St Paul's
Climate Change

A disaster like no other is heading our way and everyone in this room stands accused of causing it.

It’s not an obvious link but it is a real one.
It is happening because our climate is changing. No longer can our senses drink in the vapour of the different seasons but instead our own selfish ways are making our weather decide not to change when our months do.

What do you mean - our weather is not changing?

Our earth’s climate has changed naturally - we all remember the ice age. Changes are also happening because of our own human behaviour.

So we are all guilty of damaging the earth.

Yes - burning fossil fuel like coal, oil and natural gas in power stations and cars release carbon dioxide. This is a greenhouse gas which we need to keep the earth’s atmosphere warm, but our use of these fossil fuels has increased so much that the earth’s atmosphere is heating up more, making globe warning worse.

Not only this but deforestation, the cutting down of trees, is making the situation worse because living trees take up carbon dioxide from the air. With less trees, more of the gas stays in the air and adds to our problem so we need to stop deforestation.

Our behaviour.

You mean by us polluting.

Means that heat is trapped which raises the earth’s temperature and melts the ice caps in the Arctic and Antarctic. The ice melt into the water and this means that sea levels rise and floods happen.
If a flood were ever to occur in London our visit to the Urban Studies Centre where we interviewed Roger de Freeitas and Paul Baker has taught us that Hammersmith and Fulham would be the worst affected by floods in London.

You might sit here and think that this would never happen but London has suffered.

In 1928 Hammersmith and Fulham was flooded and areas all around our school were destroyed. Our lessons in literacy have taught us that 2 servants who were called Evelyn Hyde and Annie Moreton were killed along the Upper mall in Hammersmith.
Thankfully some caring people thought of a way to help stop flooding in London. We visited the Thames Barrier in September and were told by Rachel Hill from the Environment Agency about the magnificent way in which the barrier acts as a defence against rising sea levels.

We ask everyone gathered here:
Are you aware of the ways we all waste our resources?

How many people here drove, which is using oil and petrol that releases gases which end up polluting our world and making our climate hotter?

How many of you use as much paper and just throw it away and do not think about what harmful gas the paper could become.

We are all guilty of this happening.
We need to create less carbon dioxide by burning less fossil fuel. As a borough we should use renewable sources of energy that are not fossil fuels like sun, wind and water. Movements of wind and water can generate electricity and solar panels trap the sun’s energy and changes it to heat or electricity. All of this is done without creating carbon dioxide.

In school we are trying to make a difference - we recycle all paper so that it can be used again so more trees do not have to be cut down.

We are also all in the process of joining the library, or rejoining, so that books can be shared and so less paper is needed.
We have also contacted a school in New Zealand and have learned about what they are trying to do to help stop climate change. We are using email to swap ideas about what we could all do to help with this problem.

It can’t be just a few who do this though - everyone has got to be responsible - we can only recycle at school because bins are local but there are not enough of them in the area to make sure we’ll do it at home. Why not Hammersmith and Fulham?

It is not just us who experience difficulties - conflict in our world means that countries do not always work together.
In 1997 George Bush rejected the Kyoto agreement which was about reducing gases like carbon dioxide and at this year’s Earth Summit, he refused to send a representative from the USA.

Other difficulties are that poorer countries may not be rich enough to build things like the Thames Barrier and cannot protect against floods.

It is thought our global temperature will rise over the next 100 years by about 4.5 c. We must do something now because our children and their children will blame us for any flooding that they experience. They would be right to blame us because if we don’t change our ways we will leave them the impression that we did not care enough about preventing damage to the earth and to our future relatives’ lives.