AAAS president urges swift action to build a sustainable future
Published on 16 Feb 2007 by American Association for the Advancement of Science,.
Challenges such as poverty, climate change and nuclear proliferation pose global risks that require scientists and engineers to join with political and business leaders in a concerted search for solutions, AAAS President John P. Holdren said Thursday.
In his Presidential Address at the AAAS Annual Meeting, Holdren described a world poised at an unprecedented moment of decision: Without swift and urgent action, he said, the problems could spiral toward disastrous, permanent changes for all of life on Earth.
[snip]
In his address, he identified four key S&T challenges for achieving sustainable well-being:
* "Meeting the basic needs of the poor;
* "Managing the competition for land, soil, water, and the net primary productivity of the planet;
* "Mastering the energy-economy-environment dilemma; and
* "Moving toward a nuclear-weapon-free world."
But he offered compelling evidence that the world is not making sufficient progress on any of those challenges.
[snip]
On environmental and climate issues, Holdren stressed that the emergency is not looming in the future, but is having a palpable impact now.
"Climate change is not a problem for our children and our grandchildren—it is a problem for us," he said. "It's already causing harm."
2005 was the hottest year on record, he said. The 13 hottest years on record all have occurred since 1990. 23 out of the 24 hottest years have occurred since 1980. The sort of heat wave that killed 35,000 people in Europe in the summer of 2003 is expected to become normal by 2050.
By 2100, he said, some projections say global temperatures could rival those of the Eocene epoch some 35 million years ago, a time of dramatic global warming that caused dramatic disruptions—waves of extinction—in Earth's ecosystem.
(click the headline above to read the transcript or find the link to listen to the presentation with Real Audio)
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