Climate Impacts

Our world today is hotter than it has been in two thousand years. The 1990s was, globally, the warmest decade and the 1900s, the warmest century during the last 1000 years. The seven warmest years have occurred this decade, with the warmest being 1998.  By the end of the century, if current trends continue, the global temperature will likely climb higher than at any time in the past two million years.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "there is new and stronger evidence that the observed warming over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities". For more than a century, people have relied on fossil fuels such as oil and coal for their energy needs, with coal being the dirtiest fossil fuel. Burning fossil fuels such as coal releases into the atmosphere massive amounts of the global warming gases such as carbon dioxide -the most significant greenhouse gas. The more we release carbon dioxide, the more we increase the "greenhouse effect" on our planet by trapping in heat and increasing global temperatures and creating catastrophic impacts on the planet's ecosystems - impacts that will hit developing countries the hardest.

There is strong evidence that extreme weather events – such as hurricanes, floods, droughts and heat waves – are increasing because of climate change. According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the economic costs of extreme weather events are  growing rapidly.  Since 1960, the number of global weather disasters has increase four-fold, real economic losses seven-fold. Real losses are estimated from US$ 3.9 billion per year in the 1950's to a staggering US$40 billion per year in the 1990s. The cummulative number of people affected by disasters rose to two billion in the 1990s, up from 740 million in the 1970s. Virtually all of these millions were concentrated in poorer countries. Rising sea levels, melting glaciers, massive flooding, decline of agricultural yields, an increase in risk of species extinction and biodiversity loss - these are the other impacts that we may face if we don't act today to stop climate change.