Madam Chair, Comrades and colleagues, an amazing film entitled An Inconvenient Truth has been circling the globe. Narrated by Al Gore, it sets out in vivid terms the crisis our planet is facing as global warming escalates on an unprecedented scale. I wish, Madam Chair, that we could show the film here in Parliament for all our members to become better informed on this critical situation.
The most inconvenient truth about global warming is that we cannot stop it. Mitigate it, yes; adapt to its consequences, yes, but clearly global warming is already baked into the earth's future.
It has, in fact, been around a long time, and environmentalists and lawmakers have spent years shouting at one another about whether the grim forecasts are true. But in the past five years or so the debate has quietly ended. Global warming, even the sceptics now agree, is the real deal, and human activity has been courting it.
We thought, however, that time was on our side and that we would have at least decades to sort it out. Clearly, this is no longer the case. Once things start to go wrong, change can happen surprisingly quickly. What few people reckoned on was that global climate systems are booby-trapped, with tipping points and feedback loops.
The slow creep of environmental decay can suddenly give way to self- perpetuating collapse. If you pump enough carbon dioxide into the sky, that last part per million of greenhouse gas behaves like the 100?C that turns a pot of hot water into boiling water and steam. Carbon dioxide is a tiny, but very important, component of our earth's atmosphere. It helps warm the earth to the levels we are used to, but too much of it - and maybe the result of our use of fossil fuels and other C02 emissions - does a huge damage as it prevents sunlight from escaping form our atmosphere.
And what happens then? Put bluntly, the temperature of the earth rises. The intergovernmental panel on climate change predicts that by 2100 temperatures will have risen by between 1,1? and 6,4?, and as a result sea levels will rise by 18cm to 59cm. And now, in 2007, this is well on the way to happening.
In particular, damage is being caused to our polar caps, the reason being that the white surface of the polar ice is so bright that it reflects back 90% of sunlight into space. But, as the ice melts and shrinks and water takes its place, it absorbs the sunlight and becomes warmer, melting more and more of the coastal polar ice.
In Greenland the rate at which ice has been steadily melting and dripping into the sea has changed, and now whole glaciers are being dumped into the ocean. By some estimates the entire Greenland ice sheet, if melted, would be enough to raise global sea levels by seven metres, swallowing up large parts of coastal Florida and most of Bangladesh.
The Antarctic holds enough ice to raise sea levels more than 65 metres. Well, I don't need to expand on what that would do to our South African coastline.
So, Madam Chair, how is the heating up of our planet affecting, disrupting and destroying the biological world we inhabit, and the creatures we depend on for survival?
The naturalist and explorer John Muir once said that when one tugs at a single thing in nature, one finds that it is attached to the rest of the world. Never a truer word was spoken.
In South Africa we are extremely fortunate because the huge challenge of escalating global warming has resulted in an even greater concentration of scientific work. An intellectual focus is being dedicated to studying what is happening. I am indebted to Leonie Joubert for her extremely informative books scoured for some of the facts in my speech. All over the world biodiversity is being affected on a daily basis by changes in our climate. In South Africa, as conditions warm up, species are expected to move higher or eastward.
Our warming and drying is expected to sweep in from the north-west. Those of you in the Northern Cape and the Western Cape have reason to be especially worried.
The largest slice of bio or plant species will occur in the western, central and northern parts of the country. Concern is already being voiced about the survival of some of our fynbos species in the Western Cape.
Most of today's plants and animals have evolved under global temperatures of about 3?C to 5?C cooler than the period in which we currently live. And now conditions are changing faster than most species will be able to adapt.
Changes are happening all around us all the time. As humans, we don't see slow change, so we come to think of the present as normal. But a comparison with the distant past, 20 years or more, will show just how much places have changed. And many of these species shifts have been documented internationally. In the UK 51 species of butterfly have moved to higher altitudes or northwards. Fishermen in the UK are encountering strange fish in their nets as the sea currents shift and warm up. The Worldwide Fund for Nature reports that a 1?C rise in temperature has pushed certain fish species, such as haddock and cod, 200 miles to 400 miles north.
In Antarctica penguin species are declining in the North, yet thriving in the South. And in the Arctic the sea ice is melting, depriving polar bears of their hunting ground, and without it they starve or drown.
Plants are moving, and this is amazing. Our pine plants are urging uphill, crowding out rare species near mountain suburbs. And our Southern African quiver trees are dying in the North and thriving in the South.
Way down in the southern oceans we possess two small volcanic islands. The larger, Marion Island, has always been a weather sentinel for this country. The other messages of global warming are coming through loud and clear. Scientist Dr Steven Chung first visited Marion Island in 1983, and I quote: "When I first went there it had a glacier, South Africa's only glacier. Now we no longer have a glacier."
Africa's most famous snow-capped peak, Mount Kilimanjaro, will soon have no more ice, no more snow. This icon, bold as the continent on which it rests, will have disappeared. All over the world ice caps and glaciers are melting and disappearing. The annual sorely needed run-off of water from these formerly huge reserves of life-giving water is diminishing, and the knock- on effects of this are being recorded and noted with great anxiety. Here in South Africa the predicted warming and drying will cause the desert to move South. We, human beings, are part of the greatest system of biodiversity. And how will this affect us?
Changes will occur in land cover, and our biodiversity will come under increased pressure. Inevitably, this will have a knock-on effect on our food security.
And here I would really like to make a plea to our Department of Agriculture to consider very seriously before switching large tracts of food-producing land over to the production of biofuels. I think particularly here of the use of maize.
We can ill afford to shrink our production of one of the most basic food items that is heavily relied on by so many, particularly in our rural communities. In addition, it should be remembered that a large amount of energy is required to produce biofuels, and they are certainly not carbon- neutral.
I would hope that more research could go into the production of biogas, which I understand is a far more environmentally friendly process. Global warming is starting to take its toll on human health. So many studies have now linked higher ozone levels to the death rate from heart and lung ailments that cities are now issuing smog alerts to warn those at risk to stay indoors.
Droughts will occur, but also, as unstable weather patterns increase, there will be an increase in flooding, bringing with it more waterborne diseases as well as the spread of insects that thrive in waterlogged lands, such as mosquitoes.
South Africa's tourism industry contributes as much as 10% to our GDP, a figure that is increasing all the time. Many foreign tourists visit our country to view and marvel at our extraordinary range of wildlife, so well managed by our national parks and on private game farms. We rely heavily on our unique natural resource base to attract tourism.
The likely scenario of a climbing temperature will be increasing drought, drier soils, more fires and, inevitably, a loss of habitat and biodiversity. As our Bushveld slowly but surely turns into arid grasslands, one wonders what this would mean for our Big Five as their habitat changes. So, what now?
The world is starting to wake up to the fact that environmental collapse is happening in so many places at once. A total of 141 nations have now ratified the Kyoto Protocol, but it is extraordinary that the United States, which is home to less than 5% of the world's population, produces 25% of CO2 emissions, remains intransigent, with Australia refusing to sign.
Finally, Madam Chair, South Africa has, of course, come on board and is a signatory to the Kyoto Protocol. And whilst the picture I have painted in my speech sets out how serious our situation is, the critical challenge now is how we deal with it proactively. Questions need to be asked.
Is our energy strategy the correct one? Are we doing enough in the field of renewable energy? Surely every new house should have solar water heaters and a water tank. Are biofuels the way to go?
And how can we begin to contain the large numbers of vehicles on our roads? How can we improve our public transport system and by so doing reduce those numbers?
So many questions are being asked, and it is going to take an extraordinary amount of research, commitment and energy from each and every one of us to come up with answers that can slow down this fearful crisis facing our planet.
We should bear in mind what one journalist said. If life in its current form were to die out, this planet would recover, but we would probably have written ourselves out of the script. Thank you. [Applause.]