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Earth911 talks with Dr. William Ripple, Distinguished Professor of Ecology at Oregon State University and director of the Alliance of World Scientists, who’s the lead writer of a name for motion in response to the catastrophic local weather harm the world expertise throughout 2020 in Scientific American. Pointing to file international temperatures, a traditionally lengthy hurricane season that brought on greater than $46 billion in damages within the United States, and wildfires that burned greater than 4 million acres in California, they declared that “The local weather emergency has arrived and is accelerating extra quickly than most scientists anticipated.”
Dr. Ripple explains how 2020, which tied 2016 for hottest year on record, noticed occasions that recommend local weather change is accelerating. Science-based warnings might have been too conservative, and that the brand new regular will seemingly seem like a sequence of catastrophes, with widespread harm occurring yearly in lots of areas of the planet, if humanity doesn’t instantly cease the expansion in CO2 emissions. He suggests six key areas of motion, together with a shift to plant-based diets and decreasing food waste, a give attention to eliminating short-term pollution reminiscent of hydrofluorocarbons used as refrigerants, in addition to common schooling for women and girls to decrease beginning charges and encourage wider consciousness of local weather impacts. We additionally focus on the urgent want to deal with local weather migration in international and nationwide planning.
Learn extra about how one can change your lifestyle to scale back carbon emissions in travel, home energy use, and when you recycle.
This podcast was initially printed on January 20, 2021.
