100 Reasons To Act.

**Originally posted on Sunday, January 21, 2007**

1. We're here and we're ready. The Campus Climate Challenge has more than 450 schools signed up and we are ready to take action to avert a climate crisis and bring about a clean energy revolution.
2. The planet is heating up. Since 1980, the earth has experienced 19 of its 20 hottest years on record. 2006 was the hottest year in United States history. Global warming and El Nino are predicted to make 2007 even hotter.
   
3. After aggressive campaigning by climate activists and high youth voter turnout, America has elected a Congress that has taken the least money from Big Oil since 1990. In Canada, the Harper Government has begun to undo years of progress on global warming. Now all of us have a choice. Do we take the easy road of half-measures and compromise or do we stand up to the fossil fuel industry and give our planet a fighting chance for a bright future beyond the climate crisis? The time is now to join together and demand a clean energy future!
4. The clock is ticking. Last year, Dr. James Hansen, Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Science gave a clear warning, "We have at most ten years—not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions…Such an outcome is still feasible in the case of global warming, but just barely."
5. Ice cores drilled in Antarctica reveal that carbon dioxide levels are substantially higher now than at any time in the last 800,000 years.
6. Ice cores also show that there has been an increase of 30 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last 17 years. In the last 800,000 years the fastest increase prior to this was 30 ppm in 1,000 years.
7. If greenhouse gas buildup in the atmosphere continues at current levels, 15-37% of all plant and animal species on the planet could be wiped out due to global warming by 2050.
8. Extreme drought is predicted for about 1/3 of the planet by the end of the century if there is no change in our current energy policies, according to the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Britain.
9. The climate movement needs youth to act and lead the way if it is to succeed. As Kwesi Mfume, former President of the NAACP has said, "Students have been at the forefront of most major social movements from the civil rights movement of the 1960's to today."
10. People of color are twice as likely to die in a heat wave. A study of the fifteen largest American cities found that climate change would increase heat-related deaths by at least 90 percent.
11. Climate change harms the health of communities of color and Indigenous Peoples. Communities of color and Indigenous Peoples are burdened with poor air quality and are twice as likely to be uninsured than whites. Yet, these communities will become even more vulnerable to climate-change related respiratory ailments, heat-related illness and death, and illness from insect-carried diseases.
12. People of color are concentrated in urban centers in the South, coastal regions, and areas with substandard air quality. Approximately 80 percent of people of color and Indigenous Peoples in the United States live in coastal regions. New Orleans, which is 62 percent African-American and 2 feet below sea level, exemplifies the severe and disproportionate impacts of climate change in the U.S. Source: http://www.ejcc.org
13. U.S. and Canadian oil executives and government officials met for a two-day oil summit in Houston in January 2006 and made plans for a "fivefold expansion" in oilsands production in a relatively "short time span," according minutes of the meeting obtained by the CBC's French-language network, Radio-Canada. The current extraction of oil from the tar sands results in the spewing of millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere: it's already the biggest source of new greenhouse gas emissions in Canada. More: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/oil/wilderness_alberta.html
14. A serious clean energy revolution will produce millions of new jobs and spur economic development throughout the world.
15. A serious clean energy revolution will lessen the pressure on certain countries (that should know better) to use military force to try to secure oil and natural gas resources.
16. An article in the August 2006 issue of Science reported that the speed at which the Greenland ice sheet was melting had risen threefold in the past two years as compared with the previous five. If the Greenland ice sheets melt completely into the ocean, sea level worldwide will rise 23 feet. Half of the world's population lives along or close to ocean coastlines.
17. If the United States auto industry was a country it would rank 5th in global warming pollution just behind Japan and ahead of 188 other countries.
18. In 2003, extreme heat waves caused more than 20,000 deaths in Europe and more than 1500 deaths in India. More than 250 people died as a result of an intense heat wave that gripped most of the eastern two-thirds of the United States in 1999.
19. In the last 30 years 400,000 square kilometers of Arctic ice have melted, an area the size of Texas. (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment).
20. By 2030, Glacier National park will have no glaciers left. (U.S. Geological Survey).
21. Hurricanes hitting U.S. coastlines have caused over 100 billion dollars in damage. (National Climatic Date Center).
22. Between 2004 and 2005 Arctic perennial sea ice, which is 10 or more feet thick and which normally survives the summer melting season, abruptly shrank by 14%.
23. Today, there are four times as many large wildfires in national forests since 1987 compared to the period betwen 1970 and 1986, and these wildfires have charred more than six times the number of acres.
24. A September 8, 2006 Associated Press story reported that methane, a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, is being released from melting permafrost at a rate five times faster than previously thought, according to a study published in the journal Nature.
25. The average weight of adult female polar bears in the western Hudson Bay has dropped from 650 pounds in 1980 to 507 pounds in 2004.

Help us reach 100. Add your reason at http://www.climatechallenge/org/woa -> 100 Reasons.