Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying
“Climate change is widespread, rapid and intensifying”
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
Sixth Assessment Report, August 9, 2021
Get informed with science-based evidence.
Share the facts with your close family and friends.
Reflect and act on what you can do, as a citizen, community member, work colleague, voter.
Push back and refute disinformation. It is negligent and harmful.
Two-thousand-and-seventy days ago, I was nearing the end an expedition exploring the remote and extraordinarily beautiful continent of Antarctica. For ten days, aboard Polar Latitudes’ Sea Explorer I felt like an outsider rambling through an alien world, incomparable to anywhere I had been before. Remote, vast and full of disorientating contradictions. Ruggedly intimidating, yet delicate and fragile; infinite emptiness, yet teeming with life; colourless, yet having a thousand shades of blue, cataclysmic storms to the left, heavenly sunshine to the right. We had seen majestic humpback whales, fierce leopard seals, wallowing elephant seals, languishing weddell seals, soaring albatrosses, and darting snow petrels, and a cacophony of chinstraps, adelie and gentoo penguins and more. With most animal life habituating a world below the sea. In an otherworldly continent, that holds ninety-percent of the world’s ice and seventy-percent of the world’s fresh water.
Two-thousand-and-sixty-nine days ago we had much to celebrate and be grateful for. Fifteen-thousand kilometres away, in Paris, at COP21, the world’s leaders had finally taken a bold step, most signing on to the landmark, Paris Agreement, an agreement to “limit global warming to well below 2, preferably to 1.5 degrees Celsius”, compared to pre-industrial levels”.
Even back then, December 2015, I was witnessing this impact right before my frosty eyes. Gentoo penguins, who mostly populate the northern latitudes were migrating south, joining their chinstrap and adelie cousins in search of cooler lodgings; once ice-covered rocky outcrops on Antarctica’s peninsula, were denuded of ice cover; and whales migratory patterns changing due to warmer tides.
It was back then that I had my aha moment, seeing first-hand, the effect global warming was having in this vulnerable far flung wild barometer of climate change crisis.
Fast-forward two-thousand-and sixty-seven-days later, three-days ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations leading body of experts assessing the science related to climate change, delivered their latest assessment report, a blistering assessment on how earth's health is holding up to us humans. The findings are alarming–
CO2 concentration: Highest in at least 2 million years
Sea level rise: Fastest rates in at least 3,000 years
Arctic sea ice: Lowest in at least 1,000 years
Glaciers retreat: Unprecedented, in at least 2,000 years
“A code red for humanity”
U.N. Secretary-General
António Guterres
What will you do in the next 80 days?
It’s time to care and take action! The declarations and promises from business and governments about taking steps to curb carbon emissions are happening, but the real action is not happening fast enough. With the U.N. Climate Change Conference, COP26 scheduled in Glasgow, 31 October, there is a wee-window of 80 days to get informed, engaged and enabled.
So, find your path about what you can do. Here’s some pointers…
Getting the science-based evidence is a great start!
Stay informed. Understand what scientists and experts are saying.
The IPCC report:
Share with your family and friends. Make it easy, engaging and worth sharing.
Yup, it’s getting hotter. Here’s a video that shows temperature anomalies, by country from 1880 – 2017.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RygVNrKMs0“The Earth is full. It's full of us, it's full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands… so much that our economy is now bigger than its host, our planet”.
Australian environmentalist, consultant, and author, Paul Gilding - TED Talk, California, 2012.
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-earth-is-full-paul-gilding
Don’t forget to push back on misinformation.
Check France24’s video on “climate change has become the perfect target for fake news and what you can do to protect yourself against this”.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190329-down-earth-climate-change-fake-news-environment-disinformation-scientific-studies
