Hallo, concerned viewers, and welcome to this week’s Planet Earth: Our Loving Home featuring retired family physician Dr. Peter Carter from British Columbia, Canada who is the co-founding director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, a climate policy advisor to the Canadians for Climate Action, and the co-author of the 2008 book “Homo Sapiens! Save Your Earth from Mass Extinction Due to Global Warming.”

As Ban Ki-moon said, we have all the resources to deal with and get over climate change. The only thing we lack, as he said, is time. We are in an emergency.

Dr. Carter, a vegetarian, was a speaker at the “Humanity’s Leap to The Golden Era” climate change conference held in Washington DC, USA on November 8, 2009 that included special guest Supreme Master Ching Hai participating by videoconference.

Dr. Carter was also a speaker at a community event entitled “Creating a Healthy Planet with a Plant-Based Diet” which was held in Victoria, Canada and today we present excerpts from his talk which covered the dangers we all face from global warming. To begin, he addresses the conditions at the poles and in the oceans and how the global environment is giving strong warning signals that we are on the cusp of runaway climate change.

The latest research is that computer model climate change projections prove to be underestimating the response of the Earth to global warming. Polar ice sheets are melting into the sea. They’re underestimating what’s happened in the Arctic by at least 30 years, and they’re underestimating what’s happening in Antarctica by at least 50 years.

Life on the planet is controlled and allowed to survive because of the atmosphere. For all life on the planet, the bottom line is the atmosphere. The chemistry of the atmosphere has been extremely and fundamentally changed very much in the past 30 years and since the past 150 years.

The acid in the oceans and the carbon in the atmosphere is higher than at any time in the past 20 million years. The coral reefs are dying and the oceans are in big trouble.

Signs of accelerated global warming have attracted the attention of many prominent scientists including Dr. John Holdren who is presently the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy in the USA.

Dr. John Holdren, who is the chair of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, which is the biggest association of scientists in the world, and he has recently been appointed by President Obama’s administration as the advisor on climate change.

He says in his lecture circuit right now: “We’re way past dangerous climate interference levels in the atmosphere. The question now is whether we can avoid catastrophe.” Can we avoid catastrophe? And you can’t avoid catastrophe unless you face it full in the face.

To understand our climatic future, looking to the Earth’s ancient geological history is necessary.

We now have a really wonderful science, wonderful information from the ice cores. So these people go up to Greenland, and Antarctica, and they drill down, and every year they’re drilling down further, and further and further, and they now know that our carbon dioxide levels are — for sure, by the ice cores — a lot higher, a lot higher, than they’ve been for 800,000 years. As I said, they’re higher than they’ve been for 20 million years.

A “climate feedback loop” has been created in the Arctic because as the planet warms, the sea ice sheets melt, leaving less ice to reflect the Sun’s energy back into space. This energy is instead absorbed by the oceans which leads to the heating of the air and drives further melting of the ice. The feedback loop is also having devastating consequences to the Arctic permafrost, or the permanently frozen ground in this polar region.

Most of the planet’s carbon, up till now, has been locked away in permafrost.

Permafrost is huge, and it contains twice the carbon as the atmosphere.

Now that’s melting. It’s actually been melting and emitting methane for 10 years. The first scientific paper finding that thawing permafrost was emitting methane came out of Sweden 10 years ago.

There’s a ring around there, and that ring is on the coast of Siberia. You’ll see the United States, you’ll recognize that, and then right across from the United States is all Siberia, all the frozen wasteland of Siberia. The circle is where the warming has been most rapid on the entire planet. That’s the East Siberian coastal shelf and nobody realized there was methane there. And it’s all coming out of the ocean floor, it’s acidifying the ocean, and it’s getting out into the atmosphere. This is something the scientists said would not happen for centuries.

When the huge amount — five and a half million square miles of Arctic Ocean (sea ice) disappears in the summertime, we are going to be hit badly.

When we return, Dr. Carter will further discuss how the hazardous greenhouse gas methane is driving climate change. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home where we are presenting excerpts of a talk on climate change given by Dr. Peter Carter, a co-founding director of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment, a climate policy advisor to the Canadians for Climate Action, and co-author of the 2008 book “Homo Sapiens! Save Your Earth from Mass Extinction Due to Global Warming.”

The melting permafrost is releasing huge amounts of methane into our atmosphere and Dr. Carter next discusses why we all should be worried about this deadly gas.

It’s by far the most important greenhouse gas for many reasons. It has increased many times more than any other greenhouse gas has.

So all we hear about is carbon dioxide, right, folks? Right? That’s all we hear about. Right? Methane is just as bad, and it’s worse. As a feedback loop gas emission, and this is the runaway global heating / global warming thing, it is the most dangerous greenhouse gas without any question, to the survival of life on Earth.

Methane lasts for 12 years in the atmosphere, over that period it heats at 100 times the heating capacity of carbon dioxide and after 12 years it’s converted to carbon dioxide. James Hansen, in 2002, he suggested that we focus on methane, that we keep going on carbon dioxide, but we really focus on methane.

And he had many reasons. One of them is that it is actually relatively easy to control. It’s a lot easier to control our agriculture industry than it is to convert the entire fossil fuel industry, actually. The other thing that James Hansen mentioned was controlling methane emissions would produce a very rapid improvement in the rate of global warming that we’ve got going here.

According to the paper “Livestock and Climate Change” published in World Watch Magazine and written by former and current environmental experts from the World Bank, Robert Goodland and Jeff Anhang, the livestock sector is responsible for more than 51% of all human-caused global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock raising is also the largest source of methane that is released into the atmosphere by human activity.

There are three sources, basically, of our greenhouse gas emissions, and one of them is our energy, the heat we produce for energy. The second one is our transportation, all the planes and the cars and everything. And the third one is livestock. So there are three sources; now guess which is the biggest? Even with the recognized scientific figures today, the biggest is actually agri-business.

Why does meat matters most in the new age — we’re living in a new age — of rapid global warming? Well, farming isn’t like farming that I was brought up with as a child in England. It’s a very different business altogether. We’re now living in the industrialized, mechanized, chemical-intensive, livestock-based agribusiness. and this business is a massive emitter of the very strongest global warming greenhouse gases.

As part of informing the public about global warming, Dr. Carter has been promoting the plant-based lifestyle as vital to protecting the future of our precious planet.

The only individual action, which is a no-brainer and we all ought to be doing it, is just to stop eating meat. Going veg is now a matter of survival for all life.

We have to get to zero carbon. It means zero meat. Zero meat! Good for us, good for everybody. I’m a doctor, believe me, I know. It also means zero fossil fuels, we do that. It also means zero deforestation, which of course is just tied in with the meat, mainly.

Dr. Carter emphasized the need to immediately end meat consumption during his presentation at the “Humanity’s Leap to The Golden Era” climate change conference in Washington, DC, USA.

Obviously we have to have a compassionate culture. We have to create a compassionate culture as the Dalai Lama and all the spiritual leaders, indeed, Supreme Master Ching Hai, say is the essential.

Lord Nicholas Stern… I was very glad because he’s one of my climate heroes. I thought the Stern Commission report was great. So, last month he made a statement to the media that he said, I think people are going to have to become vegetarian to save the Earth.”

That was very good. Well, guess what he did last week?

He made another statement, “I’m vegetarian!”

All you people here I know have made the choice. We have everything we need to create this best of all possible futures.

Finally, during his talk in Victoria, Canada, Dr. Carter expressed his gratitude to Supreme Master Ching Hai for working on the issue closest to his heart – halting climate change and saving the planet.

If our children are my patients, or if life on Earth is my patient, or the planet is my patient, I am obligated to tell my patient these facts. I have to. So I thank the Supreme Master Ching Hai and her association from the bottom of my heart.

We deeply appreciate all the work of Dr. Peter Carter on the issue of global warming and also salute him for promoting the vegetarian diet as the key solution for cooling our planet. May our biosphere soon return to its previous state of stability and beauty.

For more information on Dr Peter Carter, please visit CanadianClimateAction.wordpress.com
Dr. Carter’s book “Homo Sapiens! Save Your Earth from Mass Extinction Due to Global Warming” is available at www.Amazon.com

Eco-friendly viewers, thank you for your kind company on today’s edition of Planet Earth: Our Loving Home. Enlightening Entertainment is next, after Noteworthy News. May we always know the Divine love and inner peace of Heaven.