Autor: Ana Buonomano | Publicado: 2015-09-01T03:41:00-07:00


Climate Change: Act Now or condemn our children to a world beyond repair

ABC News via Good Morning America




Key points from president Obama's recent warning on climate change:





- Future generations will face harsh consequences if we don’t fix the issue soon.&nbsp;

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;&nbsp;



“Climate change is no longer some far-off problem. It is happening here. It is happening now”





&nbsp;“The time to heed the cynics and critics and the deniers has passed. The time to plead ignorance has surely passed,” Obama said. “Those who want to ignore the science, they are increasingly alone. They are on their own shrinking island.”





“Any so-called leader who doesn’t take this issue seriously or treats it like a joke is not fit to lead,” he said. “On this issue, of all issues, there is such a thing as being too late, and that moment is almost upon us.”





“Climate change is a trend that affects all trends. Economic trends, security trends, Everything will be impacted and becomes more dramatic with each passing year,” he said. “Desperate refugees seeking the sanctuary of nations not their own, political disruptions that could trigger multiple conflicts around the globe, that’s not a future of strong economic growth.&nbsp;That’s not a future where freedom and human rights is&nbsp;on the move.”





But he was cautious to emphasize that no nation was “moving fast enough.”





“If we were to abandon our course of action—if we stopped trying to build a clean energy economy and reduce carbon pollution —&nbsp;if we do nothing to stop glaciers from melting faster and oceans from rising faster and forests from burning faster and storms from growing stronger, we will condemn our children to a planet beyond their capacity to repair it,” he said.





“We know that human activity is changing the climate. That is beyond dispute. Everything else is politics,” he said.



______________________________________________________________________



- Ana's opinion: I think it is great that president Obama is trying to change some of the government's policies by switching our main energy sources from the extremely pollutant coal to sustainable power plants. But given the dimension of the problem, I wished that he had suggested that each of us as a citizen is able to&nbsp;make a significant difference on global warming&nbsp;by simply eating less meat, for example. The UN has stated that meat production is responsible for 18% of greenhouse emissions - more than all types of transport (cars, trucks, airplanes, etc) combined.
"Livestock now use 30 per cent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 per cent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 per cent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20 per cent of pastures considered degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution from animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops." UN Report As the California governor Jerry Brown pointed out when talking about the recent severe drought faced by the State, "if you ask me, I think you should be eating veggie burgers".