Before The Last Glacier Melts

Biodiversity is important. This year, it is much more important for our country. As a result of the conference held in Rio in 1992, the governments signed three major agreements. Of these agreements, the Framework Convention for Climate Change is the agreement we hear the most. The Paris Agreement sets out the principles of implementation of this convention. The Climate Conferences held at the end of each year are actually the Conference of the Parties to this convention. Another agreement signed in Rio is the Convention on Biological Diversity. Similar to climate conferences, biodiversity conferences are also held biennially and the next conference will be held in our country. After the last conference is being held in Kunming, China, our country will assume the responsibility of biodiversity topic globally, and therefore the issue of biodiversity will be on our agenda for the next two years. Since climate affects our daily life, everybody knows more or less about it. Biodiversity, on...

Last week, European Climate Change Service announced that 2021 was the fifth warmest year in history. When we read newspaper headlines in this way, many of us may reach different conclusions, so I will try to explain the meaning of this announcement piece by piece. First of all, scientists have been measuring the average temperature of the globe with modern thermometers for nearly two hundred years. Although there were no modern thermometers all over our planet two hundred years ago, we can know the average temperatures we have experienced in the last two hundred years with quite a high accuracy, as these thermometers were spread in most places and the measurements made at that time were corrected by comparing them with the measurements today. So we are confident that the average temperatures we have experienced in 2021 have not been seen for at least two hundred years. We know that Galileo Galilei invented the first roughly scientific thermometer four hundred years ago. Although the m...

2021 was the year we believed in the climate crisis. Until that year, most of us were not yet aware of what kind of trouble we were in. And in 2020, a pandemic came on top of everything. In fact, at first, we thought that the pandemic would not be different from other problems and that life would return to normal in a short time. When 2021 started, it was widely thought that the pandemic would end in a short time with the discovery of the COVID19 vaccine. Unfortunately, 2021 did not progress as expected. The level of education, which developed all over the world after World War II, started to decrease gradually with the neoliberal system led by the US and UK in the early 1980s. At that time, most were unaware of the trouble that had befallen us. Individuals who are accustomed to learning, problem-solving, and thinking gradually decided that it is more enjoyable to live without thinking, and to walk on the path shown by the system without questioning it too much. As life got easier, peo...

It is a well-known behavior that countries start to pay more attention to the environment in addition to the economy in parallel to the increase of their level of development. Since the votes of the political parties, which attach more importance to environmental policies, have increased, the European Union has begun to put more weight on environmentally friendly production within its economic policy. This new production and consumption style friendlier to nature is primarily defined as a system respecting the boundaries of nature. The scientific basis of this definition was the Planetary Boundaries study published by the Stockholm Resilience Center in 2009, led mainly by European scientists. According to this study, the sustainable development of humanity was only possible if these limits were respected. The developments around this work have started to be implemented in all manufacturing and consumption sectors in Europe. As the European Union tightened the rules on the environment, ...

We can find enough of the precious metals on the Earth's surface to last us for thousands of years. We also have sufficient sources of coal, oil, and natural gas, most of which are underground, that humanity can burn until the atmosphere becomes unbreathable. However, when we look at all these sources, two main problems emerge. First, should we unearth and use all of these resources? We can burn all the coal, oil, and natural gas we want until we increase the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above 5000 parts per million. During the time when the dinosaurs reigned our planet, there was even more carbon dioxide, so if we extract and burn all these fossil fuels, it is possible to reach the same level. But we know that if the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere reaches 5000 ppm, we will not be able to breathe. If we decide to extract all the other minerals, the surface of our planet will belong to mining companies rather than living beings including humans. It also became ...

After the Second World War, the world economy entered a period of unprecedented economic growth. This growth process not only reduced relative poverty in almost all nations but also enabled developed nations to reach their current level of prosperity. However, this growth process also brought with it problems about the sustainability of this growth. The Club of Rome, one of the main think tanks that put forward such problems, posed the question "How much more is it possible to grow?" to a group of scientists from MIT University. Donella Meadows and her coworkers published their work to answer this question in a report called The Limits to Growth. This report, published in 1972, has since been regarded as the fundamental study that has determined the growth limits of our civilization. Although The Limits to Growth is a very comprehensive report, it looks at the problem of growth from a narrow perspective and asks, “Do we have enough resources to grow even more?” and then tries...

We need to take urgent steps to ensure that the effects of the climate crisis do not get much worse than they already are. Each year we are late to act only increases the size of the disaster that will befall humanity. Actually, the calculation is quite simple. If we want to limit global warming to 1.5℃, we can release a maximum of 420 billion tons of carbon dioxide starting today. The upper limit we can emit for the 2℃ limit is 1270 billion tons of carbon dioxide. If the emissions exceed these limits, the temperature will increase even more and the disasters we will experience will intensify and diversify. As humanity, we emit 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. If we continue like this, we will exceed the 1.5℃ limit by 2033 and the 2℃ limit by 2054. In order not to exceed these limits, the first thing we have to achieve is to come to a decision together. This decision about global warming limits will determine how humanity should act in terms of greenhou...