Our role in climate change

The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize this October to former US Vice President Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has sent an unprecedented message to the world: the future is green. The IPCC had caused alarm bells to ring loudly at the United Nations earlier this year when it announced that global warming was “most likely” i.e. over 90%, caused by human development and carbon dioxide emissions. Al Gore, for his part, had sent a chilling message about the consequences of climate change in his movie An Inconvenient Truth, for which he also won an Oscar. In layman’s terms, global warming is all about carbon emissions that cause heat to remain trapped in the atmosphere, which in turn melts ice caps and glaciers causing epic flooding in some areas and intense drought in others. Taken to extremes (that is, if all the ice melts), whole