Simon

Tim Flannery, a well known and respected climate change scientist, has released information about the coming IPCC-report. According to Tim Flannery, this is important so read carefully, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere already now is up in 455 ppm (parts per million). This is a number that the scientist thought we wouldn't reach until year 2017. "We thought we'd be at that threshold within about a decade," Flannery told Australian television late on Monday. "We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold," he said. "What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change." You might wonder why there is so much fuss about 455 ppm? If you haven’t yet figured it out let me try to explain it with one word: pain. And lot's of it. And it's a pain we in the western world have created. "That 200 gigatonnes of carbon pollutant, the standing stock that's in the atmosphere, is there courtesy of the industrial revolution, and we're the beneficiaries of that and most of the world missed out," he said. "So I see that as a historic debt that we owe the world. And I can't imagine a better way of paying it back than trying to help the poorest people on the planet." It doesn't help to change your light bulbs to CFLs or recycle your newspaper. The only solution and the only thing we MUST do is to decrease our CO2 emissions with over 90%, NOW. We can't afford to wait any longer. I'll finish this post with a link to the article in Washington Post and a quote from Al Gore: "I can't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power stations." Image credit: JohnLeGear. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.