David on Global warming

“When I was a boy in the 1900s, the carbon dioxide level was still below 300 parts per million. This year, it reached 382, the highest figure for hundreds of thousands of years.”

“Right now we are facing a man-made disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change. If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”

“When we look at the rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather … What people (must) do is to change their behavior and their attitudes … for our upcoming generation we have to do something, and we have to demand for government support.”

“Many solutions are being employed or developed, but not fast enough to forestall catastrophe. In Canada, we have federal and provincial governments hell-bent on expanding fossil fuel infrastructure and development to reap as much profit as possible from a dying industry and to satisfy the vagaries of short election cycles. The fossil fuel industry continues to receive massive subsidies, including a multi-billion-dollar taxpayer bailout for an American pipeline company, while clean energy receives far less support.”

“No matter what lengths politicians, corporate interests and others take to avoid, downplay and obfuscate serious issues around environmental degradation and our economic system’s destructive path, we can’t deny reality. Studies show we must refrain from burning most fossil fuel reserves to avoid catastrophic warming. In little more than a century, the human population has more than quadrupled to seven billion and rising, and our plastic-choked, consumer-driven, car-obsessed cultures have led to resource depletion, species extinction, ocean degradation, climate change and more. It’s past time to open our eyes and shift to a more sensible approach to living on this small, precious planet.”

“It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down.”

“Allow me to break down the facts of hunger as they stand right now. 811 million people are chronically hungry. 283 million are in hunger crises — they are marching toward starvation. And within that, 45 million in 43 countries across the globe are in hunger emergencies — in other words, famine is knocking on their door. Places like Afghanistan. Madagascar. Myanmar. Guatemala. Ethiopia. Sudan. South Sudan. Mozambique. Niger. Syria, Mali, Burkina Faso, Somalia, Haiti and on and on and on. The world has often experienced famine. But when has it ever been so widespread, in so many places, at the same time? Why? Three reasons. First, man-made conflict. Dozens of civil wars and regional conflicts are raging, and hunger has been weaponized to achieve military and political objectives. Second, climate shocks /climate change. Floods, droughts, locusts and rapidly changing weather patterns have created severe crop failures around the world. Third, COVID-19. The viral pandemic has created a secondary hunger pandemic, which is far worse than the first. Shutdowns destroyed livelihoods. Shutdowns stopped the movement of food. Shutdowns inflated prices. The net result is the poor of the world are priced out of survival. The ripple effect of COVID has been devastating on the global economy. During the pandemic, $3.7 trillion in incomes — mostly among the poor — have been wiped out, while food prices are spiking. The cost of shipping food, for example, has increased 3 – 400%. But in places of conflict and low-income countries, it is even worse. For example, in Aleppo, Syria — a war zone, where I just returned from — food is now seven times more expensive than it was 2 years ago. The combined effect of these three — conflict, climate and COVID — has created an unprecedented perfect storm.”