WORRIED ABOUT YOUR FUTURE?

Thanks to Father Shay for his incredible mission...

Huge fire balls from massive bush fires engulfed homes and incinerated unfortunate people in South Australia, the result of prolonged drought while massive floods swamped the North Territories. In the Caribbean, massive storms greater than previously experienced created havoc and loss of life and property. Europe and North America have been hit with ice and snowstorms greater than previous years. Climatic extremes are on the increase and they are not a natural occurrence these days unlike 12,000 and half a million years ago. Then climate change came slowly and the earth and plants and animals had time to adapt, change and survive.

Ever since the “Big Bang” and the universe came into being, heat has been at the center of life - and death. Life on earth depends on the sun, a fraction to close and we fry, a fraction more distant and we freeze. In the past, the slight changes in the earth¹s rotation, a tiny tilt of its axis caused the planet to heat up or cool down. That was natural climate change over eons but now human industrial activity has caused a huge increase in global warming by releasing millions of tons of Carbon Dioxide(CO2) and methane into the atmosphere in the last 100 years.

These gases form a blanket around the earth, a transparent one, as if putting the planet into a greenhouse - hence Greenhouse gases. The rays of the sun can penetrate but the resulting heat cannot be reflected back out into space because the gases block its escape. The ice sheet at the North Pole used to be a great reflector but it is melting so fast that even the Polar bears could be wiped out.

Those living in the developed nations consume more and burn more fossil fuel than the all the poor nations combined. However, making the matter worse, India and China have almost equaled the C02 emission rates of North America. We are all responsible for global warming when we buy products that are not Fair-Trade and damage the environment. When the Philippines and Vietnam were targeted as sites for shrimp farms to feed the Japanese market, government officials allowed the dense bushy mangroves to be bulldozed for shrimp ponds. Millions of tons of methane gas was released from the marsh lands and millions of tons of CO2 was released when the bushes were burnt. With the rapid rise in world temperatures, the Siberian and Canadian permafrost is melting and releasing billions of tons of methane, more dense and dangerous than CO2.

Nature creates its own CO2 emissions helped by criminal arsonists. In 2007, in seven days of wildfires, an estimated 8.7 millions tons of CO2 was released making a denser global blanket. The Australian bush fires will add millions of tons more. Wildfires in the USA pump 322 Million tons of Carbon Dioxide every year into the atmosphere. An estimated 145-255 million tons of CO2 are given off by Volcanoes. The planet cant cope and absorb this huge amount, most of the rain forests that absorb CO2 are gone. If this goes on and the amount of CO2 released reaches 3000 gigatones, then that's the tipping point for the Greenland ice sheet, it melts. Oceans rise and coast line and islands sink. I saw a Google picture of Greenland and it looks like a third has melted already. Human consumption and production activities pumps six gigatones of CO2 per year but the planet can only absorb 3 gigatones a year. A gigaton is one billion metric tons. One billion metric tons is what one cubic kilometer(one billion cubic meters) of water weighs. It boggles the mind and almost unimaginable.

Each of us can do something to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce global warming. We can drive less, take the bus, ride a train instead of a plane, turn off unneeded power appliances to reduce energy use, consume less beef. Did you know that one cow gives off 400 liters of methane a day? There are billions of them doing that. Rain forests are being cut to provide pasture, grow corn to feed them. Malaria spreads as mosquitoes thrive in rising temperatures.

In the Philippines, 92 percent of the rain forests have been logged out. We can campaign against deforestation, coal-fired power plants and instead we can join the Preda Fair-Trade tree planting project and lobby for solar, wind and geothermal power generation. We can save the planet and the polar bear and thousands of beautiful species, even ourselves. END

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