By Caesar Vallejos
Eagle News online correspondent
(Eagle News) — The room was uncomfortably hotter.
Maybe because I was only 10 feet away from former US Vice President and global climate action advocate Al Gore or it could be his ‘Nostradamic’ predictions on what happens next with the planet and in the Philippines:
At the Climate Reality Leadership Corps held recently by Al Gore’s team at Hotel Sofitel, he emphasized that the global warming pollution is man-made. “There are many causes for the man-made global warming pollution and its mainly carbon dioxide. But we have to recognize that other gases not just carbon dioxide is also significant,” he said.
Philippines: The most vulnerable of all nations
“The country that experiences the single most weather related disasters is not China or India or Brazil, it is actually the Philippines,” said Gore.
Gore said that the Philippines resides in the center of the typhoon belt. And so when the ocean’s temperatures increase and more moisture fills the storms and wind speeds grow stronger, the Philippines are impacted more than almost any other nation.
He explains the views of leading scientists that “when we put much more water vapor into the sky and much more heat energy into the atmospheric system, every storm is different. A storm that might have been a strong storm in the past because of the extra loading of water vapor and heat into the system can become a catastrophic storm.”
“The same heat that causes this evaporation of water vapor from the ocean also pulls the soil moisture out of the land. That is why, at the same time we have more floods and mud slides, we have longer and deeper droughts,” he stressed.
Farmers in the Philippines worry about the unpredictability of rainfall and they worry even more in many provinces about the increasing long droughts. He then warned that the historic drought of previous new years in Brazil caused water rationing all across the country and 20 percent of the population in Southern Africa.
Alternative sources of energy: wind and solar
“We now see the beginning of the deployment of wind energy,” Gore was happy to announce.
He cited Germany, which got more than 80% of all their energy for their factories, and businesses and homes from solar, and wind. “If they can do it, others can do it,” he said.
The world is also seeing the development of batteries that make it possible to use that energy when the wind is not blowing and when the sun is not shining until it starts shining again and the wind starts blowing again.
Gore cited that the most exciting new technology is solar electricity. “It’s now becoming cheaper than electricity for burning coal in many regions around the world. It’s going to displace fossil fuel. It is the biggest new business and investment opportunity in the history of the world.” He said that the projections in the future will continue to grow as renewables become the dominant source of new electricity.
There is an awakening to the revolutionary star potential of solar energy and coupled with the new more efficient, portable batteries. This is transforming many countries around the world. He cited the case studies of Costa Rica and Chile.
“More energy comes to the Earth from the sun every single hour than all the energy used by the entire global economy for a full year. This is heaven-sent. It has no pollution. It has no fuel costs.
Gore said that there is a need to speed this up by reducing the subsidies on oil, coal and gas and by putting a price on carbon markets.
Coal is dead
In the political system, there are still those who doubt whether reality is reality. However, he reminded that the two most powerful nations and at the same time the two largest polluters, the US and China, have now made an agreement to work together in a very positive way.
China has now announced that it is putting a nationwide capping trip system in place next year. The US has been moving fast away from coal. “Coal is dead in the US as a source of electricity generation. And this is a pattern that is now going to spread around the world,” Gore said positively.
Solutions to climate change: Will we change?
On the stand on climate change, Gore posed the question, “will we change?”
“Can we overcome the inertia, the obstacles, the greed, the self-interests and every other obstacle that has prevented us from making a choice in favor of what is right,” he continued to ask.
He then helped the audience realize that the solutions are all within themselves. “Some still doubt that we have the capacity as human beings. Some feel that we have the will to act. I believe in my heart that the will to act is in itself a renewable source,” he said.
“This is our home, we must make our stand here,” he ended.
The room was hot but these lessons from Al Gore made me cringe with cold.
(Eagle News Service)
