Native Forestry

Native News Jan 2010

The ongoing dialogue between the vast majority of climatologists, environmentalists and policy makers on the one hand, and climate change sceptics on the other, about the subject of global warming has, depending on your point of view, either hotted up or become increasingly frosty over the last few months.  The 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference (Copenhagen Summit) held last month was supposed to agree a framework for climate change mitigation beyond 2012, including legally binding reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.

The achievements of the conference didn't amount to anything that is legally binding but has been described by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, as an 'essential beginning'.  Environmental groups such as Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth have criticised the outcome, with the former even describing the city of Copenhagen as a 'crime scene'.  Although the criticism is justified in many ways, world leaders are now faced with being in an unenviable 'Catch-22' situation, in which they try to fulfil their short-term obligations of improving the lifestyles of their people on the one hand, whilst trying to find long-term solutions to the increasing threats to the environment that are often by-products of this drive for a 'better life'.  The renowned environmentalist George Monbiot summed up this paradox perfectly when he commented on the campaign against man-made climate change as being different to almost all other public protests before it because, 'It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity.  It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less.  Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves'.

It is not surprising then that the debate surrounding global warming has led to some rather strange claims and counter-claims amongst various groups.  The vast majority of climate scientists tell us that the average global surface temperature has increased significantly between the start and end of the last century and this warming will continue owing to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, particularly carbon dioxide.  The increasing body of scientific data has enabled these scientists to state that there is a greater than 90% probability that human behaviour is the overriding cause of this change in the climate, although a much smaller, but still significant, number of climatologists reject this hypothesis.  This debate amongst scientists has now been hijacked by all manner of interested parties, each with their own 'theory' about why scientists are saying the things they are.

Native Forestry believes that, whatever the truth about global warming and the extent to which humans are contributing to it, increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane are just the tip of a huge iceberg which could threaten our existence in the not-so-distant future.  We believe that too much attention is being paid to global warming (even though the effects could be devastating) and not enough time and effort focused on halting the alarming loss of global biodiversity, primarily through the destruction of habitats such as tropical rainforests.  At the very least, our increasingly unsustainable use of natural resources will eventually necessitate a complete change in our lifestyles, which will hopefully occur before irreversible damage is done to the ecosystems that provide these resources.

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