 |
|
|
 News from Around the Americas | December 2005 
Protesters from 30 Countries Unite To Fight Global Warming
 Cahal Milmo - The Independent UK
| | A Chinese man cycles past the cooling towers of a steel mill in Beijing. China called on countries that have not yet approved the United Nations Kyoto Protocol on global warming to do so as soon as possible. (AFP/Goh Chai Hin) |
Up to a million people will take to the streets of more than 100 cities in 30 countries today to demand greater action on tackling global warming.
The first worldwide demonstration on climate change will coincide with the opening of a key United Nations conference to set out the basis for the reduction of greenhouse gases after the Kyoto treaty expires in 2012.
Organisers of the protests warned that the world's leading industrialised nations had failed to make an impact on climate change and some, in particular Britain, were backsliding on their environmental commitments.
The UN meeting in Montreal, which will be attended by representatives of 189 countries, is set to be dominated by efforts to persuade America - the world's largest carbon emissions producer - to join future UN-led talks on ways to curb rising temperatures and sea levels.
The Bush administration has refused to ratify the Kyoto agreement, which pledges the 35 leading industrialized nations to cut carbon dioxide levels to 5.2 per cent below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012 - an undertaking they are struggling to meet.
In the context of Washington's steadfast refusal to contemplate any "binding" climate change commitments and signs that Kyoto is failing to cut greenhouse emissions, environmentalists believe a show of mass public discontent will send a powerful signal to the climate talks.
Phil Thornhill, of the London-based Campaign Against Climate Change, who originated the idea for the demonstrations, said: "It is a massive opportunity for ordinary people to show that urgent action is needed if we are to prevent a catastrophic destabilization of the climate. We are in a race against time and, if anything, world leaders seem to be going backwards. These protests must send the message that this is the very last thing we need. Never before have we been able to do that with a single worldwide voice."
The centerpiece of the International Day of Climate Protest will be a mass protest in Montreal, where at least 15,000 people are expected to lobby delegates, including Britain's Environment Secretary, Margaret Beckett, for a globally binding climate agreement after 2012.
The protest in London, which is expected to draw similar numbers, will pass the offices of the American oil giant Exxon Mobil and the embassy of Australia, which has also refused to ratify Kyoto, before ending with a rally outside the American embassy in Grosvenor Square.
Across the world similar protests will be held in locations from Helsinki to Seoul. In Washington, drivers of fuel-efficient hybrid cars will rally around the White House while in New Orleans - devastated by Hurricane Katrina in August - there will be a "Stop Global Warming" street party in the French Quarter.
But despite the worldwide show of popular unity, there is pessimism that the 10-day UN meeting will break new ground in achieving a successor to the Kyoto treaty which will also include developing nations and the two countries expected to become the world's two biggest producers of carbon emissions by 2050 - China and India.
Ms. Beckett this week showed the level of governmental expectation by describing those expecting new Kyoto-style targets to be agreed as "living in cloud-cuckoo-land". Even the original Kyoto agreement is failing to meet expectations. In 11 European Union countries emissions have grown, not shrunk. In Japan, emissions are nearly 18 per cent above target while in Canada - host of this week's meeting - the gap is almost 30 per cent.
Despite hopes among the Canadian and EU delegations, led by the British presidency, that the Bush administration can still be coaxed into the talks process, Washington has already bluntly ruled out any new commitments - pointing instead to a voluntary undertaking to cut greenhouse emissions by 18 per cent by 2012.
Instead the only proposal creating a buzz around the conference building this week was the idea, championed by Papua New Guinea, for wealthy countries to pay developing nations to preserve rainforests by not cutting down trees. The loss of tropical forest accounts for 20 per cent of carbon emissions by reducing the amount of carbon dioxide filtered from the air.
While such a scheme would represent progress, activists warn that the big picture - binding targets to achieve a net reduction in greenhouse gases which will include the US, China and India - is in danger of slipping away. Mr. Blair was last month accused of moving away from the Kyoto model towards the stance of his key ally George Bush when he called for a focus on technology - from renewable energies to nuclear power - to reduce emissions.
George Monbiot, the academic and leading environmental commentator, who will address the London rally, said: "There is probably very little we can expect [from Montreal] because we are doing nothing to keep fossil fuel in the ground. All these techno-fixes are a waste of time if we continue to burn fossil fuel at the same rate."
"There is a lot of cynicism about what the British government is doing. Tony Blair has promised much and persuaded many that he will deliver but it has turned out to be rubbish. Blair had no intention of doing anything on climate change other than talk about it."
"But this weekend's protests are taking place in a changed context - the media are listening and finally we have to make the politicians listen."
Countries
Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Chile, Croatia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Indonesia, Republic of Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Peru, Phillipines, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey, Uganda, United States, Venezuela.
Killer Storms
Warmer sea water means there is more energy to power hurricanes, and the computer-predicted increase in such "extreme events" with global warming seems to be coming true. Hurricane Epsilon, currently raging in the Atlantic, is the 26th named storm, and the 14th named hurricane of a record season in the US. These storms are getting more violent. An even more sobering glimpse of the future was given by Hurricane Mitch in 1998 which killed 11,000 people and left three million homeless in Honduras.
Rampant Disease
Although many of the effects of global warming will be felt by developing nations, rich countries will not escape. Acute heat episodes will become frequent and kill many. In the heat wave of August 2003 in Western Europe - confidently attributed by scientists to climate change - 35,000 old people died, more than 18,000 in France. Heat will not be the only problem. The World Health Organization fears that global warming, with its heavier rainfall, could lead to a major increase in insect-borne diseases in Britain and Europe such as malaria, Lyme disease and encephalitis, and has called for urgent government action to prevent it.
Rising Sea Levels
In the coming century, global sea levels are predicted to rise by up to three feet, threatening regions at or below sea level, such as Pacific islands, much of Bangladesh, the Nile delta in Egypt, the Netherlands, and even East Anglia and the Thames estuary in Britain. Storm surges - like that which drowned more than 300 people in eastern England and 1,800 people in the Netherlands in January 1953 - are likely to be much more frequent and catastrophic. The population of Bangladesh will double as its land surface halves.
Devastated Wildlife
Polar bears may be the first spectacular casualties as the ice of the Arctic Ocean, on which they depend to hunt seals, is rapidly melting and will probably all be gone by mid-century. But Britain itself is already feeling the problem: we are losing to rising temperatures not only the cod in the seas around our coasts, but also the small fish such as sandeels on which seabirds depend to feed their young. Last year in the Northern Isles, Orkney and Shetland, hundreds of thousands of birds such as guillemots and arctic terns failed to breed for lack of food.
Water Shortages
Drought will be much more common. In the dry-lands, rain will be even less frequent, while some parts of the world that are temperate will become arid: central Spain may be desert-like by the mid-century. And it is not only rain that will fail. Glaciers are shrinking. Lima, with seven million people, depends for half the year on water from the Sullcon glacier in the Andes, which has retreated by 30 per cent. Himalayan glaciers which feed the river Indus, the source of much of Pakistan's water, are also shrinking.
Agricultural Turmoil
The hundreds of millions of people living in the world's marginal agricultural lands, such as the countries of the Sahel region, already face a desperate daily struggle to grow food. All their energies are consumed in the effort to produce a harvest of a staple crop such as millet. As global temperatures rise, this struggle is likely to become impossible as more frequent and longer droughts make crop-growing unviable. In poor tropical regions, the increased storms predicted from climate change will be an added threat. The terrifying images of African famine are as nothing to what will come.
The 'X' Factor?
What's predicted is terrible enough. But it is what's not even on the radar that some scientists fear most of all - the possibility that global warming might bring about some sudden, extreme and devastating climatic phenomenon that we cannot yet even imagine. The climate is a complex system, and we know that complex systems, when subject to stress, can collapse - it happens on your office desk when your computer crashes - and the global climate is now being subjected to stresses that have never been put on it before. Last year's global warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow tried to show this with the northern hemisphere freezing solid in a matter of weeks. Most people dismissed it as far-fetched, but something just as catastrophic may be out there, not far in the future. |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us