Showing posts with label the great barrier reef. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the great barrier reef. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Things Are Bad

But they are going to get much, much worse.
The first study to integrate all prior scientific research in order to project approximately when climate change will produce permanent catastrophic consequences has been accepted and will soon be published in the scientific journal Nature, and it finds that things will start going haywire in the tropics at around the year 2020, and in our part of the world at around 2047.

Nature shares with Science and PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) the distinction of being tied as the world’s three most prestigious scientific journals, and an article is not published in these journals unless it has undergone extremely rigorous scientific peer-revue; so, climate-change deniers will have no professional credibility in attacking this study, as the Koch brothers and their friends can reasonably be expected to do, since they profit so much from what causes global warming - the burning of carbon-based fuels.

According to this study, the tropics, which are the near-equatorial region of this planet that’s almost 100% impoverished, and that has thus contributed virtually nothing to global warming, will begin the period of permanent catastrophe starting in approximately 2020; but the (cooler) moderate-latitude countries, such as in North America and Europe, will begin this catastrophic period in or around 2047.
As if things weren't already bad enough. Consider the plight of the Great Barrier Reef:



Corals, which are animals, have a symbiotic relationship with algae that give them their colour and help provide them with food. During stressful conditions such as heat waves, the algae disappear from the corals, leading to coral bleaching. If the stressful conditions last more than eight weeks, the corals can die of starvation.
Meanwhile, on our own continent, scenes like the following are becoming increasingly, distressingly common:



Clearly, the days of willful ignorance, selfishness and heedlessness are now exacting a massive price.