A meme worth forwarding.

[logansrogue]

Before I start, let me just say that this isn't a fun post. This isn't going to be cute pictures of fictional characters. It's not the latest quiz on what mythical animal you are. It's not the latest funny thing on Youtube or the stupid thing some celebrity has said. This isn't even me bitching about my own misfortunes.

This is above everything I've ever written in this journal. It's the most important thing I could possibly talk about. It's frightening and you might want to stop reading, but if you give even the tiniest damn about this amazing planet we live on, you'll keep on reading. If you really care you might even do something about it.

This isn't 'pass this along and Microsoft will save this dying cancer baby', or 'wear this colour-coded table in your LJ to show your support'. It's going to take more than that. You're going to have to actually DO something.

I've been reading up on global warming and by the time I had learnt even the tiniest bit of information about it, I was in tears. What I heard was staggering. We have barely ten years to save our planet from the irreversible damage of global warming. It's not a 'theory', it's not a debatable topic. It is HAPPENING. All climatologists worth their weight in degrees are telling the governments, telling US, that we have to change our ways and we have to change them NOW.

Are people listening? You have to do more than watch Al Gore for two hours. I went to the website stopglobalwarming.com and I was horrified to see that of all the millions of people that surf the internet every day, only 649,758 people had signed on to pledge their dedication to making a change. Let me put that in perspective for you.

The number of journals on livejournal: 12,423,887 (Halve that for averaging out duplicate and inactive journals and that's still six million.)
The number of people on MySpace: 100 million (Again, even if you halve that, it's a staggering number)
The number of people with a neopets account: 135,680,686 (The halving as before).

The most heartbreaking thing of all of this is that we can make a HUGE difference by doing a few little things every day. It's not convenient but it is NECESSARY. What will happen if we don't change our ways?

- Mass exinction of wildlife all over the world
- The spread of tropical diseases as dengue fever and malaria
- The sea levels will rise, destroying the homes of millions of people and creating an rush of refugees like nothing we've ever seen in human history
- The sea's acidity will rise, destroying our precious reefs and simple life forms such as algae, molluscs and coral. The entire ecosystem of our oceans will be affected.
- Huge superstorms and record-breaking droughts will ravage our world.

And this is from the world's climatologists, not for monetary gain but for the sheer desperation of saving our planet. It's the same thing we've been told since the 1970s and it's about time we listened. We have the technology to change and we can. Together we can make a difference.

It's time to kick your bad carbon habits.

Read the link above, do what you can. You can even do more than that if you're willing. Educate yourselves, empower yourselves and take care of your planet. We've taken only two hundred years to get it into this sorry state. We owe it to every single living thing we share this little rock with to make our mistakes right and conserve the only home we've got.

So. Enough of my soapboxing - it's time for action. Link to this entry. Or skip this entry (I don't mind) and link straight to any of these informative and important websites:

http://www.stopglobalwarming.org
http://www.climatecrisis.net/ (Official website of An Inconvenient Truth - handy dandy Carbon Calculator within)
http://www.greenhousenet.org

If you know any more, do let me know.

A lot of these pages are regional, so here's the best general advice for people all over the world:

- Write to your local political representatives
- Identify the ways your community is wasting carbon and try to join efforts to reverse it
- If you can, plant a tree
- Vote for environmentally aware political parties
- Educate yourself in every way you can and do everything in your power to help the effort

Most importantly - speak up in your journal, blog or myspace. On the internet, information can be viral. It can spread and reach millions. Instead of some chump singing in drag, or a cat falling off a piano (both of which are pretty funny) let's make it something worthwhile. Let's make use of the internet, its vast resources, and spread the word on something really worth going on about.

Comments

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Really? How fantastic! Who are they?

[blackbird-song.livejournal.com]

I'm here via shirasade. Thank you very much for this post. I have linked to it in a post made to my journal. I hope that it will spread.

Thanks for the links! I already do much of what is suggested in the link to stopglobalwarming, but am very happy to see that there is more that I can do. (I did sign up on their Virtual March, as well, thanks to your post.) Now, I'm off to check out the other links.

Catherine

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking time to read my post and for visiting the website. *big hugs*

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Voting and other political pressure is one of the most important things you can do about this. A lot of the things we can do as individuals get dwarfed by other industry (which largely won't change unless forced), or by the many people who won't change voluntarily. Plus Australia is small, and our part in getting diplomatic pressure to bring change in China and India is probably more important than the direct changes we can make to our whole country.

I've studied this issue a lot. There are an enormous amount of lies flying around about it, mostly from a small group of carbon polluting industry financed pr companies and nutters. Their claims are all answerable - the problem is not just real, but urgent, just as you say.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

I know - there's a lot of sources we need to get to cut down on their emmissions, but helping a little is better than not helping at all. Plus, if people realise that a certain product is causing carbon problems, perhaps their decision not to purchase that product might put the pinch on companies. Of course that doesn't count with oil and stuff like that.

Ugh, it's just so depressing.

[bingblot.livejournal.com]

Hear hear!!!
Thanks for this post; I'm encouraged by it; I tried in posting about it after I watched 'Inconvenient Truth' but didn't get the response I was hoping for. hopefully this one gets more of a response...

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

It's had a few responses. I don't mind if people don't comment to me, as long as they share the message.

People don't tend to get into things like this cause it's a depressing, scary subject. People are frightened, and you know, they have every reason to be.

All one can do is keep plugging away at trying to do right by the Earth, and try to get people involved.

[comava.livejournal.com]

I very much agree. Am forwarding the first link, and I was happy to see that many of the things listed are things I do already.

(here via shirasade, btw!)

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Cool! Thanks for passing it along - you rock! *hugs*

[ferretdad.livejournal.com]

As far as encouraging political action, check out StepItUp '07 (http://www.StepItUp07.org/).

Unfortunately, the list of adverse affects probably doesn't end (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa028&articleID=00037A5D-A938-150E-A93883414B7F0000) with what you list above.

Thanks for the post; you're right, we need to act now.

[logansrogue.livejournal.com]

Thank you - I'll check out your links. :)