A Dream for a Better World

Coral reefs aren’t being protected against climate change despite the protective zones set up to do just that, say researchers.  The No-Take Areas (NTAs) set up in the 1960s and 70s were devised when climate change wasn’t the big deal it is now. These zones have had no effect on the health of the coral and are in the wrong place.  The NTAs are often small, and are surrounded by exploited areas.  The researchers looked at different fish populations in areas that were protected, and areas that weren’t. The results showed that irrespective of body size and trophic categorization, NTAs provided no clear benefits for any of the fish groups in terms of their change in response to coral decline.  The coral reefs are currently suffering from diseases due to warmer oceans because of global warming.  The future for coral reefs looks bleak.

A secret 2006 Pentagon analysis report, suppressed by US defense chiefs, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a ‘Siberian’ climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents. Climate change ’should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern’, say the authors.  The Bush administration tried to suppress the report for 4 months trying to bury the threat of climate change. 

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency’s public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years. The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.  From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said that NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public. News releases suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency and scientific dilution.”

Global warming is disrupting wildlife and the environment on every continent, according to an unprecedented study that reveals the extent to which climate change is already affecting the world’s ecosystems. Scientists examined published reports dating back to 1970 and found that at least 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world could be explained by rising temperatures.  Big falls in Antarctic penguin populations, fewer fish in African lakes, shifts in American river flows and earlier flowering and bird migrations in Europe are all likely to be driven by global warming, the study found.  This is the first to formally link some of the most dramatic changes to the world’s wildlife and habitats with human-induced climate change.

Dee Boersma, a biologist at the University of Washington, has just written a new article in the journal BioScience warning that penguins, the animals that she has been studying for 30 years, are ‘sentinels’, and these ‘canaries in the mine’ are telling that danger is present with their declining population numbers.  The danger is a combination of climate change, fishing and pollution.  She says that penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world.  The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.

Apparently there is a growing problem of food shortages across the world and climate change may be the culprit.  Kandeh Yumkella, director-general of the UN International Development Organization, claims that climate change will impose great stresses on the world’s ability to feed ever-growing populations.  This challenge brings new threats to arable land areas, livestock rearing and fisheries through droughts, water shortages and pollution of land, air and sea.  Last month it was revealed that the UN’s World Food Program was begging for $500 million to deal with a ‘food crisis’.  Yumkella believes that there is a full blown crisis now, with problems in India and Bangladesh, riots over rice in Haiti and Africa, and Thai farmers guarding their rice paddys to prevent theft.