By Alexander Bruzual Friday, November 27 2009

HOURS before the issue is expected to engage the attention of some of the world’s influential leaders, climate change has engaged the attention of the youth.

Discussions took place on Wednesday at the Youth Forum on the Caribbean Princess, one of the cruise ships here for the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting.

Over 150 young people from various nations in the Commonwealth, including Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, Barbados, the Bahamas and the United Kingdom, were treated with revealing and intriguing lectures on how climate change would affect the world and in particular, the Caribbean island countries.

Professor John Agard, of the Department of Life Sciences, in the University of the West Indies, explained that climate change was not a new phenomenon in the history of the planet.

He said the planet went through particular cycles every few thousand years, which took it between periods of warming and periods of cooling.

Agard said the earth was currently in a period of warming and climate change but what made this period dangerous, was that it was no longer a natural process.

“Ever since the industrial revolution, the rate of warming has been increasing exponentially in a manner which is unprecedented in the history of the earth. We don’t know what will happen next.

“Scientists can calculate probabilities and suggest what could happen, but the reality is that no one knows what will happen if nothing is done to reduce global warming,” Agard said.

He warned that the required action to combat global warming and its effects on climate change needed to be implemented immediately as the longer the delay, more damage would be caused, and the cost to repair it would sky rocket.

“Temperatures in the Caribbean have a probability greater than 90 percent of increasing. But extent of the increase depends on what we do now to combat green house gas emissions. Don’t let anyone fool you. There is hard data recorded since 1955 that the maximum and minimum temperatures in the Caribbean have been increasing. If it continues it will affect climate change on a global level,” Agard explained.

Professor Anton Clayton, of the Caribbean Sustainable Development project, UWI, also expressed similar sentiments. However he cemented the direness of the situation by providing hard data on what the future could entail if measures were not undertaken to combat climate change.

“Initial estimates showed that sea levels might go up 18 to 59 centimetres by 2100 as a result of the thermal expansion of the water. But these estimates did not include the water put in the ocean from the melting of the ice sheets from Greenland and Antarctica,” Clayton said.

He indicated this new information showed that sea levels could rise anywhere between two metres and 50 metres at the end of the century, depending on the level of melting ice sheets.

“This would inundate parts of Vancouver, London, Sydney, Mumbai, Guyana, any place where cities are below sea levels. An example of the disastrous potential of sea level rise would be in Bangladesh. Here a one metre rise could result in the loss of at least 10 percent of the country’s land area,” Clayton explained.

“This country has an estimated population of 154 million which is about half the population of the USA living in an area slightly smaller than the (American) state of Iowa. So you can imagine what would happen with island nations. Something needs to be done to combat this effect, and it needs to be done soon before the damage done is irreversible,” he added.