Climate change is the greatest threat humans have ever faced. In the 2014 Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations scientific body warns humanity of the imminent impacts of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. “Human security will be progressively threatened as the climate changes (robust evidence, high agreement)” (IPCC 2014 Report, p.758). In discussing the finding of the report, Rajendra Pachauri, IPCC chairman, declared that everybody on the planet will be impacted by climate change (Tompson, 2014). Climate scientists agree now that keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (or 3.6°F) above pre-industrial temperatures, which is what was agreed upon by world governments at the 2009 Copenhagen Climate change Conference (COP 15), GHG emissions will have to be radically reduced on a global scale. “We have already emitted two thirds of the total carbon allocation to the atmosphere that would ensure at least a 66% chance of limiting global temperature increases to below 2 °C” (Jackson, el at, 2016, p.7). While GHG emissions will have to be reduced globally between 40 to 70 percent by 2050, coal-burning activities will have to be eradicated by 2050, and GHG emissions, by the end of the century (Thompson, 2014). In the spring of 2013, during Canadian environmental activist Tzeporah Berman’s honorary degree acceptance speech at the University of British Columbia, in her address to her cohort and the general assembly, she recalled a moment of disbelief: “Five years ago, I sat in the audience at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Bali, and the secretary general said: “We either reach an agreement to quickly reduce our dependence on fossil fuel or we doom humanity to oblivion” (Berman, 2013). “Climate change is undeniably an immediate, global threat and unless some radical moves are taken, the earth will be largely uninhabitable within 50 to 100 years” (Kin Chi, 2011, p.241).
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