Your World Needs You to be a Climate Champion!

We need Climate Champions with green carbon footprints to save the world!

So, we've seen that scientists have established that Climate Change and Global Warming have been caused by people, people like you and me who are just doing what everyone else is doing without realising the harm they've been doing.

If we have caused it, we could stop it, in theory. In practice we would have to make some very serious changes to our lives to stop Global Warming entirely and most of us might find that too difficult.

If Global Warming were a dangerous wild animal running towards us some of us would be running away as fast as we can and others would be standing their ground preparing to fight and kill the animal.

Global Warming is not such an obvious threat or so easy to see. We could try to imagine Global Warming as a gigantic dragon curled around our planet.  Think of Smaug in the Hobbit, lying asleep on the dwarves' treasure hoard. Every time we fly or travel in our car we feed the Global Warming dragon encouraging it to breathe fire and cause droughts and wild fires, or to thrash its tail and cause severe storms, hurricanes and flooding.

Global Warming is like an invisible dragon threatening our world

Now we are aware of the threat Global Warming is to the world as we know it, surely we want to do everything we can to fight it by reducing the amount of CO2 we produce and thereby shrinking our personal carbon footprint.

We live in an age that needs heroes and Climate Champions to join in the fight to protect our beautiful world for our children and our grandchildren. We have to stop feeding the dragon!

The most effective way any of us can reduce our carbon footprint is to fly less often. If everyone took fewer flights, airline companies wouldn’t burn as much jet fuel, so they'd send tons less CO2 into the atmosphere.

A Valentine to the World from the Climate Coalition

A Brief Introduction to Climate Change

Wind turbine near Wellington, New Zealand, February 2014
Renewable energy is important if we want to stop Climate Change

Climate change is real and it is quite possibly the biggest threat to life as we know it. However it’s not inevitable. If we really want to the world’s population can slow Climate Change down and even stop it, but we will need governments, global industries, multi-national businesses and everyone else to pull all the stops out.

So, this week I want to take a look at Climate Change and first of all I want to look at what Climate Change is and why it’s a bad thing.

What is Climate Change?

Food for Thought

A box of organic, locally grown veg can help to reduce your carbon footprint

We all need to eat to stay alive. Food is nourishing, pleasurable and something we enjoy sharing with family or friends.  However, the choices we make about food can make a difference to the world around us.

Green Christian suggests we follow the LOAF principle when deciding what to eat, if we want to make ethical and sustainable choices about our food. LOAF stands for

Locally produced

Organically grown

Animal friendly

Fairly traded

Buying as much locally produced food as possible will reduce the amount of CO2 emissions produced by the food we eat, because the fossil fuels used to transport our food are creating serious problems for the Earth's climate, which is vital to the well being of us all.

Few of us are able to grow all our own food. Most of us drive to the supermarket for most of the food we eat. That food was transported from where it was grown to the supermarket. Often it has travelled in the opposite direction to be washed or processed in some way, sometimes it travels from one side of the world to the other side before it reaches us.  Transporting our food creates a lot of CO2 emissions, so buying as much unprocessed food that has been grown as locally as possible will reduce our CO2 emissions and probably be healthier for us, too. Transporting fertilisers and animal feed adds to the carbon emissions resulting from the way our food is produced.

There is strong Scientific evidence that a marked increase CO2 emissions and other Greenhouse Gasses is seriously contributing to the increase in Climate Change in recent decades. This briefing from Friends of the Earth goes into more detail about the impact our food production has on Climate Change.  I shall take a closer look at Climate Change next week.

Here is an article from Green Eatz which gives the carbon footprint (the amount of carbon produced in a lifetime) of some common foods.

If you have a farm shop near you which sells food grown on the farm or from other local growers buying as much locally produced food as you can from them will help to reduce your carbon footprint, i.e. the amount of CO2 emitted to fulfil your wants and needs. Buying food grown or raised as close to you as possible will also mean it should be fresher and more nutritious.

If you don't have a nearby farm shop selling local produce a veg box scheme, such Riverford Organic Farmers, is a good way to buy organic, seasonal, locally produced fruit, veg and even meat that haven't been air-freighted from around the world.

In later posts I shall consider the benefits of organically grown food, the importance of animal friendly choices and why fair trade is important, amongst other things.