Positive Feedbacks

Tipping Point

A confirmation of tipping point is presented in the following report by James Hansen, NASA climatologist:

Excerpts from Hansen’s report:

• We are at the tipping point because the climate state includes large, ready positive feedbacks provided by the Arctic sea ice, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and much of Greenland’s ice.

• Our home planet is dangerously near a tipping point at which human-made greenhouse gases reach a level where major climate changes can proceed mostly under their own momentum. Warming will shift climatic zones by intensifying the hydrologic cycle, affecting freshwater availability and human health.

Source:Tipping Point: Here and Now!
Report:Tipping Point: PERSPECTIVE OF A CLIMATOLOGIST [PDF]

The ice in the Arctic is much younger than normal, with vast regions now covered by first-year ice and much less area covered by multiyear ice. Left: February distribution of ice by its age during normal Arctic conditions (1985-2000 average). Right: February 2008 Arctic ice age distribution. Credit: NSIDC [Caption: NASA]

Related Links:

• http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/04/24/arctic-melting-fast/
• http://feww.wordpress.com/2007/12/11/greenland-ice-melt-faster-than-ipcc-estimates/
• http://feww.wordpress.com/2007/10/15/only-zero-emissions-would-do/
• http://feww.wordpress.com/2008/04/19/stern-report-a-great-toxic-dump/

• Burning Earth
• Human Impact
• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Giga Trends
• Nuking Earth for Lifestyle

Lifstyle Winning Against Life?

Morales: Life first and cars second

Bolivian President Evo Morales criticized “some South American presidents” for supporting the use of biofuels, which he blamed for high food prices and global hunger.

Morales said he disagreed with “some South American presidents who were talking about biofuels but did not understand what they were talking about.”

“This is very serious,” he said. “Cars come first, not human beings. But, for us, how important is life and how important are cars? So I say life first and cars second.”

In his U.N. speech, Morales called on the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank to develop policies to curb the use of biofuels “in order to avoid hunger and misery among our people.”

Main entry: Bolivia’s Morales blames fuels crops for food shortage

World’s Top CO2 Polluters

Do you fight global warming, or prevent it?

World’s Top 33 Emitters of CO2

The top 20 emitters are responsible for about 80 percent of CO2 pollution. (Source: Wikipedia/Data were collected in 2004 by the CDIAC for United Nations. )

Original Entry: The Shrinking Window of Opportunity

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UN SecGen: Food crisis is now emergency

UNITED NATIONS – A rapidly escalating global food crisis has reached emergency proportions and threatens to wipe out seven years of progress in the fight against poverty, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned Monday.

UN Ban Ki-moon: “[The international community needs] to take urgent and concerted action in order to avoid the larger political and security implications of this growing crisis”.

“The rapidly escalating crisis of food availability around the world has reached emergency proportions,” Ban said.

“The World Bank has estimated that the doubling of food prices over the last three years could push 100 million people in low income countries deeper into poverty [starvation?],” he said. Report

Emerging Food Crisis

Poverty, Food Scarcity, Riots

Since February 2008, riots and violent protests concerning rising food prices or food shortages have been reported in Bangladesh, Bolivia, Cameroon, Egypt, El Salvador, Haiti, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, Mozambique, Philippines Senegal, Uzbekistan, and Yemen.

Related Links:

• The First Wave of World’s Collapsing Cities
• Topsoil
• Index of Human Impact on Nature
• 500 Weather-Related Disasters A Year

Main Entry: Emerging Food Crisis

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Blue Marble, Red Tide

[Updated]
Index of Human Impact on Nature (HIoN) March 2008

As of End March 2008, the MSRB-CASF Index of Human Impact on Nature (HIoN), an index for calculating the full impact of human consumption and activities on the Earth’s life support systems, stood at a terminally high level of 177.43, a rise of about 3.5 percent over the previous year. In other words, the full human impact including the ecological footprint and the damage inflicted on the living environment by his activities in the 12-month period ending March 2008 was 77.43 percent higher than the load which the planet’s ecosystems in their current state can cope with.

Components of HIoN

The HIoN Index integrates updated data and methodology used by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Synthesis Report for Global Status of Provisioning, Regulating, and Cultural Ecosystem services.

Before and After [Top : Blue Marble composite images generated by NASA. Bottom (left), Mars from Hubble Space Telescope, (right) “Late spring on Mars” portrait taken with the HST Wide Field Planetary Camera-2 by NASA. Final composite image by FEWW.]

According to HIoN projections, our cities and population centers could become almost entirely unsustainable by as early as 2015.

Page Entry: Index of Human Impact on Nature

Source: Index of Human Impact on Nature

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