The King Mango Strut is a nutty parade tradition that happens on the last Sunday of every year (since 1982!)  in Coconut Grove, Miami.  It is full of political messages, satire, parodies, and pretty much recaps the highlights of the past year.  There is nothing else like it!

My friends at Emerge Miami, a local activist group, participate every year. (Last year they had the crowd throwing shoes at a effigy of George W.)   This year it was climate cheerleading.  (which I got to be a part of!!)



Our cheer troop was followed by a bed on wheels (recycled from the Bed Race) with a senator in bed with an oil company big wig (aka a blow up doll).  Attached to the bed were the direct phone numbers to call the senators and demand a stronger climate bill. 


(You can still call BTW!)

We had a captain planet theme song remake, a pyramid, and even a cheer in Spanish!
FYI: PARE EL CAMBIO DE CLIMA means Stop Climate Change!
check us out rehearsing right before the parade started:

(all pom poms made out of recycled grocery bags)







Here are some of the others.....

The Sierra club did  one about recretional hunting in national parks.  They had about 30 people dressed as animals and trees toting guns & ammo.


Stimulating stimulus package


Barbie turns 50, aka COUGAR Barbie


There were at least 4 different Tiger Woods ones. 
This one was my favorite, but honestly, DIDN'T MORE IMPORTANT THINGS HAPPEN THIS YEAR!?!?!?


Uh.... I have NO idea what this clown was supposed to be... weird.


OH HELL NO!!!!!!!!!!!! the Climategate thing? Lucky we are peaceful cheerleaders, or this climate change skeptic would have gone DOWN! I guess everyone has a right to their opinion....


Too see more pics, check out my flickr

Copenhagen is finally behind us and some unbinding deals have been reached, including:

• Emission limits for emerging powers India and China, along with new reduction targets for the United States.
• An aid fund, to reach $100 billion a year by 2020, to help poor nations adapt to changing climate and employ low-emission fuels.

Nations will have until February to respond to specific emission commitments, but no real deadlines have been set.  This, along with other provisions, has been disappointing to many environmental activists and leaders of poor and "climate vulnerable" nations.

So what do athletes have to say about climate change?

Just this past month, Canadian Olympic athletes and Ethiopian Olympic athletes have shown concern.  According to CBC News, Canadian Olympic athletes wrote a letter to prime minister, Stephen Harper, calling on him "to support an agreement on cutting greenhouse gases at the UN conference on climate change in Copenhagen."

A victory for Canadian athletes? Well, maybe. If you consider the above unbinding deals any indication of progressive change on the climate change front.



On the other side of the globe, Ethiopian athletes are feeling a difference in outdoor temperatures. According to multi-world record holder, Haile Gebrselassie, he believes the climate change over the years affects how he trains.

"Three weeks ago I was in Asela and I jogged three kilometres," he said in the capital, Addis Ababa. "It was around 9.30 a.m. and you don't believe it ... I was sweating. I asked myself, 'Is this Asela? The place where we were training before? Yes it is'," he told Reuters.

 

I've wondered what real-world impact climate change has had on athletes, especially distance runners that have trained in hot climates over the years.  When I was running track in Houston a few years back, I never thought that the scorching morning temperatures had anything to do with climate change. Honestly, I thought I was just experiencing normal climate shock coming from the Snow Belt area. I'm in no way qualified to say whether or not climate change was the reason Houston was so hot during those intense August mornings. However, Gebrselassie seems to have a unique frame of reference since he's been training near his home town for over 20 years.

Knowing now that some form of "deals" have been reached in Copenhagen, I wonder if it will matter in the end.  I also wonder if, with erratic outdoor temperatures, we'll begin to see more athletes speak out for stricter emission standards.

Only time will tell.

 

Images: CBC News, Nazret, & E. H. Butler Library Blog

Today marks the beginning of the 15th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) in Copenhagen, Denmark.

From December 7 to 18, tens of thousands of people from 192 different countries (a crazy mix of world leaders, diplomats, green activists, journalists and celebrities) are descending upon the city of Copenhagen to witness what some believe is the most influential environmental conference in history. Participants will take on the daunting task of defining a global agreement to take action on climate change and reverse the effects of our use of fossil fuels. This summit will decide whether the world stays on the same path it is on or decides to tackle climate change head-on.

In short, COP15 is huge, both for our generation and for many generations to come. For the next two weeks, we want to hear what you in the YouthNoise community think about COP15 and climate change. What do you think of the Copenhagen summit? Why are you concerned about climate change? Should world leaders take a hard stance on stopping climate change? What do you hope results from COP15?

Here's how:

1. Log in to your YN account and click on My Profile in the top navigation
2. In the My Blog section, click "post new blog"
3. Write your thoughts, ideas and arguments about climate change
4. Check a few Environment Cause pages and add the tag "cop15" in the tags section below
5. Publish your blog and see your blog in the COP15 blog feed!

I chanced upon the strangest bit of news concerning climate change I'd ever heard today. (It's a bit out-dated, being a year old, but I haven't yet found anything to refute it).

It nearly sounds like the premise of a new hit video game: thawing corpses spread deadly disease all about the Earth (and, for the sake of the game, also come back to life). Truth may just be as strange as fiction, because some scientists are worried that some corpses, dead of smallpox and buried in permafrost lands, may thaw- and, in turn, expose people to preserved smallpox with them.

 

 

As you may know, smallpox was quite the force to be reckoned with. It is estimated to have killed over 300 million people in just the 19th century! Now, smallpox is considered eradicated- good riddance- but that leaves humanity quite vulnerable to the disease. Meaning, a reappearance of smallpox would very likely prove tragic.

Drought, famine, and now an epidemic are all what we have to look forward to should climate change go on unchecked. I would much rather take the precautionary lifestyle of an environmentalist now then face those!

For the article concerning the corpses, see:

http://www.livescience.com/environment/080327-smallpox-corpses.html

Although it hasn’t been widely publicised where I live, I’ve been informed that the American government is trying to convince India to adopt policies that will decrease their (India’s) carbon emissions.

A story in a Time of 2005 talked about something the likes of, “India and China hold the future in their hands”. The article dealt specifically with the carbon footprints of these industrial nations.

Where I come in is that India’s argument for declining to make an agreement is that it will negatively affect their poor – and one thing that India has a-plenty of is poverty.

At this stage my mind is pathology-oriented (blame varsity) and for the life of me I struggled to bring the concepts of greening and starving together.

All I could think of was that initiating these endeavours would obviously cost money, which could possibly take much-needed money from India’s budget, thus depleting the resources available for helping the poor.

In response to India’s viewpoint, however, there is an interesting opposition.

Turns out climate change isn’t just something the comfortably rich get to fight against for a lack of hardships in their lives.

TURNS OUT that climate change hits the poorest, the hardest.

But then, we’ve known that in the back of our minds all along, haven’t we?

 

In severely underdeveloped countries it’s not really a matter of water or veggies being scarce and thus having to fork out a bit more to get them. It’s a matter of: if they’re scarce, you might not actually GET THEM. At ALL.

So it kind of becomes a problem when people labour and forage for longer hours, yet come home with less water and food.

 

Think: hungry.

Think: Kwashiorkor.

Think dry skin spanning over bony limbs and swollen tummies.

 

 

 

These are times when children are kept from school (if they even have that luxury) to help with the search for food. And no education very often equals a continued cycle of poverty.

These are times of floods and droughts and all sorts of climate disasters, proven to be a direct effect of climate change.

So I would have to argue that the benefits of implementing these strategies are distinctly more far-reaching than the costs thereof.

Many believe that climate change and all its dangers don’t exist, and I don’t have a thesis to disprove that – but would you rather fight a good fight only to find out there was no danger, or not fight the fight only to discover that the dangers were real all along?

I understand that the conditions we experience now are not necessarily reversible... but reducing emissions now might at least decrease further effects (the old proverb does go, “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago... the second best time is now”).

So my point is this: you cannot say you are passionate about alleviating poverty and at the same time neglect the effects of climate change on the poor...

That’s kind of like treating Kwashiorkor without treating the cause.