What I’ve learned from Al Gore’s Climate Reality training — 1
It was a privilege to join the three day Climate Reality training by Al Gore in Berlin last week. My personal highlight was an almost three hour long titillating, splashing presentation by Gore himself, in which he showed were we are now and where we are headed. It was not just interesting or fun. It was also worrying and scary. Luckily not all hope is lost if we step up our game.
I returned to The Netherlands from the training on Friday –my train ride (of course) made possible by the Global Shapers Community of the World Economic Forum– and that evening I started to receive warnings about the current local situation in The Netherlands. Beware of wild fires, no spraying and no bathing was the header of one article. Another one mentioned the smoke and firing ban, and mentioned that in some provinces farmers aren’t allowed to use water from their ditches any longer. The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) warned that future summers may be even drier than expected up until now. This is exactly what Al Gore discussed. In the first series of blogs, of which this is the first one, I will describe the problem more in depth. In the latter ones I will focus on solutions. And on what you can do yourself!
Climate change, because that is what this is about, will influence our lives heavily. That has already started. Today we are spewing 110 million tons of manmade global warming pollution into the air. Just like yesterday and just like tomorrow. Every single day. Seventeen of the eighteen hottest years on recored have occured since 2001. Number eighteen was 1998, not exactly very long before 2001. This information wasn’t new to me however.
Because in 2010 I started studying in London. As part of my studies I wrote an article about land grabbing, the purchase or lease of large areas of arable land by companies or other states, where these buyers arrange their own security and up to a large degree set their own laws. This land was used to, for example, grow crops that could be used for biofuels. It was not about just a little bit of land: we are talking millions of hectares in 2010. This caused the situation that countries of which a large part of the population was threatened with starvation were exporting foods. What worried me then was that the amount of arable land was quickly diminishing.
Ever since I wrote that article I have been following the news on and studying our climate and climate change. “What can I possibly learn at this training?” I asked myself before the start. “I think I know a whol lot about it already.” The training reaffirmed that I already knew quite a bit. I also discovered immediately that there was still a whole lot to learn. I specifically learned a lot about the impact of climate change on global systems like our food supply, water and health.
Before diving into that I’ll start with the beginning. Al Gore showed terrifically that many place on earth are experiencing record heat and heat rises. 2017 was the 41st consecutive year in which the global temperature was above the 20th century average temperature. For my neighboring country Germany temperatures are expected to rise with 4.6 degrees Celsius in comparison with the average of 1971 till 2000. All-time record highs have been measured in India (51 degrees) in 2016, Kuwait (also 51 degrees) in 2017. Here it caused birds to die from heat exposure while in flight, causing them to drop dead from the air. On the 4th of January of this year the police of Victoria, Australia issued a warning that drivers had to keep in mind delays, because 10 kilometer of freeway had started melting (though melting roads are not unique). The highest temperature ever measured in April was 50,2 degrees, this year in Pakistan. And the summer is still to start! This winter the temperature on the north pole was 28 degrees higher than average. This caused the temperature to be above zero, and caused the north pole to melt, in winter time!
I could continue like this for a while, but I hope you get what these examples show: it is getting hot. Really hot. The next blog will be about the cold and water.
