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Tuesday, 17 April 2007 |
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 Long Nguyen, Vietnam
Every day we see appalling figures talking about how many years it is from now until a terrible thing will happen to our planet. But people often think that it’s not going to happen today. According to David Mc Hugh, a 16-year-old PEARL Reporter from Ireland, his friends often forget the meaning of figures quickly and even make jokes about them.
At the annual Celebration of Teaching and Learning, former U.S. Vice President Al Gore quoted Mark Twain: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don’t know. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so." For global warming and many other international issues which need both attention and action, we are mistakenly sure that the consequence will never get as bad as the scientists predict. But there is an "inconvenient truth" that the worst can happen.
“People are often too optimistic that the world will last forever, while we are not protecting it properly," said Tran Van Duy, 60. Mr. Van Duy teaches French at a high school in Hue city, Vietnam, and has been advocating environmental protection. "Therefore, necessary actions are often not taken or procrastinated."
For Gore, global warming is not a matter of tomorrow. It is now. During the closing session at the conference, he showed numerous figures and graphs about the deadly effects of global warming. For instance, the quick doubling of annual downpour that will take place if the temperature increases by 1.5-2 degrees Celsius will cause 20 per cent of the world's vegetation to be extinct. We do things not for our children, but for ourselves, he stressed. Otherwise, we will have to pay for the wrong belief that bad things won’t come soon.
Thirteen/WNET chose "Science and Global Awareness" as the theme for its Celebration. That's definitely what we need now, concluded Nhan Nguyen, a lecturer at RMIT International University in Hi Chi Minh City, Vietnam. We often think that an environmental effect like global warming is none of our business and other, more intelligent, people will care of it. But it, in fact, affects us all. While people have been spending a lot of time talking about numbers and forecasts, “what is expected of us is that after you read scary numbers on the Internet, you get away from your computer and start doing something small for the world," Nhan said. "And remember to do bigger things next time!"
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