Photo by Kyle D. Gahlau A great new Australian report on climate change has been issued in February 2015!
It’s released by the Australian Academy of Science and is a fantastic presentation – just what readers like, with photos and colourful graphs.
In summary:
- Earth’s climate has changed over the past century. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, sea levels have risen, and glaciers and ice sheets have decreased in size. The best available evidence indicates that greenhouse gas emissions from human activities are the main cause. Continuing increases in greenhouse gases will produce further warming and other changes in Earth’s physical environment and ecosystems.
As for impacts:
- In the future, the impacts of climate change will intensify and interact with other stresses. If greenhouse gas emissions continue to be high, it is likely that the human-induced component of climate change will exceed the capacity of some countries to adapt.
What it doesn’t tell you are the thousands of stories that are happening and will continue to happen.
- Stories like people losing their homes due to oceans rising,
- ecosystems being permanently altered,
- people losing their livelihoods because they cannot continue food production in the changed climate,
- people not being able to work outside in certain areas because of the heat, and even
- people dying because they can’t take the heat.
It also doesn’t talk in detail about everything we can do. (That’s okay, nor does it intend to.)
Building efficiently is one thing we can do. Changing our laws and our practices to focus on proper shelters that don’t need bucketloads of power to keep us comfortable, but keep us in comfortable temperatures by clever design, use of physics, and careful construction methods.
The more we think about it at Superpod®, the more we can see that the link between our comfort indoors and our earth’s survival needs to be at the front of people’s minds.
