Climate change, I learnt a lot of that from school, of how the ice caps melt and sea level rises, but even if I knew it is all anthropogenic, I never thought of it from the perspective of law and politics, this course really opened a direction of thinking for me.
The science behind climate change truly shocked me. The statistics shown depict how we ruined a balance of more than 800 thousand years by causing a rapid rise in the greenhouse effect. Though most of us are aware of climate change, seeing the line in the graph rose rapidly in the last century hurts. A common concept is that whoever polluted most heavily should be responsible for fixing the problem, there were four graphs of the largest polluter using different methods of measurement, including polluters as a whole, per capita, cumulatively and per $1000, I didn’t even know there were so many ways to measure carbon emissions. The countries ‘dominating’ the leaderboards are the USA, the EU, China and Russia, the main developed countries. It’s ironic isn’t it, wealthy in resources and technology, yet the major culprits of climate change.
Many laws were implemented to combat climate change, but few proved useful, either lacking ambition or powerful participants. One of the international laws I remember most is the Kyoto Protocol, half the countries that participated reduced their carbon emissions significantly, but it did nothing to the global situation, this is solid proof that no matter how strong a country may be, we are weak against climate change. Since every country contributed the Earth’s sickness, every country shall work together to solve the problem we created, lead by the major developed countries, put aside all selfishness and instead put their technology and resources to good use.
I didn’t expect to get all this from a talk, but I’m glad I did. The main barricade is major countries, when balancing their economy and climate change, they often neglect the latter. Climate change is a global issue, and when it is too late, when tens of millions of people lose their homes to flooding, they won’t care about the economy. Action must be taken immediately, for the clock is ticking, it’s 100 seconds to midnight, yes, there is still time, but not very much.