Climate lessons with Tiki the Penguin

Have you heard about how the world's getting hotter? Some people say it is. Some say it isn't. Who's right? And does it matter? How will it affect you and your friends? How will it affect penguins? What can we do about it? These are some of the things I wanted to find out about.

My name - Tiki - means 'talisman' - a sort of lucky charm - in the language of South Pacific people. I am a lucky Penguin, being able to do something to stop the damage to the Earth. No Penguin or other animal has ever done so before in this way So I learned some more. And became even more shocked and saddened at what's happening to our home, the planet Earth. I wanted to do something to help people understand what the rest of us animals have always known and some people seem to have forgotten: how to live life without ruining and wasting the Earth.

1.What is climate?
Climate is a sort of huge 'machine'. What's called 'weather' is just a small bit of this machine which you and I notice: you know, a tornado, a blizzard, a hurricane, very hot weather or very cold weather. And I bet you know what drives this machine, don't you? Yes, it's the sun. Without the sun, there would be no climate, no weather, no people, no penguins, no life.
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2.The climate 'machine'

The sun warms the air and hot air rises bringing with it moisture from the sea. As the moist air rises, it expands. This makes it cooler and so any moisture in the air condenses to make clouds. And, as you know, clouds mean rain. The sun also warms the seas and oceans which makes huge currents of water -- a little like winds, but inside the ocean. One of these huge currents is called the Gulf Stream in the North Atlantic Ocean. This keeps countries in Northern Europe warm even though they are nearer the North Pole than the equator. Another huge current -- this time a cold current -- affects Chile and Peru in South America. This is called the Humboldt current. It brings lots of food for fish to eat which once made the Peruvian fishing industry the biggest in the world. It also means that many seabirds can live there... including penguins. All these things -- the oceans, the atmosphere, the hot and the cold parts of the planet, deserts, rainforests -- all depend upon climate and upon the sun.
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3.Hotting up

The sun is getting hotter. It is also incredibly old -- about 5000 million years old! One day it will blow up but that won't be for another 5000 million years or so.
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But the Earth's climate seems to be heating up much much faster than can be explained by the sun making
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more heat. And the reason seems to be you people and your machines. Almost all machines use oil, gas or coal. All of them produce pollution -- you know, the smelly stuff that comes out of car exhaust pipes and factory chimneys, that sort of thing. Much of this is a gas you can't see called carbon dioxide. It's this gas which seems to be the main cause of the trouble.
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Pandora was a woman who figured in one of the Greek myths. In the myth, the gods gave her a mysterious box. They'd put something nasty in the box and told her never to open it. But she was overcome by curiosity and opened the box. Out flew horrible stuff like plagues, sorrow and misery. She tried in vain to shut the lid but it was too late: the horrors were free.
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Opening Pandora's carbon box

It's a little like that with fossil fuels. For millions of years, the planet has been tucking away its carbon in the form of coal, oil and limestone. This natural sequestering of carbon and burying it deep in the Earth's crust has kept the climate machine in balance. Too much carbon means global warming; too little means cooling. Humans have opened the planetary Pandora's carbon box and let out fossil fuels on a vast scale. Burning them releases the carbon they contained back into the air as carbon dioxide, CO2.
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4. Greenhouse Earth
What happens when you go into a greenhouse on a sunny day? It's hot, isn't it? That's because the glass in the greenhouse traps the heat from the sun. This gas carbon dioxide does the same in the earth's atmosphere. It acts like glass in a greenhouse, doing the same as my feathers do when I'm swimming in the very cold sea: my feathers keep me warm, the glass in the greenhouse keeps the plants inside warm, and the carbon dioxide keeps the planet warm. Without it, we'd freeze. Too much of it means that we boil! Because people are burning fuels with carbon in (that's oil, gas and coal which you use in cars, aeroplanes, power stations and so on), all this carbon gets dumped into the air, mixed with the oxygen we all breathe, and so adds to our greenhouse gas problem.
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And the planet warms some more.

5.What happens next?

"The climate system is an angry beast, and we are poking it."
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Wallace Broecker
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What happens next is not good news for people or penguins. The thing that bothers me is that the ice of the poles is melting. Some of it already is melting fast. The Arctic sea ice gets less every year and the great frozen continent of Antarctica(my home) is losing ice too. Other seas, like the North Sea, are warming too. This means that fish which need colder waters have to swim north and this can have bad effects of both fishing and seabirds.
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As you know, penguins like ice. Without very cold water and ice, we get too hot because, likepolar bears, we're built for cold weather. But for you people, it will be much worse.
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For a start, all the ice that melts will start to fill up the oceans and make them overflow on land. And the water itself will take up more space simply because it is warmer. That will make it overflow even more onto the land.
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6. Good news for fish; very bad news for people

More sea and less land is fine for penguins and for fish, but it's no good at all for people and other animals that live on the land. Some of the best land for growing food is also the most lowlying. That means it will be flooded first. It also happens that some of your biggest cities, like London, New Orleans and Bangkok, will get flooded too. Loads of people will go hungry and many more will have nowhere to live. This is very worrying.
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It's also very unfair! The really sad thing is that it will be poor people who suffer most. I think that's very unfair because it's the people in rich countries who have been the cause of almost all global warming but it's the poor who drown or starve.
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What do you think? Then there's disease. As the world warms, nasty diseases like malaria are starting to spread because the changing climate favours the mosquito that carries the disease. Air travel is not just a cause of global warming and aids in spreading diseases very quickly just about anywhere. Someone with an illness like TB may easily pass on the disease to others during an airplane flight of a few hours. Insects like mosquitoes which can carry disease can even 'hitch a ride' on flights from one country to another.
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7.Storms ahead

I'm afraid worse is to come: people who study earth's climate have found that as it warms up, the weather is going to get more violent and unpredictable. Hurricanes, for example, will become more powerful -- a big worry for people living in the south of the United States and in the tropical Pacific or Indian ocean areas like the Philippine islands and Bangladesh. Deserts are increasing and places like the Great Plains of America will get drier. Rain will be heavier in other parts of the world so there will be more floods. These things have already started to happen.
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8. It's not really happening, is it?

It seems to be, but there are some people who say it is not. Can you think who some of these might be? You guessed it! Many of the people who claim climate change is not happening are those who use lots of fuel, who make things like cars that use lots of fuel, or actually get the fuel out of the earth: that's heavy industry, carmakers and the oil, gas and coal companies. This is what people call 'vested interest'. These are people who depend on other people using lots of fuel if they are to continue making money. It's not surprising that they don't think there is any climate change. But it doesn't make them right!

9.Yes, climate change is real... and very unfair!

"For anyone who has wondered how global warming and reduced sea ice will affect polar bears, the answer is simple - they die." Richard Steiner, University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has found that the bears drown as they try to swim ever further between melting sea ice in search of food. (Wall Street Journal, 14 December 2005)

Lots of people have studied the climate all around the world. They agreed several years ago that climate change really was happening. As a result, all countries in the world came together in a big conference at Kyoto in Japan. Here they began to try and agree what to do about climate change. Lots of promises were made but countries haven't been very good at carrying them out. Since then, the evidence of change has become stronger and stronger. The special computer 'models' which scientists had used have become more and more accurate. The ice sheets in both the Arctic and the Antarctic are melting, in some cases very fast. Sea levels are rising. Temperatures are rising, especially in the Arctic and Antarctic. Glaciers on other mountains of the world are melting very fast -especially in the Himalayas. Animals and plants which like warmer conditions are moving further north and south. Yes, it's happening all right. The world is hotting up. And I'm sorry to say it's all people's fault. But it's not everyone that's doing it. Mostly it's people in rich countries -- North America, Europe and Australia. They are the ones with energy-hungry lifestyles which guzzle fossil fuels. Poor people like those in most African countries, Asia and Latin America can't afford to travel all over the place in cars and planes, they don't have heating or air conditioning in their homes or eat fancy food. Many don't even have anything more to live in than a one-room shack with no toilet, no kitchen, no running water. These people are not the ones causing global warming. Yet they are the ones who suffer most from climate change caused by the rich. It's not fair, is it?
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As for us other animals, we are innocent too because the only fuel we use is that which we get from our food ... so what are you folks going to do about it?

Oh no Stop Global Warming! (from Amy, age 8, writing in her school magazine which she sent me) Global warming has started. A lot of people are making too much carbon dioxide called green house gasses and that green house gas goes up into the air and is making our planet hotter and then all the polar bears and penguins are dying out and all that ice turns into water and that water makes the sea level go up and floods houses and shops. Picture of flooded railway in Bombay/Mumbai city, India (by Pachyderm). In 2005, Mumbai had 896 millimetres of rain in 24 hours, turning the streets into rivers. Around 1500 people died because of the floods. (Slideshow: Marooned Mumbai)
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Yes, there's lots you and your friends and family can do.

10.Twelve Really Important Things you can do to help stop global warming
1. Get active: Talk with your friends, your teachers and your parents. It's your space... like MySpace, but this special space is for setting up networks of like-minded people to help fix climate change. On OneClimate, you can ask questions or write about things you're doing to combat global warming. You can post videos and pictures too. You can even form your own group and make contact with others like yourself. Get your parents and teachers involved! Why not get your school to join as a group? Take a look at OneClimate.net! It's completely FREE.
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You can also write to your country's politicians telling them that you're worried about climate change and why. If enough people make a fuss, they have to do something.
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2. Know what damage you're doing and get to be an expert! It's not much use trying to change something if you're part of the problem or you don't understand what it's all about!

3. Why drive when you can walk?! If your family has a car, get them to use it less. Walk to the shops. Walking, running, skipping are all much more fun than sitting in a boring un-cool car. If you need to travel further than you can walk, use a bus, metro or train if you can.

4. Make your own climate!

Turn the heating down in winter. If you're cold, wear more clothes! Turn the air conditioning down in summer or use a fan.

5. Shop locally: If you can, buy your food from local farm shops and try and avoid imported goods. Or get your family to join a veg box scheme. Trucks and planes bringing in food and stuff from other countries, or from distant parts of your own country, use huge amounts of fuel.
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6. Travelling light: Don't travel long distances unless you really have to. Particularly try and avoid using aeroplanes and big, gas-guzzling cars like SUVs. See if your friends and parents could holiday locally
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7. Get your parents to change their driving habits... and their car. Cars guzzle fuel, but they use much less if people drive them gently and keep below speed limits. Big SUVs make about six times their own weight in CO2 each year. A small efficient diesel car covering the same distance not only uses much less fuel; it makes two thirds less CO2.
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8. Solar energy is free: see if you can get your parents and friends interested in free solar energy -- that's energy from the sun and wind. You can get much of your hot water and heating from the sun and even generate electricity. And it's exciting building all these things. If you live in a windy place, a wind turbine - also called 'windmill'- really is a serious option. More and more people are installing them and more and more companies are producing well-designed, sturdy machines. Generating your own power is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint.
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9. Eating: Learn to cook! Home cooking is not only fun, it means you don't have to drive to a takeaway or fast food restaurant. Result? Less pollution. If you make a garden, you can grow much of your own food. Did you know that if you eat fewer meat and dairy products, you can reduce greenhouse gas output? (Here's why.) And composting your waste food means it doesn't have to be trucked away to a landfill waste dump where it will cause more pollution including methane, a powerful greenhouse gas. [why doesn't composting make methane?] Some Cool Kids - aged between 11 and 14 in San Diego, California, USA - are fighting against global warming in a really smart way. They've made a website which explains why eating much less meat is so important. It's a great site so please take a look. You can join them and commit to eating less meat!
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10. Reduce, reuse, recycle: Remember your three Rs!

Reduce: the most important. If you don't buy so much stuff in the first place, then you don't need to reuse or recycle it. Reuse whatever you can (like plastic supermarket bags). If you can't reuse something,
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Recycle it!
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11. Turn off and shut it!

Turning things off may seem a boring turn-off hee hee! . But leaving lights, heating, air conditioning, computers, TVs and stuff on when you don't need them wastes a lot of energy. Turning them off saves money too! "Put t' wood in t' 'ole" if it's warm in one room and cold in another. The door helps keep the heat in.
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Leaving things on standby (like TVs, computers and stuff) also uses a surprising amount of energy.See more of my cartoons about this!
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12. Psst! Don't keep this a secret: the future is DTQs Eh?!? What?!? This is one cool secret which no one seems to know about so you really must tell everyone! Don't be put off if you don't know what DTQs are; I didn't either. But they look like the best way to stop global warming and energy shortages. So get your head round DTQs here and then be sure to tell everyone! Way to go...
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So you see climate change is not all gloom and doom. There's plenty you can do.