Saving Planet Earth, the only home we have

The highly anticipated United Nations Climate Change Conference or COP26 meaning Conference of the Parties has begun in the Scottish City of Glasgow attended by delegates from some 200 countries to announce how they will help the planet by cutting emissions by 2030. With the world warming because of fossil fuel emissions caused by humans, scientists warn that urgent action is needed to avoid a climate catastrophe, a BBC report says.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said the summit would be the “world’s moment of truth”. Speaking ahead of the two-week conference, he urged leaders to make the most of it: “The question everyone is asking is whether we seize this moment or let it slip away.”

COP26 President Alok Sharma said agreement would be “tougher than what we achieved in Paris” five years ago, when almost all the world’s nations agreed on a treaty to “pursue efforts” to limit the global temperature rise to at least 1.5 degrees Celsius. He said “we expected more” of countries such as China, the world’s largest carbon emitter, and called the summit a “real opportunity” for them to show leadership.

Scientists say any additional warming past 1.5 degrees will trigger more intense and frequent climate extremes and render some of the world’s most densely populated areas into uninhabitable deserts or flood them with sea water.

With the ongoing climate change conference as the backdrop, we thought it appropriate to conclude today’s column with this, February 14, 2016 Reuters report. It says that on February 14, 1990, famed scientist Carl Sagan gave us an incredible never seen-before perspective on Planet Earth, the only Home we have.

The report says that as NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was about to leave our Solar System in 1989, Sagan, a member of the mission’s imaging team, pleaded with officials to turn the camera around to take one last look at Earth before the spaceship left our solar system. The resulting image, with the Earth as a speck less than 0.12 pixels in size, became known as “the pale blue dot.”

Astronauts had already taken plenty of beautiful photos of our planet at that point, and this grainy, low-resolution snapshot was not one of them. But instead of beauty, this one-of-a-kind picture showed the immeasurable vastness of space, and our undeniably-small place within it.

The striking photograph almost never happened. Early on in Voyager’s mission, Sagan had tried to get the look back at Earth, but others on the team worried that the Sun would end up frying the camera. But eventually, with the mission winding down, Sagan finally got his wish — a last minute Valentine’s Day gift in 1990.

Here is what Sagan would later write about the photograph and the deeper meaning he gleaned from it in his 1994 book, “Pale Blue Dot:

“From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of any particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.

“The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader’, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

“The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner.

“How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturing, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are all challenged by this point of Pale Light”. Listening to Carl Sagan’s narration is an unforgettable experience.

Saving Planet Earth, the only Home we have, has to be an effort both individual and collective. If we do not act fast there would be no Planet Earth and none to tell how we destroyed it by ignoring the repeated warnings we were given. Are we prepared to save our Planet or allow it to vanish into Space?