UNESCO’s 5

The choice of ICE CARE’s 5 glaciers, was based on a document by UNESCO, entitled: “Case Studies on Climate Change and World Heritage”
The report highlights 5 glaciers that are dramatically affected by climate change. These are the glaciers we will climb from 2009 until 2012.
UNESCO’s report was coordinated by Augustin Colette, at the time UNESCO’s consultant for climate change. In a recent conversation (by e-mail), he sent me an enthusiastic: “…congratulations for this exciting project!”

Because it’s absolutely pro bono, ICE CARE puts me at a state that borders the statute of divinity and of furious madman! That’s probably why people indulge to pay some attention to my requests.

Driven by Colette’s reassuring statement, about ICE CARE’s public interest, I’ll probably get in touch with UNESCO to set up some kind of collaboration protocol.

UNESCO’s stamp provides enough confidence, that we’ve chosen the right glaciers…unfortunately, these glaciers were selected primarily because of the amount of data available to document the impacts of climate change….there are of course other glaciers currently at risk…

Q&A

Ice Care started as a ‘civil movement’ (as someone put it in a meeting), by a couple of friends who like to climb, but know little about climate change.

Soon enough this naïf attitude was cornered and proved unsustainable in the long term.

Tiago Bettencourt suggested I would prepare a tutorial about global warming – with all due right.

Recently I came across Zé Diogo Quintela (rather famous Portuguese humorist) on the street. We’ve known each other for ages, so I invited him to become the first official Ice Care ambassador. He throws a couple of intelligent questions at me – which is quite normal for someone publicly endorsing a cause.

- ‘Is it really happening? Isn’t our climate naturally variable? Why is it different now? Is it really serious?’

- ‘can we really do something? Switching off mobile chargers has any effect whatsoever?’

Natural and healthy skepticism, I would say – very common to the majority of people, like me and him, who need a veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery good reason to decline the comforts of ignorance.

By then I’d realize the urge to explain the dimensions of the problem to everyone (like me and him….).

In London I found an excellent book by Bill McGuire - '7 years to change the planet’. Based on that book, I’m preparing a sequence of ppts with Q&A according to the following issues:

1. What is happening already?
2. Is it already too late?
3. What is Ice Care doing?
4. What can I do?

In the meanwhile, here are some ideas that can be applied immediately:

. Eat less meat! – we’ve exhorted the guilt upon cars and planes, but ‘…the meat industry conspires to generate an astonishing 12% of global emissions […]almost as much as all cars, trains, boats and planes put together.’

. Switch off unused equipments! – if everyone in the UK ‘…made sure that the appliances were properly switched off when not in use, we could do away with 2, or maybe 3, of the 10 new nuclear power plants currently in the planning stages.’