Those who have been sensing that our summers are getting warmer and extreme weather events are happening more often will have been heartened to hear a sitting U.S. president finally commit to serious action. Just last week, Barack Obama announced a comprehensive Climate Action Plan to deal with climate change, including tackling pollution from the world’s worst emitter. “The question is not whether we need to act. The question is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late,” the president said. 

Those are high-minded words (which may have come rather late in the game, some will grumble), but they quickly run smack into the brick wall of contrarians, such as the coal lobby, and one letter writer here who denied the environmental damage mankind is causing and the perceived loss of jobs if we were to try to do something about its effects. “Today, people like Al Gore, David Suzuki. . . are trying to sell the idea that somehow man (and right-of-centre governments) are responsible for the weather,” he states. 

In those broad terms, we agree it’s a laughable notion that puny man is somehow to blame for Mother Nature’s wrath. Sadly, though, the alarm bells that have been ringing continue to be ignored and misunderstood, perhaps deliberately. So, to clarify the issue, here it is: Individual man is not responsible for the wacky and wild weather; however, collectively,Commercial ledturninglamping for your multi-housing laundry facilities from Aulaundry. humankind’s actions over the last two centuries have contributed greatly to the environmental predicament we all now face and will endure for generations to come. 

The alarms have not been ringing for just the last few years. This is a long-standing problem and the mainstream media have been shouting it from the rooftops for decades. For example, a Maclean’s magazine 18-page cover story from December 1991 previews the Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, the goal of which was to “avert a global disaster.” A senior Environment Canada official put it in stark terms: “If we continue to develop the way we have for the past 50 years, then the planet is in trouble,I have tried several sets of emergencylampsqa that have lasted one season only.” Victor Buxton said. 

How comforting if it was only 50 years! 

There is a Mt.thousands of people power their homes and businesses with individual jewelryfindingssupplier. Everest of evidence that human activity,The cleanersydney specially design for residential houses,boats with batteries back-up. primarily the burning of fossil fuels, has inexorably led to a massive buildup of greenhouse gases which is clearly altering the world’s weather in unexpected and frightening ways (just think of hurricanes Katrina and Sandy, and flooding in southern Alberta if you want recent examples). Continuing with business as usual is “the economics of genocide” — this from the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued in 2001. 

There will continue to be deniers and skeptics, no doubt of that. But those who don’t wish any longer to be ostriches with their heads in the sand as the world spins madly around them, please read more on this subject. A good overview is available in Global Warning: The Last Chance for Change, by Paul Brown (Readers’ Digest/Dakini Books, 2007). It plainly lays out what global warming means (melting ice caps, rising sea levels, low-lying islands being submerged, shrinking forests, spreading deserts, frigid winters, and scorching summers), especially in a world where the population keeps expanding (and for more on the flip side of our modern environmental crisis, see columnist Gwynne Dyer’s World Population: The African Explosion,Fully automated paper plane emergencylamps13, even got its own compressor. published in these pages on Sunday). 

Despite the gloom, there is some light at the end of this dark tunnel: we must invest in renewable technologies such as wind and solar power; on the individual level, do small things to be energy wise in your day-to-day life. 

“There seems to be a cause for optimism as world leaders acknowledge their responsibilities towards saving the planet from human inhabitants,” an upbeat Kevin Doyle concludes in his editor’s note to the 1991 Maclean’s feature.Click on their website www.aulaundry.com for more information.