TED Talks : Climate changes is happening. Here's how we adapt

I watched a conference entitled “Climate changes is happening. Here’s how we adapt” en presented by Alice Bows-Larkin on TED Talks. The presentation is about the global warming.

First, she says that the temperature has risen over several decades. And people in the richest countries are somewhat responsible for increase in greenhouse gas emissions, due to our way of life. Indeed, we’ve all contributed to climate change because of our actions, choices and behaviors. Even if we can feel guilty about decisions what we have to made around where to travel to, how often and how for example, or about the energy we choose to use. Today we have to think that, if our past behavior has damaged the climatic situation, then if we change our current behavior we can change the trend adopted by the climate in the world.

Secondly she explain by a graph the trend of the CO2 emissions : it was around 5 GtCO2/year in 1950 and today it is around 36 GtCO2/year, so there is a significant increase. Before 1950 these emissions were almost zero. Yet, some action was taken like the intergovernmental panel on climate change in 1988, the Rio earth summit in 1992, the Copenhagen accord in 2009 where it established avoiding a 2 degree temperature rise in keeping with the science and on the basis of equity. Then, in 2012 the Rio+20 even. But during all these meeting emissions have continued to rise.
Concerning the future, in nothing change we are much more on track for a 4 degree centigrade global warming than we are for the 2 degree centigrade. These forecasts are a real problem, because there is a lot of environmental consequences like the sea-level rise, and our infrastructures are not set up to deal with these sort of event. That’s why we must act to limit global warming.

Finally, to limiting global climate change to 2 degrees, rich countries have to reduce their energy demand of 10% per year. The demand of energy of developing countries must increase, so to compensate for this increase, Europeans countries, United-States and Australia have to fight harder against climate change.