Global Climate Change
October 22nd, 2005
A photo atlas released by the United Nations Environment Program shows mankind’s impact on the planet, from major deforestation to urban sprawl. Mexico City mushrooms from a modest urban center in 1973 to a massive blot on the landscape in 2000, while Beijing shows a similar surge between 1978 and 2000 in satellite pictures. Delhi sprawls explosively between 1977 and 1999, while from 1973 to 2000 the tiny desert town of Las Vegas turns into a monster conurbation of 1 million people — placing massive strain on scarce water supplies.
Klaus Taupfer, U.N. Environment Program Director, said the battle for delivering a more environmentally stable, just and healthier world, is going to be largely won and lost in our cities. The “One Planet Many People” atlas illustrates in 300-pages book, in before-and-after pictures from space, the disfigurement of the face of the planet wrought by human activities. These include rapid oil and gas development in Wyoming, forest fires across sub-Saharan Africa and the retreat of glaciers and ice in polar and mountain areas.
“These illustrate some of the changes we have made to our environment,” said U.N. expert Kaveh Zahedi. “This is a visual tool to capture people’s imaginations showing what is really happening. It serves as an early warning” (MSNBC, 6/3/2005).
(June 3, 2005)An accelerating Arctic warming trend over the past quarter of a century has dramatically dried up more than a thousand large lakes in Siberia, probably because the permafrost beneath them has begun to thaw, according to a paper published in the June 3rd issue of the journal Science. Comparing satellite images made in the early 1970s to those from recent years, a team of U.S. scientists determined that the number of large lakes in a vast 200,000-square-mile region of Russia’s Siberia diminished by about 11%, from 10,882 to 9,712. About 125 of the 1,170 shrunken lakes disappeared altogether, and most are now considerably smaller than the study’s baseline of 40 hectares, or about 99 acres, the researchers found. If Arctic temperatures continue to rise, the scientists said, many of the lakes in high northern latitudes, where they are ubiquitous, could eventually disappear.
Laurence C. Smith, an associate geology professor at UCLA, conducted the research with UCLA colleague Glen M. MacDonald, Yongwei Sheng of the State University of New York and Larry Hinzman of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The researchers found that lakes are disappearing in areas of Siberia where the permafrost, ground that is frozen as solid as concrete year-round, is known to be softening. They believe the lakes are receding because the water is seeping into the increasingly mushy ground, a finding that scientists have already confirmed in portions of Alaska where Arctic lakes are also drying up.(Miguel Bustillo, LATimes, 6/3/2005)
Leave a Comment