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Climate Change
Recent reports confirm our planet is heating up, climate change is visibly happening. FoE has been saying it for years! Even if you don’t know the science, you can see there are growing numbers of us using increasing amounts of fossil fuels – gas, oil and coal – and creating gases as we burn these fuels in our travel, homes, and cooking. The carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases can’t escape and thus remain circulating in the Earth’s atmosphere. So heat is trapped, like in a greenhouse - the planet warms, and temperature rises of between 1.8 – 4 deg.C are predicted within the century. Ice caps are melting , low lying cities will become uninhabitable as a result of flooding, deserts will get drier and broader, and the natural world will continue to evolve in unpredictable ways. It’s too late to stop many of these changes, but if we act fast now, within 10 years we will have made good progress in slowing it down. We can see evidence of climate change in the UK and here in Shrewsbury – early spring plants, flooding, high winds.
It has been suggested that not only must we do our own bit in our own lives, but that this alone will not be enough. We must organise ourselves politically for greater awareness that CLIMATE CHANGE is the biggest challenge to ever have faced humanity, and a challenge that needs to be tackled on local, national, and international fronts.
Friends of the Earth has an ongoing campaign called The Big Ask, to get the Government to cut C02 emissions every year by 3% from now on. Please support us on this campaign.
I Count is the campaign of the Stop Climate Chaos coalition, the ever-growing coalition of more than 50 organisations including Friends of the Earth, Women’s Institute, Wildlife Trusts, Action Aid, CAFOD, CPRE, Garden Organic, Greenpeace, Islamic relief, Oxfam, RSPB, Unison, Woodland Trusts, WDM and WWF-UK. www.icount.org.uk
Good website for scientific evidence, information, discussion, articles and connections is: www.realclimate.org
also Climate Outreach
& Information Network www.coinet.org.uk
and www.climatedenial.org
lots of info on
www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
about how to go
carbon neutral - www.goingcarbonneutral.co.uk
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