Grim Reapings
Climate change still in its infancy is re-arranging the world we know. It's irrelevant in a way whether the changes we're witnessing and which scientists the world over are grappling to understand with respect to cause-and-effect is caused by nature's normal fluctuations from warming to cooling over stupendous and sometimes relatively short periods of time.Or whether much of what we're witnessing is an effect of sunflares, mass ejections of gamma rays, protons, neutrons affecting our little corner of the galaxy.
Or whether it's a combination of events naturally occurring throughout the universe, and in our particular case, helped along a bit by humankind's interference with nature.
That our environment has changed, is changing and may become altered to the extent where it threatens our very existence over a period of time seems fairly well agreed upon. With some notable exceptions of opinion. Furthermore, we're informed that as global warming increases melting glaciers and permafrost melt will raise the ocean levels.
We're facing droughts and crop failures and a potential shortage of potable water. Millions upon millions of the earth's inhabitants who domicile in coastal areas and river deltas will see their homes inundated and we will be faced with a mass migration of humankind with whom a smaller inhabitable landscape must be shared, along with the scarcity of food crops.
Fire, pestilence and disease are predicted; forests will burn at unprecedented rates.
Rising temperatures already have demonstrated that species are moving into areas formerly inhospitable to their existence. Diseases formerly thought of as confined to exotic locations may become more commonplace elsewhere on the globe as warmer temperatures encourage their spread.
By 2050 up to 35% of the permafrost in the Northern Hemisphere could be gone.
Heat stress related to extreme global temperatures will lead to early deaths among animals and humans and produce famine as well, since many crops will fail to grow and mature reacting just as animals do to extreme heat. More plants, bugs, birds and mammals will face the possibility of extinction.
Ecosystem resilience will be impaired by extremes foisted upon geographical locations. The combination of wildfires, insect surges, deadly heat waves, glacier melt leading to fresh water shortage, acidification of oceans, deadlier storms forming over warmer oceans, aquatic lifeform losses, all point to future disaster.
That's what a general scientific consensus tells us. And then there's an entirely different scientific view, that the types of environmental events we're witnessing aren't new to our planet, nor to written accounts of past climate events.
Time will tell. These things too may pass.
Labels: Environment
posted by Pieface @ Thursday, April 05, 2007
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