Climate Change
"Climate change carries no passport. And no country is immune."
Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon
Speech in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
27 July 2009
In the 19th century, an awareness began to dawn that accumulated carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere could create a “greenhouse effect” and increase the temperature of the planet. A perceptible process in that direction had already begun — a side-effect of the industrial age and its production of carbon dioxide and other such “greenhouse gases”.
By the middle of the 20th century, it was becoming clear that human action had significantly increased the production of these gases, and the process of “global warming” was accelerating. Today, nearly all scientists agree that we must stop and reverse this process now — or face a devastating cascade of natural disasters that will change life on earth as we know it.
Much of the evidence already seems apparent to the layman as well. Most of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past two decades. In Europe, the heat wave in the summer of 2003 resulted in over 30,000 deaths. In India, temperatures reached 48.1 degrees Centigrade — nearly 119 degrees Fahrenheit.
Two years later, the ferocity of Hurricane Katrina in the United States was attributed in large part to the elevated water temperatures in the Gulf of Mexico. And in one of many terrain changing developments, 160 square miles of territory broke away from the Antarctic coast in 2008 — its bindings to Antarctica having literally melted away.
The UN family is in the forefront of the effort to save our planet. In 1992, its “Earth Summit” produced the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a first step in tackling the problem. In 1998, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to provide an objective source of scientific information. And the Convention’s 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which set emission reduction targets for industrialized countries, has already helped stabilize and in some cases reduce emissions in several countries.
The UN has consistently taken the lead in taking on climate change. In 2007, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to former United States Vice-President Al Gore and the IPCC "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".
The Kyoto Protocol set standards for certain industrialized countries. Those targets expire in 2012. In the meanwhile, greenhouse gas emissions from both developed and developing countries have been increasing rapidly. International efforts are now focused on developing a new agreement for the period after 2012 — to be adopted by the States parties to the Climate Change Convention at Copenhagen in December 2009.