Environmental doom news stories



Mercia Blackcat said:
The report gives a pretty bleak outlook and I don't think we can turn it around in time. I would say we have 20 years at the most before the human systems we've created start to fall apart. There is unlikely to be any real affect we will can initiate due to out dependence on what drives the global economy.

As the report points out:

They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold....

Topsoil is being lost 10 to 40 times faster than it is being replenished by natural processes

Since the mid-20th Century, 30% of the world's arable land has become unproductive due to erosion

95% of the Earth's land areas could become degraded by 2050...

The IPPR says many scientists believe we have entered a new era of rapid environmental change.

The report warns: "We define this as the 'age of environmental breakdown' to better highlight the severity of the scale, pace and implications of environmental destabilisation resulting from aggregate human activity."

The problem is that even if we could act now it would be decades before there wasd an effect due to the inherent latency in the global system.


Rather than give up we still need to apply the brakes and mitigate the disaster, give us time to prepare for the inevitable. It would still be too little, too late. We've known about this for 50 years.

It's if the human race has a collective cancer but when we go to the GP we don't want to face the reality and instead moan about a boil on our arse.
Click to expand...
I'm not claiming that we are not damaging the environment or that what we are doing isn't having a big effect o climate but reports like this focus on short term. Since 2005 ffs? Climate needs to be studied in terms of centuries not years or decades. Like most things on here, people wade passionately into arguments armed with very limited knowledge about climate.
 
The planet will sort itself out.

Whether or not we are still on it, or in what numbers, is the issue.

There is not the political will to control greenhouse emissions, so major change resulting in a planet less hospitable to humans is inevitable.
 
Mercia Blackcat said:
The report gives a pretty bleak outlook and I don't think we can turn it around in time. I would say we have 20 years at the most before the human systems we've created start to fall apart. There is unlikely to be any real affect we will can initiate due to out dependence on what drives the global economy.

As the report points out:

They say since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold....
Click to expand...
This was proved as incorrect here......

More or Less - Climate change, Victorian diseases, Alcohol - BBC Sounds

...one of the best programmes on the wireless.
 
pillars of hercules said:
I'm not claiming that we are not damaging the environment or that what we are doing isn't having a big effect o climate but reports like this focus on short term. Since 2005 ffs? Climate needs to be studied in terms of centuries not years or decades. Like most things on here, people wade passionately into arguments armed with very limited knowledge about climate.
Click to expand...

The long term historical data has been analysed and provided in several reports over the last couple of decades.. This is not a definitive report but confirms that climate change is accelerating.
 
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