Please help Greenpeace in their current campaign Save The Arctic. The Arctic is vital to our planet and us. It will be even more difficult to combat climate change without it. On August 28th 2012, a new record for the amount of Arctic ice melt was announced and it has beaten the record three weeks before sea ice will reach its minimum extent this year. This shows that climate change is occurring for more rapidly than climate scientists predicted. This is possibly one of the most significant events of our lifetime and yet it was barely mentioned in the news and people continue to deny global warming is a serious problem. Just as George Monbiot writes (I have used information from his article in this post, link below at the bottom of this post) the date 28/08/2012 "marks the day when the world went raving mad."
There are 3 crucial reasons why we need to save the Arctic:
1.It is the home to many amazing species that exist in few other places in the world. It is also home for many people. We have no right to take this home from them just because we refuse to stop our reliance on fossil fuels.
2. Melting Arctic sea ice is going to increase the already rising sea level. Islands have already been lost, such as the Locahara Island that used to be near India. Low lying land will continue to be lost, for example Bangladesh, displacing thousands of people and species with it. These are major problems that the world's future governments will have to deal with. And those most affected are likely to be those with the least resources to manage the disaster.
3. The Arctic's survival is vital in helping us slow down global warming. The ice reflects the sun's light and sends it back into space. Where there is land without ice, far less light is reflected and it is instead caught by greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, and contributes to heating the world's atmosphere. The more ice that melts the less sunlight is reflected back and the more heat is retained and therefore the more ice melts. Basically it's a downward spiral that we need to stop if we have any hope of combating further climate change.
Find out more about the campaign on the website Save The Arctic and please sign the petition, help us try to make a difference.
Also, check out George Monbiot's interesting article 'The Day the World went Mad'.
