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GLOBAL WARMING AFFECTS HIT HOME IN LONDON
Do you remember the lyrics from Porgy & Bess musical?, ‘In the summer time when the living is easy’. Well my friendly, times have certainly changed.
On Tuesday, July 6th we took a drive in the evening down Hamilton Road to the Downtown Y. The temperature during the day had soared to 40 degrees Celsius. It sure looked worse at 100 degrees Farenheit.
There were scores of exhausted people sitting in front of their apartment buildings with their doors and window wide open. There was not a whisper of a breeze to alleviate their discomfort.
The poor people living on the fringe who can not afford air conditioners plug in their window fans to move the hot air around their meager dwellings. Our most vulnerable in society always seem to suffer when nature goes awry.
Even Number One London Place’s magnificent sky scraper architecture was hidden behind a veil of blue smog.
Night fall brought little comfort with the temperature registering in the mid twenties. We awoke to find the morning grass coated with a heavy dew. There doesn’t seem to be any respite to our present heat wave problems.
In 2007 mankind had the warmest temperatures ever recorded on earth. This summer I wager that we will set new records in London. Over the past decade our planet has been heating up with little hope for change.
Folks our world has changed with tsunamis, hurricanes & tornados much more frequent occurrences in our environmental disaster package.
Our climate scientists, the like of London’s own David Suzuki, has been warning us for many years that we are not going through a natural, normal phenomena that will right itself in due time. The clock is clicking with a decade left to affect positive change before it is too late.
We North Americans, have been polluting the atmosphere with green house gases. Canadians have been throwing out fumes from our cars, factories and homes into the environment hoping that with time they will dissipate. The oceans/lakes that we have fouled they will not again become pristine if we keep on abusing them.
What can we Londoners do to cut down on noxious green house omissions? We can adjust our thermostats to conserve energy. Buy a de-humidifier to take out the moisture from your home. Don’t use the drive through lanes to get your morning coffee.
Take an LTC bus to work and leave your gas guzzling eight cylinder SUV at home. Walk/bike from the suburbs in Masonville, White Oaks to the mall to do your shopping.
Contact your local Members of Parliament and tell them we have to keep our promise in the Kyoto Protocols to protect the fragile environment.
If you want to learn the truth and consequences of global warming you can rent US Vice President, Al Gore’s documentary video “An Inconvenient Truth”, or visit the web site: www.climatecrisis.net
Len Lesser