From: Louis de Villiers <louisviljee@gmail.com>
Subject: Time for urgent action
I am just a member of the public. But I’ve been concerned about conservation of heritage and the environment for many years. I have been appalled at the recklessness with which us humans have dealt with the beauty and abundance given to us. That, rather than appreciating this and using it wisely, we have been abusing it to the extent that we have and are continuing to drive many species to extinction. Our continuing recklessness now, when the problem and the solutions have been so clearly identified, is threatening to destroy our own survival. But, for the sake of another quick buck for those who are already financially wealthy beyond belief, we are sacrificing those less fortunate and those younger to a terrible future. Because we don’t recognise the richness of nature, we are sacrificing it for all.
As Greta Thunberg has repeatedly warned, our house is on fire. We need to take urgent and appropriate action.
It is time to declare a world-wide climate emergency. It is encouraging how quickly people around the world are recognising this and adding their voice to this call, but we need far more action.
“A billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fuelled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared. We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in World War II…”
~ Raj Reddy
From: MYAKALA RAJ REDDY
Subject: Climate Emergency Support and endorsement
Please find the attached my statement of the climate emergency declaration
Thanks and warm regards
Raj Reddy.M
CE, MTech, FIE, MISTE, MASCE, MCIOB, MCMI, MIACET
I am calling the Heads of the Nations to work like soldiers in the war and declare war on climate change.
Its already late, but at least to stop the further damage of this nuclear reactor-like chain actions of global warming. It must be stopped in every possible way, and this means as the most important priority. We must act religiously in this aspect to extend human life on Earth.
Damage so severe that global climate systems could create a cascade effect in a world of chaos, where political panic is the norm and humans are on a path facing the end of civilization – that’s not going to be a problem to the Earth, which has been around for 4.5 billion years, but only to the life on Earth, which slowly will perish. And humans are the most endangered spices of them all, destroying their own life.
We don’t take our environment seriously. The world’s current actions are evidence of that. We know that during the 2020s carbon emissions probably won’t be curbed. So think about the world we know, and imagine what could happen. We have already witnessed the catastophe last year in Kerala and this year in Orissa in India, and so on, as the rains are now in dole drum of 45 days delay in touching this warm Earth.
You could say it is ok for people above 50 years of age to perish, but what about our children and the world they will inherit? What if 4°C-degree changes really do create some symptoms of dystopia?
As this damage is irreversible, all human beings should work like a farmer who is always looking for an opportunity to green the land, every inch available. Now is the time all nations should wake and not to waste a single minute in working with their utmost care and take the responsibility towards the only Earth in our vicinity by planting trees, protecting the planted trees, cleaning own garbage and recycling, not wasting the water, and not damaging the eco systems by killing the fauna and flora.
Not to bring any more heat generated systems in use, rather use very simplistic life like a villager, use walking – and use public transport system when walking is not possible.
So what do you tell your kids?
Global greenhouse gas emissions are likely to peak in 2030 and begin to fall due to a drop in fossil fuel use, but the damage has been done, and global heating will reach 3°C or higher. So that’s a different world, as we can see already – with forest fires and super storms in 2019. Multiply that by many factors, and add in climate migrants and a significantly higher global population.
So by that 2050 date? Globally, 55 per cent of the population lives in areas subject to more than 20 days of lethal heat a year, beyond the human threshold of survivability. People are going to die, and it will just be the new normal.
North America will continue to suffer from devastating weather extremes, including wildfires, heat waves, droughts and flooding. But just much worse and more frequent.
Two billion people globally are affected by lack of water. Food production falls by one-fifth as droughts, heat waves, flooding and storms affect crops. Up to 1 billion people could be displaced. That’s a lot of bodies and a lot of chaos.
Even slight rises of the ocean could lead to some cities becoming inhabitable. And here is the panic button. Rising ocean levels make some of the world’s most populous cities uninhabitable, including Mumbai, Jakarta, Canton, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Lagos, Bangkok and Manila. Billions of people must be relocated.
What evidence will you need to declare an emergency?
Carbon and methane now represent the deadliest enemy of all time, the first force fully capable of harrying, scattering, and impoverishing our entire civilization.
We’re used to war as metaphor: the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on cancer. Usually this is just a rhetorical device, a way of saying, “We need to focus our attention and marshal our forces to fix something we don’t like.” But this is no metaphor. By most of the ways we measure wars, climate change is the real deal: Carbon and methane are seizing physical territory, sowing havoc and panic, racking up casualties, and even destabilizing governments. Over the past few years, record-setting droughts have helped undermine the brutal strongman of Syria and fuel the rise of Boko Haram in Nigeria.
It’s not that global warming is like a world war. It is a world war. Its first victims, ironically, are those who have done the least to cause the crisis. But it’s a world war aimed at us all. And if we lose, we will be as decimated and helpless as the losers in every conflict – except that this time, there will be no winners, and no end to the planet-wide occupation that follows.
The global enemy already devastated the North: Enemy forces have seized huge swaths of territory; with each passing week, another 22,000 square miles of Arctic ice disappears. Experts dispatched to the battlefield in July saw little cause for hope, especially since this siege is one of the oldest fronts in the war. “In 30 years, the area has shrunk approximately by half,” said a scientist who examined the onslaught. “There doesn’t seem anything able to stop this.”
In the Pacific this spring, the enemy staged a daring breakout across thousands of miles of ocean, waging a full-scale assault on the region’s coral reefs. In a matter of months, long stretches of formations like the Great Barrier Reef — dating back past the start of human civilization and visible from space — were reduced to white bone-yards.
Day after day, week after week, saboteurs behind our lines are unleashing a series of brilliant and overwhelming attacks. In the past few months alone, our foes have used a firestorm to force the total evacuation of a city of 90,000 in Canada, drought to ravage crops to the point where southern Africans are literally eating their seed corn, and floods to threaten the priceless repository of art in the Louvre.
The enemy is even deploying biological weapons to spread psychological terror: The zika virus, loaded like a bomb into a growing army of mosquitoes, has shrunk the heads of new born babies across an entire continent; panicked health ministers in seven countries are now urging women not to get pregnant. And as in all conflicts, millions of refugees are fleeing the horrors of war, their numbers swelling daily as they’re forced to abandon their homes to escape famine and desolation and disease.
I don’t think you can actually imagine that world. A world where rising droughts leads to rising food shortages and people clamour to get help all over the world on a more consistent basis. A world of climate change uncertainty and the huge economic cost of global warming — not to mention just the lower quality of our lives that this impact.
In a worst-case scenario, those 3 or 4°C degrees lead to changes in society that pressure our ability to adapt and survive, leading to a chain reaction of events that puts millions of lives at risk.
And we are losing. For years, our leaders chose to ignore the warnings of our best scientists, top military strategists and environmentalists. Global warming, they told us, was beginning a stealth campaign that would lay waste to vast stretches of the planet, uprooting and killing millions of innocent civilians. But instead of paying heed and taking obvious precautions, our leaders chose to strengthen the enemy with society’s endless combustion; a billion explosions of a billion pistons inside a billion cylinders have fuelled a global threat as lethal as the mushroom-shaped nuclear explosions we long feared.
We’re under attack from climate change — and our only hope is to mobilize like we did in World War II. We must now work relentlessly in protecting the humans, first of all by restoring the ecosystems and declaring war on climate change with a constitutional provision.
M.RAJ REDDY. CE, MTech, FIE, MISTE, MASCE, ACIOB, MCMI, MIACET
Expert on the Climate change and Sustainable cities
Director CDI, National Academy of Construction, Hyderabad, India
Thank you for the article. Not exactly uplifting but then it is not meant to be but rather a call to action. We are calling on our local Council to declare a climate emergency. I am particularly concerned about the things we just don’t know, like tipping points, runaway climate, changing ocean currents.