UN climate change chief tells charities to stop complaining about global warming

Instead, Janos Pasztor suggests they come up with more workable solutions

TOM BAWDEN Author Biography
 
ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
 
Saturday 04 July 2015
216
PRINT
A A A
Environmental charities should spend less time complaining about global warming and more time coming up with workable solutions to the problem, the UN’s climate change chief has said.
NGOs have traditionally spent their time in opposition and must devote more of their efforts to being constructive, according to Janos Pasztor, the former WWF campaigner who is now UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon’s official climate change spokesman.
“There is a role for opposition and saying ‘no’ but there is a big difference being saying ‘no’ and saying ‘how we can make this work?’. We need the NGOs to constructively help us to create a new, sustainable, low-carbon world,” Mr Pasztor told The Independent.
Most scientists agree that the evidence for man-made climate change is overwhelming, meaning that the debate is moving on from whether global warming exists to how best to tackle the problem.
As such, the role of NGOs is evolving, Mr Pasztor suggests.
READ MORE: QUIETER WIND TURBINES ONE STEP CLOSER
CLIMATE CHANGE 'COULD LEAD TO SMALLER LOAVES OF BREAD IN 2050'
PREVENTING CLIMATE CHANGE 'COULD BOOST HEALTH WORLDWIDE'
 
Mr Pasztor also said that climate change should be taken out of the “environmental box” and described in terms of its wider effects, such as dangers to global health.
Mr Pasztor will play a key role in crucial UN climate change talks in Paris in December – where world leaders have pledged to agree to limit global warming to 2C.
In his role at the UN, Mr Pasztor engages with NGOs, government leaders and industry on Mr Ki-moon’s behalf.
Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, said: “I would completely agree that it is critical for environmental organisations to campaign for solutions .
“The problem is that as long as some companies and governments carry on proposing new airports and looking for yet more oil and gas, irrespective of the evidence, environmental groups will be forced to carry on opposing these crazy actions.”

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