This is cross-posted from 350.org:
We have an exciting announcement today! One of the world’s greatest leaders on climate change, President Mohammed Nasheed of the Maldives, has issued a statement calling on citizens around the world to take action on October 24 as part of the International Day of Climate Action. President Nasheed has been a vocal advocate for 350 ppm, the only climate target that can protect the survival of his island nation. Please take a look at the video below and read Nasheed’s endorsement of the 350 target and the October 24 Day of Action. But most important, pass it on, and help build this movement to protect the survival of all nations and peoples.
Climate Change Requires a Real Movement
by Mohammed Nasheed, President of the Maldives
Here in the Maldives, it’s easy to see why the math of the current climate change debate just doesn’t add up — and why negotiators are going to have to work a lot harder before the Copenhagen climate conference if they’re interested in the survival of much of the planet.
The Maldives stretches 800 kilometers across the Indian Ocean, an archipelago of 1,200 tropical islands just a few meters above sea level. It is incomparably beautiful but also highly vulnerable. Sea level rise of even half a meter would make much of it uninhabitable; meanwhile, ocean temperature spikes could destroy the coral reefs that protect these islands from the waves.
This is why no one in the Maldives is applauding the recent pledge of the G-8 nations to try and hold temperature increases to 2 degrees and the atmospheric concentration of CO2 to 450 parts per million. A few years ago, those might have been laudable goals, but new science makes clear they’re out of date.
After the rapid Arctic sea ice melt in the summer of 2007, scientists realized that global warming was happening more quickly and on a larger scale than they had anticipated. Wherever they looked — high-altitude glaciers, hydrological cycles, the spread of mosquitoes — they found change happening decades ahead of schedule. In January 2008, James Hansen, one of the world’s leading climatologists, published a series of papers showing that the actual safe limit for carbon in the atmosphere was at most 350 parts per million. Anything higher than that limit, warns Hansen, could seed “irreversible, catastrophic effects” on a global scale.
Thanks for posting this Phil. Powerful testimony! I had the privilege of meeting President Nasheed this week and am deeply inspired by his leadership. I had to blog about it!
Read about more of what he has to say here: http://www.chesapeakeclimate.org/blog/?p=2121