Climate disaster is occuring faster than expected

Polar bears can't catch seals in open water. They are only able to do so on the sea ice.
On the ice, the bears catch their prey when they surface to breathe.
Seals swim to the surface to breathe every five to fifteen minute but because they visit as many as fifteen breathing holes, a polar bear's wait for its prey can be long.

Polar bears locate breathing holes with their powerful sense of smell. When a bear finds an aglu, it waits patiently for the seal to surface — which can take hours or days.

Polar bears depend on the presence of ice for access to seals. In summer, when the floes retreat north, polar bears will travel hundreds of miles to maintain contact with their prey.

Between summer and winter the amount of ice-covered water can change rapidly. Polar bears learn to follow the ice to stay with their food source.

Those polar bears that are stranded on land in summer must stay there until the ice forms again in fall. On land, the bears face lean times, for they seldom catch seals without a platform of ice.

The picture above is a polar bear being killed as it went rampaging into a nearby town looking for food.

With the thinning ice caps, more polar bears are dying day by day...


The SUN, 26th February 2009

ALLIGATORS bask off England. Brazil is a desert. Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai have disappeared — along with 90 per cent of the human race.

This is what scientists believe could happen 41 years from now if the world warms by just 4°C.

Here we graphically illustrate how Earth could become a whole new world.

Rivers would disappear, as would entire species such as lions and tigers. Most marine life would be extinct.

These are among the dire predictions made by experts in the latest New Scientist magazine, on sale this week.

They have begun to consider what the world could look like if we are unable to do our bit to stem climate change — and say only one in ten humans would survive to see it.

Many scientists believe this could happen by 2100, but others fear it is just two generations away, and could arrive as soon as 2050.

Peter Cox of the University of Exeter, who studies climate systems, says: “Climatologists tend to fall into two camps. There are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won’t even think about high global temperatures — and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we’re all doomed. I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now.”

If the planet warms by an average of 4°C — as it might this century — it will change beyond all recognition.

All of the world’s major deserts are predicted to expand, with Africa’s Sahara reaching right into central Europe, while we would see Europe’s rivers drying up, from the Danube to the Rhine.

Two massive belts of desert-dry land would girdle the earth’s central zones.


The only places with guaranteed water will be in the high latitudes.

Former NASA scientist James Lovelock, one of the UK’s most highly regarded environmentalists, says: “Everything in that region will be growing like mad. It’s where all the life will be.

“The rest of the world will be largely desert with a few oases.

“Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I don’t think they are clever enough to handle what’s ahead.

“I think they’ll survive as a species but the cull during this century is going to be huge.

“The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. And you can forget lions and tigers — if it moves we’ll have eaten it. People will be desperate.”
Relocate

The world’s population would relocate to the coolest regions — including Britain, Scandinavia, Russia, Canada, Greenland, New Zealand and North Australia. However, with less land the world will be crowded and food scarce.

Human survivors’ diet will be mostly vegetarian — as the seas become acidic with higher amounts of dissolved carbon dioxide killing off most marine life.

This is not the first time the world has faced a catastrophe on this scale.

Similar temperature rises occurred 55million years ago, when vast quantities of methane bubbled explosively from the deep ocean, filling the atmosphere with carbon and wiping out sea life.

The planet’s temperature rocketed almost 6°C, sea levels rose 330ft higher than today’s and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.

Sadly we have no survival lessons to learn from it — mankind didn’t develop on the planet until quarter of a million years ago.

Nobel prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen says: “I would like to be optimistic that we will survive but I’ve got no good reason to be.

“In order to be safe we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2015. At the moment we are putting them up by three per cent... ”