Moyers: Climate Change You Can Believe In
by Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
Just as Sunday’s big People’s Climate March and next week’s UN global summit on climate converge here in New York City, the nation and world are experiencing weather of an intensity that should rattle the stubborn false convictions of even the most fervent climate change denier.
Terrible flooding in India and Pakistan, the worst in more than a century, with heavy monsoon rains, 500 lives lost and hundreds of thousands left stranded… thousands of wildfires ignited by severe drought in California and the West… flashfloods in Arizona… the punch of a hurricane pounding Mexico’s Baja coast, the strongest in nearly fifty years, battering locals and trapping tourists in their hotels without electricity.
We know it’s important not to confuse day-to-day weather patterns with climate, which measure variations of things like temperatures and humidity over long periods of time, but it’s clear that these disasters are made more powerful by global warming. The pain is only going to get worse for us and for future generations, unless we act now. Our governments must reduce those carbon emissions that are heating up the atmosphere before it’s too late.
But up to now, world leaders have refused to give global warming the crisis treatment that’s needed, even as the evidence mounts day by day. A draft report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that the vast amounts of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere will have “severe, pervasive and irreversible impacts,” and that we’re already seeing the effect in heat waves, floods and rising sea levels. Another UN report, this one from the World Meteorological Organization, says that amounts of carbon dioxide — the gas that traps heat in our atmosphere — are increasing even faster than scientists predicted, more than in the last 800,000 years at least. The accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers has crunched the numbers and spots an “unmistakable trend” that puts us just twenty years away from catastrophe. “In a highly globalized economy,” they write, “no country is likely to be spared as the impacts of climate change ripple around the world…” ....................(more)
The complete piece is at: http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/26299-climate-change-you-can-believe-in
