admin November 4th, 2009
There’s a lot of noise around at the moment about the causes of climate change. The American people have decided that it wasn’t their fault after all – more now believe that natural causes lie behind global warming than believe there is a human effect – and the ‘deniers’ seeming to grow in number even as the scientific evidence grows stronger by the month.
George Monbiot in The Guardian puts it all down to our fear of death. Another view is that the stronger the scientific evidence gets, the more certain it is that we are going to have to change our treasured lifestyles – lifestyles that have caused the problem in the first place. And it is this threat to our lifestyles that brings out the Inner Denier in everyone.
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Tags: Climate change, Environmental Justice Foundation, Global warming, Monbiot, Refugees
admin September 17th, 2009
So now it’s official. The World Bank has spoken. Climate change is not just the cause of more extreme weather events, which hit developing countries disproportionately, it is also disproportionately damaging to them economically.
The World Development Report 2010, the Press edition of which has just been published, comments, “Warming of 2°C could result in a 4 to 5 percent permanent reduction in annual per capita consumption in Africa and South Asia, as opposed to minimal losses in high-income countries…It is estimated that developing countries will bear most of the costs of the damages—some 75–80 percent.”
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Tags: Carbon emissions, Climate change, GDP, Sub-Saharan Africa, World Bank, World Development Report
