UN says climate change as great a threat as war
Friday • March 2, 2007
UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said on Thursday that global warming posed the same threat to humanity as war and warned of an “unconscionable legacy” being left for future generations.
In a speech to a UN International School Conference, Ban acknowledged that the “majority” of the UN’s work still focuses on the prevention and resolution of conflict.
“But the danger posed by war to all of humanity — and to our planet — is at least matched by the climate crisis and global warming,” he said.
Pledging to raise the issue at a summit of the G8 major industrialised nations in June, Ban said the absence of decisive measures to combat climate change would place an appalling burden on succeeding generations.
“That would be an unconscionable legacy; one which we must all join hands to avert,” he said. “As it stands, the damage already inflicted on our ecosystem will take decades, perhaps centuries, to reverse — if we act now.”
The secretary general highlighted the far-reaching ramifications of global warming and its impact on economic growth, the spread of disease, migration patterns and other changes that “are likely to become a major driver of war and conflict.”
Referring to the G8 summit in Germany, Ban stressed that the task of tackling climate change was beyond the capacity of any one nation.
“We are all complicit in the process of global warming … these issues transcend borders,” he said. “Only concerted and coordinated international action, supported and sustained by individual initiative, will be sufficient.”
The United Nations is due to hold a conference on climate change in Bali in December.
Earlier this month, UN scientists delivered their starkest warning yet about global warming, saying fossil fuel pollution would raise temperatures this century, worsen floods, droughts and hurricanes, melt polar sea ice and damage the climate system for a thousand years to come.
In its first assessment in six years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) dealt a crippling blow to the shrinking body of opinion that claims higher temperatures in past decades have been driven by natural, not man-made, causes.
The United Nations’ paramount scientific authority on global warming highlighted a range of changes that had taken place in Earth’s ice cover, rainfall patterns and permafrost and declared that most of the temperature rise over the past 50 years had “very likely” been caused by human activity. — AFP
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My Thoughts and Opinions
I feel that global warming is just a time bomb which is counting down faster and faster as we humans destroy the earth by polluting the environment in all sorts of ways. I hope that the human race will turn around and unite as one to prevent this catastrophe from surfacing in our lives so that the next generations of people can live to tell the stories of how their ancestors saved them from a humanitarian disaster!
There are quite a few things we can do to prevent this impending disaster. One example is to use more public transport instead of private transport vehicles like cars which consume fuel and release huge amounts of carbon which pollute the environment. Certain environmentally-friendly cars can still be used like the solar-powered car though. Another example is to grow more plants all over the world so as to reduce the amount of greenhouse gases in the air which damage the ozone layer.
By reducing the amounts of greenhouse gases and carbon, global warming will be, if not gradually stopped, slowed down by quite a bit at the very least. I hope that scientists will soon find a way to totally replace fuel in cars so that carbon will not be produced on such a large scale every single day.
I feel for the environment as I live in it myself. This is why my Research Education group had decided to embark on the Singapore National GreenWave competition which requires us to contribute innovative ideas on how to save the environment from further harm. Our idea currently has been refined to a point where we are thinking of creating an interactive web portal where people can learn about caring about the environment. We will also include entertaining games which are environment related and we will put ads up for free on our website which advertise for environmentally friendly products such as biodegradable disposable cutlery, which helps in the waste management of the earth. I hope our greenwave project is successful and we might get the prize money so that we can sustain our web portal for a longer period of time.
~357 words~
Signing off,
Ng Wei Zhong
