Also filed in the scares-the-shit-out-of-me category is a story from the NZ Herald this morning titled: Earth could flip into environmental disaster
The Earth is in imminent peril and nothing short of a planetary rescue will save it from the environmental cataclysm of dangerous climate change, six leading scientists say.
Writing in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A, the American scientists believe civilisation itself is threatened by global warming.
AFP
A group of US scientists have reportedly warned that a UN panel on climate change underestimated the scale of sea-level increases this century resulting from global warming.
The six scientists cautioned that the Earth is in “imminent peril” in a 29-page article published in the July 15 issue of the “Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A,” The Independent reported.
“Recent greenhouse gas emissions place the Earth perilously close to dramatic climate change that could run out of control, with great dangers for humans and other creatures,” wrote the group led by James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
They predict in their paper, “Climate change and trace gases” that sea levels may rise by several metres by 2100, according to The Independent.
That compares to a forecast from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published in a February report that predicts sea levels increasing between 18 and 59 centimetres.
The other scientists involved in the paper were Makiko Sato, Pushker Kharecha and Gary Russell, also of the Goddard Institute, David Lea of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Mark Siddall of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York.
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Forget 50 – 100 year projections – The planets living systems are collpasing like dominos NOW. The bees the phytoplankton, the coral reefs, the Amazon jungle – all dying. Large tracts of both freshwater and ocean are turnign into a mixture of algal snot and toxic bacteria and the list goes on.
Like the cartoon character we ran over the cliff soemtime ago – we just havent looked down yet.
We may all be stupid and lazy but our polticians are the most responsible. The UNCED conference in 1992 identified the issues and the critical need for appropriate responses but our govt like most has waited for the icebergs to float past the window for a reponse and even now just talk slow motion bullshit.
Check out this old article as just one indicator
Fish numbers plummet in warming Pacific
12:00AM Sunday November 13, 2005
By Geoffrey Lean
SAN FRANCISCO – A catastrophic collapse in sea and bird life numbers along America\\\\\\\’s Northwest Pacific seaboard is raising fears that global warming is beginning to irreparably damage the health of the oceans.
Scientists say a dramatic rise in the ocean temperature led to unprecedented deaths of birds and fish this summer all along the coast from central California to British Columbia in Canada.
The population of seabirds, such as cormorants, auklets and murres, and fish, including salmon and rockfish, fell to record lows.
This ecological meltdown mirrors a similar development taking place thousands of miles away in the North Sea.
Also caused by warming of the water, the increase in temperatures there has driven the plankton that form the base of the marine food chain hundreds of miles north.
This triggers a collapse in the number of sand eels on which many birds and large fish feed and causes a rapid decline in puffins, razorbills, kittiwakes and other birds.
The collapses in the Pacific are also down to the disappearance of plankton, though the immediate cause for this is different.
Water temperatures soared to 7C above normal, which delighted bathers but caused the whole delicate system to collapse.
The amount of phytoplankton crashed to a quarter of its usual level.
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Like your blog keep up the great work.
Be well and prosper,
Mike
I don’t believe civilisation is threatened by global warming – I think civilisation is threatened BY CIVILISATION. Global warming, famine, war, disease and all the isms you can think of are an off-shoot of what we have done to ourselves.
We’re the ones we need to run away from. It’s either that or the whole world goes on a SERIOUS detox.