More than thirty years ago, talk of climate change was a matter for scientists only. In fact, in their labs or in their elegant offices, they were not able to communicate the facts they knew to the world. Their language was a possibility, and could not easily affect the public. Many politicians took advantage of this opportunity to silence scientists and climate initiatives year after year. Another, but something - more powerful than talk - happened and started to change the picture.
The ugly face of the climate
Several weeks ago, (1) the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that 2019 could be the second-most in our temperature history, a hundred and fifty years from now.You must have noticed it last summer. As far as we know, its temperature extends to autumn, we go through hot nights in October and November reminding us of summer, but the most striking is when we talk about the hottest ten years in measurement history, because they all fall during the last two decades. !
"Climate change is more severe and faster than expected by scientists," said Dr. William Ripple, professor of forestry at the University of Oregon. "It threatens natural ecosystems and the fate of humanity." We have not yet taken tough policies, despite the many responses we see during the current decade.
One of those responses was the announcement by the European Parliament, the place of 500 million people on the continent, to a 429-to-225 vote on the state of emergency. He called for tough measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions completely by the middle of the century, but the most striking was the insistence on one important point: that if everyone wants change, no one is acting that way.
While youth demonstrations in many countries around the world are escalating on climate change issues, the EU was not the first to declare a climate emergency, which simply means that the country or entity considers climate change to be a fact and that the measures taken to deal with it are disproportionate to the scale of the event. The Australian Medical Association was the first to make the announcement in a statement: "The high mortality and morbidity caused by heat stress, injury and death from increasingly severe climatic events, and increases in the transmission of transmitted diseases , Food insecurity caused by the decline in agricultural output, and the high incidence of mental illness, Lehigh more than one occasion the reasons for declaring a state of emergency climate. "
In fact, the fundamental crisis facing the public in understanding climate change is the usual news reports of a global average temperature rise of one degree. Here, the citizen asks, “Just one degree, are you crazy ?! She's 36 in the summer, she's 37! "But it's never really the case, and the previous AMA statement is a good example.
Right up to the Pope's house
"Global average temperatures are rising, and the intensity and severity of harsh waves are increasing. We feel that we are approaching a catastrophic irreversible turning point, especially with the rapid melting of ice," Ripple told Meydan . This allows the climate system to become more stressful and unstable. The rate of abnormal climatic conditions, such as heat waves, increases. It becomes natural for our country to hit consecutively so that people think that something strange is happening. Meanwhile, some harmful organisms find an opportunity to thrive and get more. Of vitality, Vetzi Incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, including the incident or because of it.
For the same reason, the incidence of heat stress increases (5), and the lives of people with stress and diabetes in particular are more threatened, and some workers in certain occupations are more at risk. In fact, we can see the impact of heat stress in the heat wave that swept through Russia (6). In 2010, it killed more than 55,000 people, the main victims of which were cardiovascular disease, kidneys and diabetes.We will soon be reporting a special report on the implications of climate change for human health and how you - in your safe home - are no more than a hair.
The Australian Medical Association has followed, over the last few years, many similar declarations. Scotland, then Britain, last summer was the first country to declare a climate emergency, followed by many institutions, and Pope Francis (7) himself - Pope "What is happening is an unjust and brutal act for the poor and future generations," he said. "Our children and grandchildren should not bear the cost of our generation's irresponsibility."
Because of this apparent crowding in the declarations of climate emergency, the Oxford Dictionary of the World's most famous has chosen (8) `` climate emergency '' word of the year in 2019, in reference to the linguistic change this year by escalating talk about climate change globally, In a sense, the words - from that point of view - their change and the form of speech they use reflect the world's concerns and issues, and this year was no doubt a year of questioning climate change.
One hundred foolish companies
“But that is not enough, despite 40 years of global negotiations on the matter, so far we have failed to address this crisis fully, even with repeated warnings from scientists, world leaders lack Political will to move forward with radical action. " In fact, the reasons for this controversy are not merely political controversies or interests, but are fundamentally related to money. 9 You may not know that only 100 companies in the world are responsible for emitting more than 70% of the greenhouse gases. For global warming.
According to a number of studies (11,11), these companies have paid about $ 2 billion to put political pressure on environmental and climate movements to avoid paying climate taxes over the past few decades and so far, James Hansen, a former physicist, From NASA and the famous nickname "Father of Climate Change Awareness" (12) recently stated that there is no direct solution except by suing these companies.
But the pressing question now is: Has the land reached the point of no return? To understand how sensitive this problem is, let's start a catastrophic turning point with which we will have to change our history books, where we will note that September 2016 is the month when CO2 exceeds 13 levels in the cover. At 400,000 ppm, for the first time in our history as human beings, in 400,000 years ago the figure dipped between only 160-300 ppm. Several decades ago scientists were waiting for that point, some called "the point of no return", not Because something will happen, but because we know we need to wait forty years for the earth to return as it was.
But Ribel and his colleagues, talking about more than 11,000 scientists from 153 countries, in a recent research paper (14), believe that it is possible to save the rest, and this huge team of scientists had also decided to declare a state of climate emergency in a letter According to Ripple, Maidan said: "Scientists of the world have a moral duty to warn people of the dangers coming. We feel that the time allowed for decision-making is running out."
World scientists
In their statement, scientists say that there are six criteria that world politicians must work to achieve, including stopping the use of fossil fuels, as well as harmful environmental pollutants such as methane and chlorofluorocarbons, and to protect the ecosystem from damage especially as it is facing problems due to climate change already, and reduce Meat in diets and the call for people to multiply vegetables and grains, because this prevents the exploitation of green areas as well as the emission of methane from cattle breeding, as well as the team hinted on the need to control the population on the planet, and adjust the economy to be a servant, or more clearly "profitable" Systems that protect the environment and climate.
You might see these as utopian dreams in some way, but our lives on this planet depend on them. Before the Industrial Revolution, if someone came up with such statements, people would consider them as soon as or coming from a science fiction novel, but now we literally stand on the brink of danger. Rapidly, rates of change are accelerating like never before, and the biggest problem is that the climate system is a complex system that cannot accurately predict its future, putting us simply as a feather in the wind.
“All we have seen so far has been partial solutions,” says Ripple . “There must be total solutions, so that our food, our work, the way we live and our entire economy move through those solutions.” But can world politicians act? With a degree of wisdom toward that issue? This is a difficult question, there is a lot of intransigence and tampering based on special interests, on the other hand some of the movements that occur are occurring day by day so that we now see climatic events, but we also see the deaths and mass migrations due to climate change, it seems like - we humans in The contemporary world - we dance on the brink of chaos, either we fall or not.