climate-change

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*update*
October 2, 2019 DUBAI (Reuters) - Dubai continues to service its debt and is ready to take on more if needed, an economic official said on Wednesday, adding that current debt was $124 billion.
June 02, 2016 Dubai plans world's largest solar project

"This came as a big shock" – that Dubai is in debt by 59 billion and might not be able to pay its bills sent a wave of uncertainty rippling through markets just as investors thought the worst of the global financial instability was over. Once, Dubai was "like the new beacon for all the world's money" [HOME, the 2009 documentary]... "Dubai has endless sun, but no solar panels. It is the totem of total modernity that never fails to amaze the world. Nothing seems further removed from nature than Dubai, although nothing depends on nature more than Dubai. Dubai is a sort of culmination of the western model - we haven't understood that we're depleting what nature provides."

2009 Docu- mentary Film: HOME  read more »

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Greenland ice cap melting at triple the rate of just a decade ago

Greenland ice cap is disappearing at the rate of 300 Lake Windermeres a year. More than 273 gigatons of water is now pouring into the oceans annually, raising sea levels by nearly a millimeter every year, satellite imaging has shown. Such is the change in the vast ice sheet that the loss of weight is actually changing its affect on the earth's gravitational pull, the study in Science claims. One gigaton could provide enough water for 17 million people in Britain and is the volume of Lake Windermere, Britain's biggest water mass.

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November is US National Vegan Month, starting with World Vegan Day on Nov. 1st. So, turkeys may have less fear this year though Thanksgiving is around the corner. Why go vegan? Here are some alarming facts, or "tough reality", such as – fewer than 1 out of every 250,000 slaughtered animals is tested for toxic chemical residues; 55% of U.S. antibiotics is fed to livestock; 91% of staphylococci infections are resistant to penicillin in 1988; BAN is the response of European Economic Community to routine feeding of antibiotics to livestock while the response of U.S. meat & pharmaceutical industries is full & complete support. The world’s meat consumption was estimated to be 284 million tons in one year (2007), and it takes 5,000 gallons of water to produce a pound of California beef, compared to 25 gallons to produce a pound of wheat.
Heart disease is number one killer, but one can reduce heart-attack risk by 90% just by eliminating meat, dairy and eggs from diet. In other words, 5000 gallons of water can be spared and risk of heart attack can be lessened when one eats one less pound of meat.

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Can a purely vegan diet be healthy?  read more »

How far from awareness to action? Ice is now melting fast, sea level rising non-stop… When will pollution be decisively and extensively checked to reverse the wheel of climate change?

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Most courageous & greatest swimmer, to swim beyond extreme, bearing excruciating pain, not for gold medals but for fragile Nature. "I have chosen to swim. It’s my way of drawing attention to the oceans, & the fragile state of our nature," Lewis Gordon Pugh said, "we’ve lost more than half the Arctic summer sea ice cover decades ahead of predictions, showing climate change has been hugely underestimated. We must insist our leaders take urgent action..sea ice is melting fast.." "I have done very, very cold swims in the North Pole which was so cold that your life is on the line and it took me four months to feel my hands again." "I can’t think of a better way to show that climate change is a reality than by swimming in a place that should be totally frozen over." "This is not just about protecting a pristine environment, it's about saving ourselves."

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Lewis Gordon Pugh is the first swimmer in history to complete a long distance swim in all 5 oceans of the world, a feat which many had considered to be the "holy grail" of swimming. He also became the first person to complete a long distance swim in both the Arctic and the Antarctic.  read more »

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The ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has continued to retreat rapidly, declining 26 percent since 2000, scientists say in a new report. 85% of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished. It is anticipated to be completely gone in 20 years. Surface melting like that seen in recent years has not occurred over the last 11,700 years.

The impact of these events and the precursor that they offer of the trends to follow e.g. - droughts, intensified storms, floods, sea level increase and famine, are all a result of global warming which, according to an organization (IPCC) of 2,500 scientists from 130 countries is a result of human-caused activities that produce greenhouse gases.

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Photos courtesy of Yann Arthus-Bertrand / HOME, National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) for Tanzania, and Wikipedia  read more »

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In a worse-case projection, a Vietnamese government report released last month says that more than one-third of the delta, where 17 million people live and nearly half the country’s rice is grown, could be submerged if sea levels rise by 3 feet in the decades to come. In a more modest projection, it calculates that one-fifth of the delta would be flooded, said Tran Thuc, who leads Vietnam’s National Institute for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Sciences and is the chief author of the report. Storm surges could periodically raise that level, he said, and experts say an intrusion of salt water and industrial pollution could contaminate much of the remaining delta area.

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Photos courtesy of AFP / Getty and EPA

Original Source: NY Times