While government representatives sit idly, debating over cocktails whether to do something about global climate change with carbon trading schemes, their own houses are afire. Climate change, left unchecked, will doom every government on the planet, and it will happen much sooner than they presently imagine.
The 10,000+ years of the Holocene Epoch have ended abruptly, and a new Epoch is coming to dominate the Earth: that of the Anthropocene.
Thanksgiving of 2008 I published The Famine Of 2009. I was right about starvation, only partially right about the causes and conditions, and two years premature.
I called my wheat farmer friend Bryan Lutter today to double check my thinking, and I'm really, really worried about what I see coming at us in 2011.
"Nobody can claim this was caused by global warming. On the other hand nobody can claim that it wasn't," Muenchow said
"The mortality rate has doubled," said Andrei Seltsovsky, head of the city's health department. There were usually 360 to 380 deaths a day in the city, but "now that number is about 700".
The full scale of the tragedy engulfing Pakistan is now emerging, with the United Nations saying today that the floods, which have entered their third week, have now affected 13.8 million people.
The Diff animal herders who, by most estimates, have lost more than half of their livestock, say this year’s drought is not only worse than the one in 2005, but the worst in living memory.