ENVIRONMENTALISTS WERE RIGHT ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE

Happily, the climate change debate is finally over: Global warming is happening, it will continue to happen, and human activity is the cause of it. Sadly, the environmentalists who have been warning the world about this for the last 40 years were right.

On February 2^nd, 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or ‘IPCC’ for short (and yes, one could question whether these panels get long boring names so they are hard to quote and harder to remember) published a summary of their 4^th Climate Change Assessment since it began in 1988. With the advance of satellite technology and the use of ice core samples, this is the first report capable of proving once and for all that climate change is not a natural process.

In the past, sceptics argued that climate change could be part of a natural cycle. They also argued that because earth’s processes took place over centuries rather than decades, measurements over the last hundred years or so could hardly make a case for global warming. Fortunately recent years have provided the scientific community with new tools of measurement with satellite data and ice core samples, making their conclusions much more difficult to refute and ignore.

The ice core samples can be read much like tree rings to provide very reliable data for atmospheric conditions that date back as far as 650,000 years. Satellite data has provided far more detailed and reliable observational data on just about how everything interacts on earth such as temperature, wind, dust, ocean currents, precipitation rates and more. In fact, the combined science of balloon technology and satellite data has provided evidence that global warming is not just happening on the surface of the earth, it is happening in the upper layers of our atmosphere at the same rate.

This new IPCC report may be the beginning of a new era of acknowledging climate change as a priority. The history of the world ignoring the early warnings has been long and discouraging indeed. In 1987 the Bruntland Report, was published under the title, “Our Common Future”, which not only warned the world of the things that we are seeing today, but also provided a very comprehensive coping strategy to go with it, which was called “Agenda 21”. These reports were largely ignored by industry and international leaders. In 1992 the Rio Summit generated the Kyoto Accord, which still had not been ratified by the world’s largest greenhouse gas contributor, the United States. The 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development did not generate anything capable of combating the sustainable development needs earth has.

Perhaps with the abundance of conclusive evidence emerging, leaders and policy makers will take the aggressive action that will be required for survival before it is too late, and create something like a “Survival Commission”. Lest we forget why all this matters, it is not just about temperatures, sea level rise, droughts, floods or storms. It is the integrity and fine balance of gasses in the atmosphere that makes this planet capable of supporting life.

Jennifer Ellard-Deveney has worked as an environmentalist for over 20 years. She has a Specialized Honours Degree in Environmental Studies and Political Science from York University, and was a delegate in the United Nations Summit for Sustainable Development in 2002. She has been living in Grenada for nearly two years after coming here to assist with Hurricane Ivan recovery efforts and is a member of Grenada’s Sustainable Development Council. Jennifer currently writes a weekly column for the Grenada Advocate on sustainable development issues.