• News
•   Dec., 2, 2011   

• UN report warns of worsening effects of climate change.

• Culminating several years of research, a new document has been published by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). With conclusions linking extreme weather to climate change, the final version's release coincided with the COP 17 United Nations Climate Change Conference that launched on Monday, November 28 in Durban, South Africa.  
  
  Dr. Rajendra Pachauri – Chair, UN IPCC; vegetarian said: "Just a few days ago, we brought out a special report, which essentially deals with extreme events and disasters. And we've come up with a number of very profound findings.
  
  One of them was that a change in climate does lead to extreme weather and increasing severity and frequency of climate events.  If we don’t do anything, then by the end of this century, those heat waves which have been taking place once in 20 years will now take place once in 2 years. And I don’t want to remind you of what happened in 2003. When there was a severe heat wave in Europe, over 40,000 lives were lost.  I think the world has to realize the urgency of action, because if we delay action, then clearly we are incurring a much higher cost. Globally, we have to mitigate the emissions of greenhouse gases, because adaptation alone will not be adequate, and we will not have the capacity to be able to handle all these impacts in the future. "
  
  During a January 2009 videoconference in Mongolia, Supreme Master Ching Hai spoke about the best way to rapidly mitigate climate change and its dangerous impacts.  We must, first of all and the most important thing, we have to stop global warming by choosing a sustainable diet that is vegetarian or vegan.   This will almost immediately stabilize the planet, the weather, and then we can think about adapting to the changes. I hope we don’t have to adapt, but otherwise, it might be too late if we don’t take care of the problem at the root right now, we will have no planet to even adapt to.  It’s a very sad affair and very urgent. So, in order to neutralize the effects     resulting from the evermore severe climate, we must stop the raising of livestock to kill for food. We must live a vegan, animal-free, cruelty-free lifestyle according to Buddhist teaching, and according to scientific evidence that this is the best way for us to stop the global warming, and the fastest and the most efficient and the most long-lasting.