Green group tries to highlight effects of climate change

Guo Xinping, a Beijing citizen in her 50s, is worried about the city's water scarcity.

"The city is getting bigger, with more skyscrapers being built and more people settling here everyday, but we are already running out of water resources," said Guo, who has witnessed Beijing's urban sprawl grow at a fantastic clip over the past decade.

Guo, a retired worker who has lived in the southern part of Beijing for most of her life, said she is well aware the city is facing problems such as air and water pollution.

But climate change is a vague concept for her, one that she scarcely reads about in newspapers or hears about on TV, she said.

So when she learned Greenpeace China was launching a campaign on climate change at Yongdingmen, one of Beijing's ancient city gates, Guo was curious to check it out.

At seven o'clock on the evening of March 23, the World Meteorological Day, Greenpeace used projection images to turn Yongdingmen, towering at the southernmost tip of Beijing's central axis, into a gigantic countdown clock reminding citizens that "time is running out to stop global warming."

The clock was ticking down towards the United Nation's conference on climate change in Copenhagen, Denmark, scheduled at the end of this year, where countries are expected to agree to a new treaty to cap greenhouse gas emissions and stop climate change.

"The world is now in imminent peril and the Copenhagen climate meeting is human beings' last chance to save the world from a catastrophic climate crisis," said Li Yan, a climate campaigner at Greenpeace China.

A short video showing how climate change is already threatening the existence of human beings, projected on the ancient city wall, attracted about two hundreds people.

In her speech, delivered in both Chinese and English, Li also talked about the latest scientific findings on climate change and called for China to take a leadership role in tackling climate change.

But the one-hour campaign was too brief to communicate the reach of the problem to Guo.

Rapid sea-level rising, melting glaciers and ice-sheets and potential threats to crop production seem "too far away" from her life and the Copenhagen meeting is even more beyond her reach, she said.

Even though scientists have upgraded their warnings on climate change and now say that human beings are facing "an increasing risk of abrupt or irreversible climate shifts", many people such as Guo said they don't understand how it is relevant to their own daily life.

About 2,500 scientists from 80 countries gathered recently at the International Scientific Congress on Climate Change, held in Copenhagen, to put together the most up-to-date scientific information on global warming.

Their findings will be published into a full synthesis report in June 2009, and handed over to world leaders who are going to attend the negotiations at Copenhagen in December.

The congress has sent out six key messages, which are more severe than what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Nobel Prize winner Al Gore, had previously predicted.

Scientists concluded that the most damaging scenarios of the IPCC report, or worse, are being realized, with global temperatures on a path to rise by 2 degree by the end of this century.

And rising temperatures are already causing, and will continue to cause, socio-political and economic disruptions, with the poor being most vulnerable. People living in coastal area, for instance, will be forced to migrate by flooding from rising sea levels.

The scientists urged "rapid, sustained, and effective" efforts to cut greenhouse gases to avoid "dangerous climate change".

An effective, well-funded adaptation safety net is required for those people least capable of coping with climate change impacts.

Most of the tools, technologies, and management mechanisms needed to "de-carbonize" economies already exist, the scientists said.

"There is no excuse for inaction," said the scientists, especially when the world knows that de-carbonizing economies will produce benefits such as job growth, improved public health, and restoration of ecological systems.

But there are numerous obstacles standing in the way.

"World leaders are already aware of the threats of climate change and they know that technologies are available to deal with the problem," said Li from Greenpeace China.

"The fundamental problem is whether the world leaders are willing to show their sincerity and compromise with each other at negotiations to finally work out a solution," said Li.

"Growing public awareness of the issue and public desire for governments to take aggressive actions on climate change are crucial," Li said.

(China Daily 04/06/2009 page3)