I have been attending The Planet Under Pressure conference in London , a major international conference focusing on solutions to global sustainability as a virtual guest.
The conference which is the world’s largest gathering of experts on global environmental and social issues in advance of the major UN Summit Rio+20 in June began by declaring that we are needing to elevate Science in all policy and governmental actions. Of course, sympathy was extended to the US participates as the world knows that one of our two major political parties is regressive anti-science. They were even aware of the SCOTUS health care battle here and expressed how "primitive" and "backward" it seemed.
The feeling of urgency was evident. The scientists involved in the conference issued the first State Of The Planet Declaration (PDF)
The defining challenge of our age is to safeguard Earth’s natural processes to ensure the well-being of civilization while eradicating poverty, reducing conflict over resources, and supporting human and ecosystem health.
They are trying to mobilize the science with rapid social action to ward off the worst effect of climate change.
Our highly interconnected global society has the potential to innovate rapidly. The Planet Under Pressure conference has taken advantage of this potential to explore new pathways. It has marked a new direction for global change research. The international scientific community must rapidly reorganize to focus on global sustainability solutions. We must develop a new strategy for creating and rapidly translating knowledge into action, which will form part of a new contract between science and society, with commitments from both sides.
The conference was solution oriented and this is where we come in. It was noted that we don't have much time and that there is
"no technological fix" around the corner. But one solution was emphasised as being a way to buy us 15 years of time in which we can focus on reducing C02 emissions and
that solution was presented by Peter Cox of The University of Exeter, UK. He spoke on the solution of reducing short-lived climate forcers such as Methane and Ozone to get us back to the
350 degrees that scientists say we need to be to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.
And what do you know? This is what we have been working on for the past four years with our work here at Daily Kos through my Meatless Monday series and our Meatless Advocates Group and at the MIT Climate CoLab.
In his presentation Dr. Cox gave solutions for reducing methane and ozone but neglected the major source of methane and that is livestock production. But that is alright as we are ready to fill in the gaps with this scientific work by my CoLab partner Gerard Wedderburn Bisshop, senior scientist at The World Preservation Foundation
From The World Preservation Foundation:
Most actions for mitigating climate change and slowing global warming temperatures have relied on reducing C02 emissions. C02 emissions remain in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, so even if we went completely C02 neutral today, there would still be the damaging remains of the past use of C02 lingering in the atmosphere preventing us from stopping the most damaging effects of Climate Change. We need a short term solution which will reduce short-lived warming gases to buy us the time to take the long term solution of reducing C02. Livestock production is a significate contributor to all of the short term climate forcers including: Black Carbon, Methane and Ground Level Ozone.[1]
So we have a solution, perhaps the only one, to get us on the track back to 350 degrees. This is not a solution that can be legislated. Even if it could our politics here in US would prevent it. So
this. is. on. us. We have to mobilize and that can be done through our social networks and our communities.
Society is taking substantial risks by delaying urgent and large-scale action. We must show leadership at all levels. We must all play our parts. {..} We urge the world to grasp this moment and make history.
London, 29th March 2012