Climate change as urgent as ISIS, Ebola

Secretary of State John Kerry said the threats posed by climate change should be addressed with as much "immediacy" as confronting the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and the Ebola outbreak.

During a meeting with foreign ministers on Sunday, Kerry said global warming is creating "climate refugees."
"We see people fighting over water in some places. There are huge challenges to food security and challenges to the ecosystem, our fisheries and ... the acidification of the ocean is a challenge for all of us," Kerry said. 

"And when you accrue all of this, while we are confronting ISIL and we are confronting terrorism and we are confronting Ebola and other things, those are immediate," he added, using an alternate acronym for the terrorist group. 
"This also has an immediacy that people need to come to understand, but it has even greater longer-term consequences that can cost hundreds of billions, trillions of dollars, lives, and the security of the world," Kerry continued.
Kerry has drawn the ire of lawmakers in the past for comparing the threats of climate change to terrorism, and weapons of mass destruction.
Still, Kerry hasn't backed down, and is a key player in President Obama's diplomatic efforts on climate change.
Kerry made the comments ahead of a United Nations climate summit in New York where the president on Tuesday will urge 125 heads of state to take "ambitious" action in the fight against global warming.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Global warming could drive world temperatures up 7 degrees by 2100

Another piece of the  global warming  puzzle has been revealed. According to new research published on Jan. 1 in the journal  Nature , increased levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the number of clouds that form. This, in turn, will cause temperatures to rise much higher than previous climate-change models have predicted. According to this new research, global temperatures could rise 4 degrees Celsius or 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2100, and twice that by 2200. Lead researcher Steven Sherwood at the Climate Change Research Center at Australia's University of New South Wales, told  The Guardian  that this level of climate change would be "catastrophic rather than simply dangerous. For example, it would make life difficult, if not impossible, in much of the tropics, and would guarantee the eventual melting of the Greenland ice sheet and some of the Antarctic ice sheet."   In a  news release , Sherwood said this new research is not an
Read more

Climate Change Skeptics Lash Out At New Global Warming ‘Hiatus’ Study That Questions Ocean Temperature Measurements

Image
Share on facebook 227 Share on twitter 22 Share on linkedin Share on google_plusone_share More Sharing Services 128 An estimated 35,000 walruses are pictured crowding on a beach near Point Lay, Alaska, because of a lack of sea ice in this September 2014 photo. A study published June 4, 2015, refuting the notion that the Earth’s temperature rise has been interrupted since 1998 was lambasted by the usual skeptics and their supporters.  Corey Accardo/NOAA/NMFS/AFSC/NMML/Via Reuters A new climate study was released Thursday that refutes the claim that there’s been a slowdown, or “hiatus” in the rate the Earth is warming, but some conservative-leaning media sites skipped covering the study itself and chose instead to promote the views of the minority of climate change deniers, such as  Christopher Monckton . For example, the Drudge Report, an immensely popular headline aggregator operated by conservative Matthew Drudge, prominently di
Read more

Why Is Critical Technology to Stop Global Warming Stalled?

Image
Pumping CO2 underground can help fight climate change but remains untested for the most part March 12, 2015  | By  Howard J. Herzog  and  The Conversation US Injection of CO2 and other gases into geological formations has been practiced for many years.  Credit:  SaskPower There are many uncertainties with respect to global climate change, but there is one thing about which I have no doubts: we will not solve climate change by running out of fossil fuels. Understanding this leads to three posible pathways we can follow to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, and explains why I’ve chosen to focus  my research  on carbon capture and storage. We can: continue to burn fossil fuels with little or no restrictions. We will blow by atmospheric CO2 concentrations of 450 parts per million (ppm), the level many scientists think is dangerous to exceed, and we will keep on going. We have enough fossil fuels to easily go above 1,000 ppm. The impact will be significant, perhaps catastro
Read more