A United Nations report says that the world's richest countries, while contributing the most toward global warming, are doing little to curb its effects in the poorer nations that will be hardest hit.
That's hardly news to California bicyclist David Kroodsma, who for the past 17 months has been bicycling through Central and South America to raise awareness about global warming and its impact on the Americas.
His website, Ride for Climate: The Americas, is a primer on the science of global warming and offers first-hand observations of how rising temperatures will affect the poorer nations of Latin America.
Journey ends
Kroodsma, a climate researcher at Stanford University before he embarked on his bike tour, has just finished his trip, going as far south as he can by bicycle. In the last entry to his blog, written Saturday:
“This trip was about global warming because I want us to think about how what we do affects the many people of this world. Global warming is a problem that has no borders and will affect all of us, and to solve it will require all of us to work together.”
The news from the New York Times is that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release a report on Friday that highlights the so-called climate divide :
“… with wealthy nations far from the equator not only experiencing fewer effects but better able to withstand them.
“Two-thirds of the atmospheric buildup of carbon dioxide, a heat-trapping greenhouse gas that can persist for centuries, has come in nearly equal proportions from the U.S. and Western European countries. These and other wealthy nations are investing in windmill-powered plants that turn seawater to drinking water, in flood barriers and floatable homes, in grains and soybeans genetically altered to flourish even in a drought.”
UN report
For instance, while cities in California, Texas and Australia are building desalination plants to purify brackish water, the report says that hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans will be short of water in less than 20 years.
The melting ice sheets that cause rising sea levels will first affect populated river deltas in southern Asia and Egypt, as well as small island nations.
Kroodsma wrote about the impact of rising sea levels of 1 1/2 feet this century:
“This could be very bad for many places I have visited – especially along the Caribbean coast—and also make storms much worse, not to mention erode some nice beaches.”
Earlier Kroodsma biked into the Andes and talked to people about the shrinking glaciers and how so much of Chile's agriculture depends on water from snow melt.
The bicyclist said he was interviewed for newspapers, radio or TV in nearly every country he visited, and he spoke at 60 schools on his nearly 16,000-mile bike journey.
Later this month, Kroodsma travels to Boston to begin Ride for Climate USA, a 15,000-mile tour around the US to raise awareness about global warming and how to create clean and safe energy.
As bicyclists, we know one way to curb greenhouse gases — ride a bike. A chief cause of global warming is carbon dioxide, and motor vehicles are the second largest source of carbon dioxide in the US.
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