Blog Action Day – Changes that change

The climate changes don’t come alone, by the way they insist to always have company. To help to deal with many changes derived from climate changes, a small list follows:

Good maners: “If you can’t talk about roads or weather, then don’t open your mouth.” That is a recommendation of a mother to her daughter in a novel by Jane Austen (English novelist, 1775-1817). That was a golden rule to live together in society, in England, in order to avoid polemic or personal uncomfortable subjects. Those rules aren’t anymore in fashion, currently would be impossible to use the weather as a theme for light conversations during the traditional five o’clock tea. By the way, roads even less…

Jokes: do you remember that old joke that is about to ask to a distracted interlocutor if the polar bear feeds on penguins? As the person reviews the knowledge on the bear’s food chain, we remind that the polar bear lives in the North Pole, as penguins populate the South Pole. In times of climate change, however, even the old jokes must be treated with caution. I don’t know if we’ll reach the extreme to have bears meeting penguins around, but this bear has been leading unusual meetings – even dates – with other species. Hybrid cubs of polar bears and grey bears, species that don’t usually met, are already wandering around.

Maldives Islands, located on the Indian Ocean, takes the risk to disappear with the increase on the level of oceans caused by the global warming

Tourism: destinations never thought before for family vacation, as the Arctic, will become commonplace. In the other hand, ski stations will need to find other objective for its facilities. Other class that can become a great attraction is the adventure submarine tourism. That is about the visitation of disappeared countries, diving for the most boldness, and with submarines, for the most rich.

Geography: we don’t have only to forget what we knew one day, but we also have to review our ideas about maps, continents, seas and the very geography itself. That is, by the melting of the ice caps due to the climate changes, countries and cities will vanish from the map and inaccessible places will become destinations for vacations. But, everything in a dynamic constant, that is, what you see on the map today, could not be there tomorrow, not only because the increase on the level of the seas, but also because of tsunamis, hurricanes and other extreme climate events.

Refugees: even today, the disasters are the great factor of migration and movement of populations, the increase of frequency and intensity of these events, derived from climate changes, unavoidably intensify such processes. The amount of people involved in movements and migrations caused by climate changes are estimated to leap from the 50 million in 2010 to around of 700 million in 2050. Furthermore, the increase on the level of the seas directly threatens the existence of 40 countries at least, as, for example, Tuvalu and Maldives, small island countries that will develop a new situation: refugees literally with no country.

The climate changes can extremely change the Planet biodiversity and animals such as the polar bear can become legends

Monsters from the past: the role performed by the dinosaurs and mammoths in our lives will be fulfilled, in the future, by animals that exist today. By the current climate changes, the great problem is that, in most of cases, there’s no place for animal populations to move and, in certain cases, this scenario is escalated by the fact that there isn’t in the population enough diversity to develop individuals resistant to the new environmental conditions. Probable result: extinction. So, the most probable isn’t that penguins and polar bears to meet in some place on the planet, but is that both become only legends of a world with biodiversity…

Legendary views: some of us that had the privilege to see views as the caps with actual ice, the great glaciers, small island countries, and marvelous cities by the cost live will be live witnesses that these views had existed in fact and that aren’t another resource from Photoshop…

Starving and poverty: that won’t change, only increase. Besides the refugees, already mentioned, many agriculture systems can collapse and part of the small resources that most of the human population have today to buy their daily food will have to be spent in other necessities, as shelter, health and even water.

Flying saucer: before a symbol of science fiction, can become the only chance to escape from a planet hostile to human life…

Nurit Bensusan is writer, blogger and biologist. Her great occupation is to think without rails

Blog Action Day – The subject is getting hot

It’s not to keep remembering “immemorial times”, but haven’t been so long since the countries got together its representatives in a great ecologic conference, the greater of all times, in Rio, in 92, with the city symptomatic taken by the Brazilian army to assure “the safety” and an agreement, from the governor in that time, Leonel Brizola, with the barons of the city to legalize it…

In that time, when we’re talking about global warming we had to face the economic lobby of oil with a whole block of renowned scientists that defended the increase of concentration of greenhouse effect gases by the use of energy after the industrial revolution, the human territorial occupation model and the negligence with the absorption capacity of the environment which would have little to do with the global warming. This is a natural cycle of the earth, irreversible and not related with humans and their way of life.

Well, 17 years after, the Kyoto Protocol in the ways for renovation, many things have changed.

Today is difficult to find someone that doesn’t have an understanding even rough about the greenhouse effect and its causes and it’s already a regular knowledge to know that the environment doesn’t support anymore, that we pay a high price for deforestation, that Brazil is among the 5 great emitters of greenhouse effect gases in the world and is still reluctant to assume a position to cut exemplary emissions, the same fears of the consequences of it for economy already satanized by the United States.

Greenhouse effect and global warming contribute for the melting of the ice caps and ecologic unbalances that are already a reality on our Planet

About my life on it, I’ve passed from a young engineer that talked about a distant and incomprehensible subject (it could look like a crook’s thing) to a professional with experience in this area of current and future climate changes, being asked to talk, write, discuss, inform and educate new professionals and decision makers about the subject.

More… particular things due to advances in solutions, as emissions compensations, neutralizations, and names as Carbon Free (created in the living room of my house), have become world terms that are associated to the most famous brands in the world, the main corporations and have turned into a new economy, the economy of payment of environmental services, the forest economy, not that about deforestation, but about the recovering and preservation of forests!

Well, so it’s alright, we advanced a lot, as human kind, if we think about that the formalization of environmentalism was marked with the book Silent Spring and the governmental structures as ministries and offices of environment are recent not only in Brazil, but in the world…

It’s alright if we are not talking about a goal, to hold the increase of average temperature in the globe in 2 C degrees in 2100, by the idea of a cooperative effort between the countries for that and if we didn’t know that we will reach the very 2 C degrees in 2050, just considering the inertial result of greenhouse effect gases already emitted.

It’s alright if into the sceneries of human behavior in the fight and decrease stipulated by the IPCC (International Panel of Climate Change, Peace Nobel with Al Gore in 2007) we didn’t find ourselves in the worst case scenario, which leads for an increase of temperature even greater or a necessity to extrapolate the solutions…

It’s alright if the geo-economy of the planet didn’t was suffering already meaningful changes, the Islands in the Pacific wasn’t submerging, if the occurrence of cataclysms with great probability to be caused by climate change wasn’t exponentially growing…

And it’s alright if the speed of decision of our governmental representatives didn’t obey anymore the political and diplomatic dynamic rather than the urgent necessity on the weight of the problem and its potential escalate for social exclusion…

Not that bad if the amazing capacity of awareness that the humanity had developed by the availability of information and speed of its medias could mean a coordinated action (or not?) that passes by the asking to elected, to the associations and local, regional and global actions.

Families mobilize and protest on the streets following manifestations all over the world against the global warming

In this year of 2009 we’re living a happy blooming of the action of the society about the subject, and that is a great difference.

We already had the Ecologic March, in São Paulo, we had the movement Global Climate Act, that begun at the World Social Forum and ends in a great event on December 12th, during the Climate Conference in Copenhagen, which the very march and others took part. We had the planet day.

Mobilizations spread out through the Internet and now this beautiful Global Action Day.

This great difference is the notion of that the change isn’t only in the economy, politics and diplomacy.

It’s, before everything else, a cultural change that we’re all involved and interested, because it results in a change in the way of life and perception of things that compose this very life, dreams and expectations.

And this time isn’t possible to pretend that we are not seeing and to wait for ready solutions.

We’ve to notice that if the world doesn’t fit us, we’re not fitting on this world.

We’ve to discuss the essential, to qualify again the luxury and to review the beauty.

We’ll get through, because our capacity to surprise is huge.

But it’s right there, with the willing to do, the necessity to express and the mobilization.

Let’s keep moving!

Francisco Maciel, chairman of the Iniciativa Verde ou Txai Brasil, musician and poet