The Big Picture 2

Newsweek: Even those who deny the existence of global climate change are having trouble dismissing the evidence of the last year. In the US alone, nearly 1,000 tornadoes have ripped across the heartland, killing more than 500 people and inflicting $9 billion in damage. The Midwest suffered the wettest April in 116 years, forcing the Mississippi to flood thousands of square miles, even as drought-plagued Texas suffered the driest month in a century.

There was flooding in New York City, especially in lower Manhattan; swamped roads and infrastructure along the Gulf Coast; coral bleaching and eventual death of Hawaii's reefs; villages in Alaska are being moved away from melting permafrost and rising seas; North Carolina's historic Cape Hatteras lighthouse was moved inland in 1999; and, threatened by storm surges, California's famed Highway 1 will have to be rerouted.

Worldwide, the litany of weather's extremes has reached biblical proportions. The 2010 heat wave in Russia killed an estimated 15,000 people. Floods in Australia and Pakistan killed 2,000 and left large swaths of each country under water. A months-long drought in China has devastated millions of acres of farmland. And the temperature keeps rising: 2010 was the hottest year on earth since weather records began. The stable climate of the last 12,000 years is gone. Which means you haven't seen anything yet.

And we are not prepared. The burning of fossil fuels has raised atmospheric levels of heat-trapping carbon dioxide by 40% above what they were before the Industrial Revolution. The added heat in the atmosphere retains more moisture, ratchets up the energy in the system, and incites more violent and extreme weather.
There is wide consensus that the 2 degrees Fahrenheit of global warming of the last century is behind the rise in sea levels, more intense hurricanes, more heat waves, and more droughts and deluges. Changing temperatures will have a profound effect on the plants and animals among us.

Crops that flourished in the old climate regime will have to adapt to the new one, as some pests are already doing. Tropical diseases such as malaria, dengue fever, and yellow fever are reaching temperate regions, and ragweed and poison ivy thrive in the hothouse world. In much of the US Northeast, farmers will be unable to grow popular varieties of apples, blueberries, and cranberries, for instance; in Vermont, maple sugaring will likely go the way of ox-drawn plows. States and cities will have to make huge investments in infrastructure to handle the encroaching sea and raging rivers. In Ventura, California, construction crews moved Surfer's Point
65-feet inland, the state's first experiment in "managed retreat."

Miami and New Orleans will become islands as surrounding communities are sacrificed. Given that Manhattan is already an island, architects design Venice-like canals for the southern tip. Around the world, nearly 1-billion people live in low-lying river deltas, from Guangzhou to New Orleans, that will be reclaimed by the sea, forcing tens of millions of people to migrate. Britain is taking adaptation seriously, planning to raise the height of the
floodgates protecting central London from the Thames by 12 inches.

Global warming is already responsible for one war (Darfur). A second war (in Yemen) has its roots in water supply. These are just curtain raisers.....The violence in the Middle East has a basis in hunger, partly induced by global warming. The great human migrations, similar to those in the animal kingdom, have begun. A small trickle.....for now.

If global warming is real, and it is, shifting from carbon to nuclear power is inevitable.

COMMENT:DON"T WORRY ABOUT THE PLANET, IT WILL SURVIVE....WE WON'T! DON"T BELIEVE YOUR POLITICIANS. THEY ARE THE ONES WHO PUT US IN THIS POSITION. AND TYPICALLY, THEY WILL ONLY REACT WHEN IT IS TOO LATE. 

There is nothing stable in the world - uproar's our only music. - John Keats