Guardian
Yeah! So a climate deal has been agreed to in Durban..now what do we do about climate change? I will admit that forging any agreement coming out of the 194 countries who were participating is quite a fete. But what they have done is rolled the mitigations down the road guaranteeing that we will not reach the goal of keeping rising temperatures to a 2 degree rise to avoid the worse effects of climate change.
Unlike the economic debt currently transfixing the attention of world's leaders, it appears possible to them that we can put our climate debt on the never-never.
The loans in euros, dollars and pounds will be called in within days, weeks, and months. But the environmental debt – run up by many decades of dumping carbon dioxide waste in the atmosphere – won't be due for full repayment before 2020, according to the plan from Durban. If this roadmap to agree a global deal to tackle climate change by 2015, which would take force by 2020, is a triumph, it is a pitiful one. It aspires to achieve in four year's time what was deemed essential by the world's governments in 2007, but crashed at the Copenhagen summit in 2009.
That eight-year failure is why the ecological debt will inevitably transform into a new economic debt dwarfing our current woes. Like a loan-shark's debt, the cost of halting global warming - and coping with the impacts already certain - spirals higher and higher the longer you leave repayment. At the moment, as record rises in carbon emissions show, we are paying back nothing.
By 2020, the date that the agreement would come into affect scientists predict that we will already be on the road to a 4 degree rise in global temperature due to the tipping points that we will reach before that date which will exacerbate all predictions and put us into this scenario:
With a 4 degree rise in temperature
4C- At this stage, the Arctic permafrost enters the danger zone. The methane and carbon dioxide currently locked in the soils will be released into the atmosphere. At the Arctic itself, the ice cover would disappear permanently, meaning extinction for polar bears and other native species that rely on the presence of ice. Further melting of Antarctic ice sheets would mean a further 5m rise in the sea level, submerging many island nations. Italy, Spain, Greece and Turkey become deserts and mid-Europe reaches desert temperatures of almost 50C in summer. Southern England's summer climate could resemble that of modern southern Morocco.
So we have something to work with but it is pitifully small. At the least there is global consensus that we must do something and that all countries will have to participate. That is what we have to take to move forward.
Credit must go to President Obama for getting us this far and giving our negotiators the leeway to back this global agreement. But, in the US we are still between a rock and a hard place with the republicans obstructing any forward movement on climate change. In order to get anything done here in US we will have to change the political makeup of the US congress. We must reelect President Obama, keep the senate and take back the house. There is no greater urgency as our lives and especially the lives of our children and the next generations are dependent on our success.
To a great extent we are still on our own. It remains to us to force our leaders to do the right thing. But even then there is only so much that they can do. We are the ones who have to change our lives by reducing our use of fossil fuels. If we wait for our leaders to change our lives we will lose this historic fight to preserve a livable future for our children.
There are fast simple solutions that we can take to avoid the effects of what would happen with a 4C increase in global temperature. Indeed it is the only reasonable fast solution available to us. And that is the simple and easy solution of eliminating/reducing meat in our diets. In fact, a vegetarian diet could cut climate change mitigation costs by at least 70%!
History will judge us..let's get this done.