Climate change
Climate change is the greatest threat facing mankind today. Many people think of it as just an environmental issue, but its social and economic consequences in the coming centuries will be greater than that of all the world wars the planet has seen to date – unless we act in this generation to do something about it.
Many people take the view that scientists will find a way to deal with it in the future, so why should we worry about it now, whilst others (in some cases the polluting industries themselves) are deliberately spreading misinformation in order to confuse the public.
But most scientists today (except those on the payrolls of oil companies and logging companies) agree that unless we act now, many of the consequences will be irreversible.
Here are some useful links that contain a lot of enlightening information about climate change. Please take the time to read through some of them and make yourself aware of the global crisis that is facing humanity.
Everybody, including you and me, can play an important role by helping to bring the issue to the top of the political agenda of the people who run our countries. Until they act, nothing substantive will be done, and future generations will look back on us and see us as the ‘greedy generation’ that used up half of the planet’s resources and left the world in an environmental mess for our children’s children.
Here are the links:
http://www.unep.org/themes/climatechange
http://www.defra.gov.uk/ENVIRONMENT/climatechange/index.htm
http://ec.europa.eu/environment/climat/home_en.htm
http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/index.cfm
http://www.davidsuzuki.org/Climate_Change/default.asp
http://www.exploratorium.edu/climate/index.html
http://environment.newscientist.com/channel/earth/climate-change
http://www.greenpeace.org/international/campaigns/climate-change
http://www.climatechallenge.gov.uk
The following two sites are quite heavy going. They are not easy to navigate and they don’t contain much ‘bite-size’ information that will help to educate the general public, but I’ve added them here as they are sources of some important reports in case you want to delve into this topic more deeply:
Finally, the following link is to the website of the fourth World Electronic Media Forum in Mexico City where I made a presentation on Multilateral Institutions and Global Media Concerns. Whilst this presentation touches on a wide range of development issues apart from climate change prevention and mitigation, it includes the CNN report that won the 2009 Asian Development Bank/ABU Prize for climate change reporting:
http://wemf4.org/eswemf_05_03.html