OXFAM Global Warming Report

Suffering the Science Brings Global Warming Home

by Deb Powers

OXFAM global warming report, July 2009Global warming is a reality that is affecting the lives of millions of people right now.On Monday, OXFAM released a new report that puts a human face on the bleak realities facing millions of people in the countries affected most by global warming, not in some far off, unknowable future, but right now, every morning and every day. Suffering the Science: Climate change, people and poverty takes a hard look at the latest science available and blends it with stories collected by researchers in town meetings across the countries most affected by global warming right now.

The report has one key message - developed nations, the nations that have most benefitted from the use of carbon fuels and most contributed to the current global warming crisis, are the nations that will feel its real effects last and least. In the meantime, while we argue about the "reality" of global warming and whether or not our industrial activities have a hand in causing it, millions of people in the most fragile economies in the world are already suffering the effects.

Human Effects of Global Warming - Disease, Drought, Disaster

The statistics about the effects of global warming are bleak. The Oxfam global warming report gives is bleaker because it puts a face on those statistics. Some of the stats the third world countries are facing and the human faces behind them:

• 26 million people may already be displaced because of global warming
  • In the developed world, we tend to see disastrous storms like hurricanes and typhoons as individual incidents, but there is evidence that these storms and events are more frequent and more powerful because of global climate change. There are still thousands of people who are living in trailers and in substandard housing, living in other cities, displaced and unable to return home. This effect is magnified in the Phillipines, in Taiwan, in African countries and in South America.

  ‘We went to sleep the night before, and woke up in the morning with water everywhere. The only thing we were able to save was the roof of the house.’
  Magdalena Mansilla, a 51-year-old farmer in Lambayong town, Sultan Kudarat, in the south Philippines. She has lost her home in floods twice in four years, in 2008 and 2004.

• 375 million people may be affected by climate related disasters by 2020
  • All over the world, farmers are facing seasons that have changed - sometimes incrementally, sometimes drastically, almost overnight. Back when I first started writing this column, I talked about coffee plants as a canary for climate change. The reality is that climate change is already affecting other crops, among them maize and food crops on which many families depend for food. Frosts come unexpectedly, destroying crops. Springs are too rainy and crops succumb to rust and wilt. Summers are too hot and dry, and the crops wither and die before they can be harvested. To me, these changing seasons endanger my favorite cup of coffee. A mother in Africa or South America watches her family slowly starve because of them.

  • Nature has got much worse, people have offended Nature. Spring comes 2–3 weeks earlier than before. Spring is getting harsh; it is raining or snowing all the time. The first thaw is at the end of April. The first rain is in May; it has never been like that before.’
    Gregory Rykhtyn, Vankarem Settlement, Siberia, 2006.

• 200 million people may be on the move each year by 2050 because of hunger, environmental degradation, and loss of land
  • When the crops fail, when the village is washed away in a typhoon, when the water is undrinkable and the land won't support so much as a string bean plant, people move - not to find jobs, but to find food and water.

  • We used to get three good rains. Now we don’t even get two. There’s no more rainy season, just the hurricane season. As soon as people see clouds forming, they put together their stuff and head for the hills.’
    Gary Novamn, farmer, Gonaives, Haiti, April 2009.

The OXFAM report estimates that developed countries will have to commit about $150 billion in aid to underdeveloped and developing countries to help them deal with the effects of global warming and to start insulating the poorest of them from the worst of it. That's less than the U.S. committed to bailing out AIG. It also says that keeping global warming under the 2 degree threshold is not enough - but doubts that developed countries will agree to even that much - because it is "economically not feasible". In other words, the desire for profits makes it politically impossible to pass the legislation needed to save millions of lives.

If that is as unacceptable to you as it is to me, take this one simple action. Find the email addresses of your elected representatives and send them a link to this report. You can find the full OXFAM global warming report here and the summary of the OXFAM global warming report here. Flood the government officials with the faces of those who are losing their world, and make it clear that they must do something about it now.

Comments

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