and our species (like Al Gore), instead of politicians who are merely puppets of the oil companies (like George Bush). If we ignore these recommendations, our world will become uninhabitable sooner than we think, and we will have only ourselves to blame.
All three IPCC publications are available in their entirety at http://www.ipcc.ch.
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