Humanity is sitting on a time bomb. If the vast majority of the world’s scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet’s climate system into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced- a catastrophe of our own making.
Thus starts the synopsis of Al Gore's new movie, "An Inconvenient Truth."
Aptly titled, Climate Change (aka Global Warming) is the biggest challenge facing mankind, certainly far greater than terrorism and fighting for tax cuts. Go see the movie today...
The official website is called ClimateCrisis.net and the production company is called Participant Productions.
And then there's this super comprehensive article from USA Today
A few excerpts:
Alaska has emerged as the poster state for global warming, the climate effect attributed to higher concentrations of "greenhouse" gases — mostly carbon dioxide created by burning fossil fuels — that capture the sun's heat in the atmosphere.The growing season in Fairbanks has gone from 80 to 120 days since records were first kept in the 1900s, says John Walsh, director of the Center for Global Change and Arctic System Research at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks.
Hotter summers aren't just a problem here. In the Midwest and East, a few extra degrees can bring on higher milk prices. That's because cows don't like it hot. When the mercury gets over 80°F, milk production drops.
"Last year, we had herds that were down 5 to 15 pounds of milk per cow, and they'll usually be making 65 to 75 pounds" a day, says Larry Chase, a professor of animal science at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
David Lobell, an environmental scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, Calif., says that for every 2°F increase in growing-season temperature, farmers can expect a 17% decline in yield for both corn and soybeans.
etc., etc....
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