The case for an oil-free future
Oil and development: The Midas touch in reverse
The oil industry - a boon or burden for its workers?
Climate change - the biggest threat
International financial institutions - key players unlocking global oil
Corporate capture of universities
UK and global resistance to big oil
the oil curse and solutions for an oil-free future
The debate about climate change is over.
Climate change natural disasters are hitting the poorest communities the hardest.
At least 98% of climate scientists agree that our planet is warming up due to the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, and that this process is set to worsen unless urgent measures are taken to rein back emissions.
The evidence is mounting quickly: global temperatures are higher than they have been for two thousand years.20 Mountain glaciers are thawing quickly across the globe, whilst the melt rate in Greenland is also accelerating, adding further to global sea level rise. These rising oceans have begun to overwhelm low-lying atoll countries, and even the east coasts of England and the United States are suffering the effects.21
The extreme summer heatwave of 2003 cost over 20,000 lives in Europe. Droughts and floods are becoming increasingly severe as global warming speeds up the planet's hydrological cycle.
According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, temperatures this century will rise between 1.4 and 5.8°C.22 Even the lower ranges of this estimate would involve the submergence of island nations, a catastrophic loss of coral reefs and the continued melting of ice caps and mountain glaciers. The higher levels would spell disaster for human civilisation and natural biodiversity alike: one recent study has suggested that global warming before 2050 could tip a quarter of animal and plant species over the edge to extinction.23
Particularly hard hit could be the Amazon rainforest: a computer model projection by the UK-based Hadley Centre envisaged the forest transforming into savannah and desert as temperatures rose and rainfall plummeted.24
None of this is inevitable, but avoiding the worst impacts will involve substantial cuts in fossil fuel emissions. Greenpeace calculated in its Carbon Logic
report25 that humanity could burn only a quarter of existing fossil fuel reserves if we were to avoid what the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change calls dangerous human interference with the climate
. As Greenpeace concludes, the exploration for new fossil fuel supplies must be halted and resources shifted into renewable energy sources.
