Climate change is the defining human development challenge of the 21st Century. Failure to respond to that challenge will stall and then reverse international efforts to reduce poverty. The poorest countries and most vulnerable citizens will suffer the earliest and most damaging setbacks, even though they have contributed least to the problem. Looking to the future, no country—however wealthy or powerful—will be immune to the impact of global warming.
Climate change is not just a future scenario. Increased exposure to droughts, floods and storms is already destroying opportunity and reinforcing inequality. Meanwhile, there is now overwhelming scientific evidence that the world is moving towards the point at which irreversible ecological catastrophe becomes unavoidable. Business-as-usual climate change points in a clear direction: unprecedented reversal in human development in our lifetime, and acute risks for our children and their grandchildren.
In a divided but ecologically interdependent world, it challenges all people to reflect upon how we manage the environment of the one thing that we share in common: planet Earth. It challenges us to reflect on social justice and human rights across countries and generations. It challenges political leaders and people in rich nations to acknowledge their historic responsibility for the problem, and to initiate deep and early cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. Above all, it challenges the entire human community to undertake prompt and strong collective action based on shared values and a shared vision.
The IPCC2000 report, based on the work of some 2,500 scientists in more than 130 countries, concluded that humans have caused all or most of the current planetary warming. Human-caused global warming is often called anthropogenic climate change.
Industrialization, deforestation, and pollution have greatly increased atmospheric concentrations of water vapor, carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, all greenhouse gases that help trap heat near Earth’s surface. Humans are pouring carbon dioxide into the atmosphere much faster than can be absorbed by plants and oceans.
It is expected that environmentally friendly methods of electricity generation will help to lower the CO2 being produced during power generation. Some of this methods include solar and wind energy power generators.
THE SUN IS NOT TO BLAME
It’s global warming, it’s climate change, it’s our fault, no it’s volcanoes… wait, actually it’s the sun! Or maybe not.
The arguments about climate change have been raging for years. Some say that the warming is a natural occurrence, some blame humanity and then others simply say ‘what warming?’ One idea now at least can be put to rest – the sun is not to blame.
It has been very popular to cite that the planet goes through many warming and cooling periods as a direct result of changes in solar activity. It sounds fair enough, if the sun produces more heat we get warmer. And this was very much the idea put forward by Britain’s Channel 4 in their documentary called ‘The great global warming swindle.’ There is one main problem with blaming the sun – it’s just not true.
It is true that up until about 1980 all the information showed that solar activity was increasing. This is exactly what they showed on all of their graphs, and it looks both convincing and logical. The sun was outputting more energy, the planet was getting warmer, bingo, we have our culprit! But this is just not the case, the trend in solar activity changed.
“This paper is the final nail in the coffin for people who would like to make the sun responsible for present global warming,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, told the journal Nature.
GLOBAL MEAN TEMPERATURES
Mike Lockwood, from Oxford’s Rutherford-Appleton Laboratory and Claus Fröhlich, from the World Radiation Centre in Switzerland recently published their paper in the UK’s Royal Society’s journal, stating clear evidence that the warming of the past two decades is not due to the sun – we need to look elsewhere.
Not only does the sun fail to explain any rise in temperature but it would actually suggest a cooling, as clearly stated in the abstract of the paper, “There is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate and the Sun may well have been a factor in post-industrial climate change in the first half of the last century. Here we show that over the past 20 years, all the trends in the Sun that could have had an influence on the Earth’s climate have been in the opposite direction to that required to explain the observed rise in global mean temperatures.”
COUNTERING GLOBAL WARMING
This study has compiled data about solar activity spanning the last one hundred years and have shown that solar activity peaked between 1985 and 1987.
“This is an important contribution to the scientific debate on climate change. At present there is a small minority which is seeking to deliberately confuse the public on the causes of climate change. They are often misrepresenting the science, when the reality is that the evidence is getting stronger every day. We have reached a point where a failure to take action to reduce carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions would be irresponsible and dangerous,” said a representative of the Royal Society.
Even though one theory countering global warming has been overturned new ones will come up every day. People will continue to say that the whole idea of climate change is nothing but government propaganda and a dozen or so other conspiracy theories. Now more than ever it is important for the public to be properly educated about what is going on. There are far too many places citing ‘scientific’ reasons as to why global warming is nothing but a lie. And sadly, with the way the media and the internet works, this is unlikely to change. Let’s just hope the politicians listen to the scientists and not to members of the public who are being confused and misled by far too many sources.
SHEEP BLAME HUMANS
Two years after scientists concluded that a breed of wild sheep on a remote Scottish island was shrinking over time, a study released Thursday revealed why: milder winters tied to global warming.
Due to milder winters, lambs on the island of Hirta do not need to put on as much as weight in the first months of life to survive to their first year, according to the study in the peer-reviewed journal Science. As a result, even the slower-growing ones now have a chance of surviving.
“In the past, only the big, healthy sheep and large lambs that had piled on weight in their first summer could survive the harsh winters on Hirta,” lead author Tim Coulson, a researcher at Imperial College London, said in a statement.
“But now, due to climate change, grass for food is available for more months of the year, and survival conditions are not so challenging — even the slower growing sheep have a chance of making it, and this means smaller individuals are becoming increasingly prevalent in the population.”
EVOLUTIONARY THEORY UPENDED
The study upends the belief that natural selection is a dominant feature of evolution, noting that climate can trump that card.
“According to classic evolutionary theory,” Coulson added, the sheep “should have been getting bigger, because larger sheep tend to be more likely to survive and reproduce than smaller ones, and offspring tend to resemble their parents.”
The sheep on Hirta have been examined closely since 1985 and experts concluded in 2007 that average body size was shrinking. By this year, it had decreased by 5 percent since 1985.
Coulson’s team analyzed body-weight measurements and key life milestones for a selected group of female sheep. They then plugged the data into a computer model that predicts how body size will change over time due to natural selection and other factors.
The results suggest that the decrease in average size is primarily an ecological response to warming, the authors said, and that natural selection has contributed relatively little.