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Climate change: how did we get here?
No deal in Copenhagen means climate change will only increase the magnitude and the frequency of weather related disasters. Mother Nature is not waiting for a bureaucratic resolution and she does not accept compromises. UN Radio's Donn Bobb looks at the impact of climate change, and how we got here.
Cars are under water in a flooded zone in Haiti
FX: Hurricane force winds/Heavy sea swells
NARRATOR: The effects of climate change are many and often disastrous.
TAPE: Climate change, warming, unusual weather, violent weather, sea level rise, receding glaciers, droughts, firestorms-very, very serious consequences of this level of carbon dioxide.
NARRATOR: So, how did we get here? According to Carlos Fuller, the deputy director of the Caribbean Climate Change Centre in Belize, it started more than 100 years ago, when people began burning more coal and oil for their homes, factories, and transportation. It is believed that these changes are being triggered by an excess build-up of gases such as carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere. A phenomenon is known as climate change or global warming
Fuller: As we started to increase our agriculture production, we started to emit more methane from soil, water and so on. So more and more of these gases go into the atmosphere, making the blanket too thick. As a result, the air and the earth warming up much more than necessary and as a result, we're now creating global warming.
NARRATOR: The Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, made up of more than 200 scientists throughout the world, warns that as a result of climate change, precipitation increased significantly in eastern parts of North and South America, northern Europe and northern and Central Asia while declining in Africa's Sahel region, the Mediterranean, Southern Africa and parts of Southern Asia. Evidence of this can be found with a woman in a village in the African country of Niger who faces the challenge of declining rainfall and an encroaching desert which is destroying her traditional way of life as her crops fail to yield enough food to feed her family.
Woman in a village : We used to get five or six inches of rain, but now the rainy season is much shorter. I'm really worried for my children. Sometimes we go three or four nights without eating.
NARRATOR: So what can be done to adapt to and mitigate the effects of climate change? Developing countries have urged industrialized nations to take immediate action to scale up significantly the level of financing devoted to adaptation through the provision of new and additional resources. Developed countries, for their part, argue that the costs of adaptation and mitigation are prohibitive. The deal the United Nations is seeking in Copenhagen, includes such action as adapting to the negative consequences of climate change, ways to reduce green house gas emissions and financing both mitigation and adaptation measures.
PRES: UN Radio's Donn Bobb on the impact of climate change and how we got here.
(duration: 2'34")
