GLOBAL MELTDOWN
The catalogue of disasters that are happening right now
Across the planet, rising temperatures are taking their toll
CARBON DIOXIDE
New research has found that levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere - the main cause of global warming - are higher than at any time in the past 625,000 years. HOTTEST EVER
This year is expected to be the warmest ever recorded; 1998 was the hottest so far, but the past three years currently occupy the next three places.
DESERTIFICATION
The giant Kalahari desert, already four times the size of Britain, threatens to become larger still, covering farmland in Namibia, Botswana and South Africa.
EXPANDING OCEANS
The level of the world's seas and oceans is rising twice as fast as in the past, as their waters expand in rising temperatures and glaciers melt.
OCEAN EXILES
The people of the Carteret Islands, a scattering of atolls off Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific, have started to leave as their homes succumb to rising seas.
HURRICANES
Hurricane Epsilon - the 14th of the year - is forming in the Atlantic, even though the worst recorded hurricane season by far formally ended on Wednesday.
GLACIER MELT
Greenland glaciers have suddenly started racing towards the sea and melting. Much the same is beginning to happen to glaciers in the West Antarctic Ice Sheet.
WATER SHORTAGE
Areas such as the western USA, which depend on mountain snows for their water supplies, are running short as less snow falls - and what does fall melts earlier.
DISAPPEARING SPECIES
Sealife and birdlife have declined catastrophically this year along America's north-west Pacific coast, after a similar meltdown in the North Sea.
CORAL REEFS
Corals on the Great Barrier Reef are bleaching out and dying as sea temperatures rise and scientists fear that the whole reef may perish by 2050.
Also in this section
Nature's Little Rule Book for Sustainable Human Life on Earth
Rule No. 1 - Life on Earth is a web, NOT a pyramid.
Rule No. 2 - The evolution of life on Earth has NO inherent direction or "purpose" that directs it to develop supposedly "higher" forms of life.
Rule No. 3 - Life on Earth is infinitely subtle, complex and interrelated.
Rule No. 4 - Death is an essential part of life on Earth.
Rule No. 5 - Variety - lots of it - is the spice of life.
Rule No. 6 - Assuming stable rates of predation and other causes of death, a species' population inevitably increases as its food supply increases.
Rule No. 7 - You are allowed to compete with other species for food, but not to wage war on them.
Rule No. 8 - Earth's ecosystems are NOT evolutionarily designed to withstand a species that goes gallivanting all around the world and willy-nilly introducing species from one place to another.
Rule No. 9 - It's very easy to determine what a sustainable way of human life looks like - just look around you.
Rule No. 10 - There is much more to life than meets the human eye.
From an article by Oneida Kincaid (Another Way of Knowing)
Please read the whole article here: Nature's Little Rule Book
Threads: Web of Life