November 2016 is a real Good News Bad News month for the climate.
The Paris climate deal has come into force. As this is being written the US Presidential Election outcome is not yet known and how a Trump win could wreck the agreement is unclear. Whatever the outcome much more needs to be done. The UN Emissions Gap Report indicates that – even with the emission reduction plans nations have submitted under the Paris agreement – we are heading for a temperature rise of around 3 degrees, under which many millions of people would have neither a home nor food.
Bringing things back to the personal level, a new study has provided a basis for linking the emissions each of us are responsible for to the loss of Arctic sea ice. On current trends, all summer Arctic ice will be gone in 20 years. Each person in the UK with an average annual CO2 emissions of 7.5 tonnes is responsible for 22.5 square metres of sea ice disappearing each year. That is something we can at least picture. Here is why arctic ice is so important, apart from those stranded polar bears:
- Rising sea levels will result in loss of habitat for many humans as well as other species
- Ice is white and reflects sunlight. Melting of summer ice adds to ocean warming.
So… two actions for this month
- Please make the Geetotal commitment (if you have still to do this) and tell friends about it. The sea ice data provides a graphic way to illustrate the difference each of us can make
- As the first post Paris conference gets underway this month (COP22 7-18 November) , sign the petition asking world leaders to freeze new fossil fuel projects, here
And do please continue to give us give feedback on carbon footprint assessment and Geetotal in general.
Through the month, we give regular tweets and retweets (we don’t have the resource to repeat on Facebook.
Do follow wegeetees if you are a Twitter user and please retweet, see
https://twitter.com/wegeetees
Best wishes
The Geetotal team
www.geetotal.org/
Geetotal 