As a physician with a keen interest in human rights I thoroughly agree with Doctor Gideon Polya's assessment of the now inevitable global climate change impacts as climate genocide. There is an extraordinary reluctance amongst environmental and human rights advocates to use what they describe as emotional or passionate terms on the global climate change issue. The fact is that words have not been yet invented to describe the horrendous now unavoidable impacts on a very large proportion of humanity. We are looking at the worst ever crime against humanity and to refrain from using emotionally loaded language to describe it only serves to make the crime worse and more inhumane.
A global warming of 2° C is now unavoidable. 2° C has become an almost universally accepted global warming target. The story of the 2° C target supports Doctor Polya's contention of climate genocide. Rather then a safe limit, as it is described , it is at least disastrously dangerous ( James Hansen) and for certain carries a huge risk of global climate catastrophe to billions of people this century in Africa and South Asia alone (IPCC 2007).
2oC is not and never has been a scientifically established limit. It originated with the EU and the EU itself admits it is not safe. The published science including the IPCC fourth assessment says that at under 2oC there are losses to water availability and agriculture to very large populations in the most climate change vulnerable regions where the most economically deprived populations live in the Global South. These dangers are clearly of a disastrous nature which will result in huge loss of life as global climate change will have a multiplying effect on large populations already suffering high disease and mortality rates from the very factors that are increased by global climate change- water deprivation water pollution malnutrition famine and multiple communicable diseases.
When, for example in Africa, large regions of agricultural already degraded lands become more degraded by climate change, the food availability that people depend on will progressively and irreversibly deteriorate.
Add the well known fact that these large populations of the most climate change vulnerable are also by far the most climate change innocent with respect to greenhouse gas emissions we have a clear case of genocode on the Southern hemisphere perpetrated by the Northern hemisphere.
The reason for the acceptance of the disastrously dangerous 2 degree C target makes the crime against humanity far worse even. We have been led to believe in the Northern Hemisphere that we can ride out global climate climate change with possibly a net benefit to our agricultural food supply. This is why 2oC has been called a safe limit when it has long been known that for huge vulnerable populations in the South it is certain catastrophe.
Further confirmation is the fact that the IPCC estimated in its 2007 assessment of agricultural losses to the most climate vulnerable regions in the South Harry global warming of 1.5° Cand even in some regions at 1oC. The IPCC estimates agricultural losses in some African regions as 50%. The worst of it is that the leaders of the these vulnerable regions have been led to assume that the global warming target of 2° C should be acceptable by them. Indeed to aggravate the genocide even further these African nations have been criticised by the North for not taking measures of adaptation to climate change, when is impossible to adapt to the climate change impacts on their water and food supplies and on their health. I
The computer models however that projected little problem for agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere till late in this century have been proved badly in error. The IPCC predicted that agriculture in all regions would become vulnerable to a global warming of 2.5° C. But this did not account for the loss of the climate moderating summer Arctic ice influencing the entire northern hemisphere because the computers had the summer Arctic meltdown also towards the end of this century. Now the projections are that the summer Arctic will be ice free between 2015 and 2030. When this happens agriculture in the Northern Hemisphere will become vulnerable. The regional warming of the Arctic which is already double the global average will further accelerate inevitably increase in the rate of additional carbon emissions by carbon feedback effect on Northern permafrost and Arctic Ocean methane hydrates. This will result in agricultural output declining globally and progressively well before 2050 which is the current estimate (Cline). So it is looking like we're all equally in peril North and South from the impacts of global climate change on agriculture.
Therefore Doctor Gideon Polya's call for the recognition of a state of global climate change emergency needs to be recognised and responded to for the sake of us all. If we don't. the unprecedented inhumane criminal negligence can only be described by a new word- progenycide.
Peter Carter