Hi everyone,
This is just a quick post about the effects of climate change that were mentioned in The 11th Hour as well as in our class discussions.
Before we started this class I was on holiday for about a month so I was able to brief myself on the international news on a daily basis. The first report to impact me was on a cyclone that hit Burma in south east Asia. CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Channel) news reports were calling it a global crisis as aid workers were having difficulty accessing the area and over 10,000 people were killed. This was the cover story for days, however it wasn’t long before it was replaced by a story on a tornado that passed through 3 states in the US, killing 22 people and leaving many homeless. If I remember it properly these incidents were about 2 weeks apart. If that wasn’t enough natural damage for the month, days later CBC’s leading story was covering an earthquake that hit China, causing buildings to collapse and thousands more to perish.
After reading these stories one after the other I started to think that something very strange was happening in our global environment. It wasn’t until we started this class that I was able to relate it back to global warming. As was discussed in class and in The 11th Hour, national governments are what stand in the way of changes in favour of sustainable development. I can only hope that this string of natural disasters is enough to catch the attention of at least some decision makers within major governments, and encourage them to start taking action.
Stefanie
Sustainable Development & Competitive Advantage 
Hy Stephany,
I was also quiet shocked, when I heard in the news about all those natural catastrophes happening one after the other in such a short period of time and devastating so many human lives. While thinking about the factors, that might have caused those disasters, I gained the impression that nature is regulating itselve in a certain way. Maybe it is because Earth has only a limited capacity of supporting live and that we have already exceeded this capacity, which explains, why there are so many natural disasters at this moment. Nature is regulating the population on earth by devasting the lives, which are too much.
But even if I assume, that we cannot prevent the natural regulation process of going on and with that natural diasters like the cyclone in Birma and the earthquake in China of happening, I also belive, that governments are not powerless what climate change is concerned. They can and definetly should do something so that people restart to live in harmony with nature, to respect the limits and contraints nature imoses and to adapt their lives according to them. Actually I do not really know why some governments are so slowly in taking action, but I think that much of it is due to a lack in nature education. If children whould begin very early to understand how nature functions and in which way it is important for people, I guess that SD would be much easier to impose, when these children turn into politicians, entrepreuniers or whatever. In Germany for example, children have this kind of education in primary school. There are courses, in which they learn how our ecosystems is working, where the rain comes from, where soil erosion comes from, what food chains are or how phosynthesis is working. I believe, that nowadays every primary school in every country should have such courses in order to grow the awareness of SD.
Sarah!
Just keep in mind, the other side of the story is that we may not necessarily have more natural disasters, but it is rather you hear about them more today then your parents could have heard due to the globalization of the world. Also with the increased population density that is now been seen with the world population, the effects of any natural disasters are significantly increased. You have a cyclone in the ‘cowboy’ country of forests and plains, this really is not going to effect anyone. While compare this to the east cost of China where most of the 1.3 billion people live, it will be far more then Canada’s 3.2/km2.
Today it is unseasonal hailstorms and floods in Belgrade (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/7407644.stm). The IPCC scientists are now pretty much agreed that global warming is contributing to more extreme weather events (http://www.global-greenhouse-warming.com/extreme-weather-frequency.html)