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The greatest threat to Mother Earth
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Visits
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April 20, 2012
The world today is facing many harsh realities in the form of ‘threats’, nukes, weapons of mass destruction, biological weapons, deadly conventional arms, inter-continental missiles, religious and liberal extremism, terrorism, ethnic and sectarian violence and many more types of deadly dangers. But the deadliest of them all is global warming which, for sure, is going to sink many of coastal cities, hundreds of islands and even countries like Maldives and the Philippines, major parts of Japan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, India, and Pakistan and many other countries under salted waters of oceans. Yes! Global Warming is deadliest. Sea water level is rising as the ice on the poles and Greenland is melting due to constantly increasing carbon emission and increasing global warming.
Humans are causing global warming and pollution, and the effects are devastating. Global warming is real, potentially catastrophic caused by us humans. Most scientists have the same observation that the earth is heating up due primarily to increase in Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere caused chiefly by the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and petroleum. The number of destructive hurricanes has almost doubled in recent years. Studies find that these upswings in hurricane strength correlate with a rise in sea-surface temperatures. The ocean heat is the key ingredient for hurricane formation.
Heat waves will be more frequent and more forceful as temperatures rise. Last decade was the hottest decade on earth since the late 19th century when scientists began collecting temperature data. The past decade had five of the warmest years ever recorded, with the second hottest year being 1998. Deaths from global warming will double in just two and a half decades to 300,000 people a year. Many coastal cities will drown into the sea water. The globe really is warming up.
A study published in “Nature” in 2004 predicted that climate change could push more than a million species towards extinction by 2050. (Read "By 2050 Warming to Doom Million Species, Study Says."). "Climate change now represents at least as a great threat to a number of species surviving on earth as habitat destruction and modification," stated the lead author of that study, Chris Thomas, a conservation biologist at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom.
Global warming will also cause the generation of new, invasive species. Global sea levels could rise by more than 20 feet with the loss of shelf ice in Greenland and Antarctica, devastating coastal areas worldwide. Sea levels would rise by that much if Greenland melted.
A recent “Nature” study suggested that Greenland's ice sheet will begin to melt if the temperature there rises by 3ºC. But many experts consent that even partial melting would cause one-meter rise in sea levels, which would entirely sink low-lying island countries such as the Indian Ocean's Maldives. The Arctic Ocean could be ice-free in summer by 2050. New research shows it could take as little as 20 years for the sea ice to vanish. There is no doubt that as sea ice continues to melt, home for animals like polar bears will continue to shrivel.
A study by researchers at the Physics Institute at the University of Bern and the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica presenting data from Antarctic ice cores shows carbon dioxide concentrations higher than at any time during the past 650,000 years. Temperature record since 1880 shows that 10 hottest years ever measured in this atmospheric record had all occurred in the last 14 years.
Global warming is not a political issue at all; it is a moral issue. There is no controversy surrounding global warming; there is one hundred percent agreement among scientists on the threat. The choice between economic as well as ecological well-being is also a false dilemma. There is room for hope; the solutions to the difficulty are within reach. The world only needs the political will to do anything, a "moral imperative” to save the globe. We will have to think now to save the future generations; otherwise, they will ask what their parents were thinking while destroying the world? Why did not they wake up when they had a chance? We have to hear that question from them now.
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