The Vigil to End Climate Silence kicked off this evening in Boston’s Government Center. People from all walks of life will be calling for an end to the political silence over climate change. This election year, it was put on the back burner while politicians focused on more pressing matters of the economy and foreign policy. This seems reasonable, so long as one ignores three, apparently inconvenient, things:
1) There is general scientific consensus that the climate is changing right now, that it is affecting us right now, and it will be much easier to deal with now than later.
“However, even with an 80 per cent emissions cut, damages will be large: any impact that occurs below a temperature rise of 1 °C (Figs. 1 and 2) is likely to be unavoidable, even under the most stringent mitigative action. Residual damage will be great unless we invest in adaptation now. Much of the damage could be avoided by adaptation, but again, this would require a much larger effort than is currently planned.”
M Parry, J Palutikof, C Hanson, J Lowe
Nature Reports Climate Change 2008
http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0806/full/climate.2008.50.html
“ …we can state, with a high degree of confidence, that extreme anomalies such as those in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010 were a consequence of global warming because their likelihood in the absence of global warming was exceedingly small.”
– J Hansen, M Sato, R Ruedy
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA 2012
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/07/30/1205276109.abstract
“The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has reaffirmed the position of its Board of Directors and the leaders of 18 respected organizations, who concluded based on multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society.”
– American Association For the Advancement of Science 2009
http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2009/1204climate_statement.shtml
2) A neat separation between climate change issues and economic issues is vanishing. [Check out the sources above]
3) The partition between climate change issues and foreign policy issues is predicted to crumble.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/10/19/1047081/hillary-clinton-on-energy-and-foreign-policy-we-need-to-address-the-very-real-threat-of-climate-change/
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/renee-parsons/climate-change-national-security_b_1929398.html
http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=116192
Gus Speth (who’s many hats have included Vermont Law School Professor of Law, Chairman of the U.S. Council on Environmental Quality, and Keystone XL protester/arrestee) gave a rousing speech, followed by another fantastic one by Craig Altemose of Better Future Project to a small but dedicated crowd of 40 or so people. The vigil was organized by 350MA, Students for a Just and Stable Future and several other local organizations. The gathering included organizers from Occupy Boston and Veterans for Peace. There are stalwart folks out there as I write this tonight, keeping vigil and stubbornly working to break the silence. They will be there throughout the week and I am sure they would love company.
Link: 350ma.org/vigil
Tweet: #climatesilence