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Written by:
1/11/2012 1:34 PM 

Doomsday clock moves closer to midnight

Numerous articles (including USA Today’s) note that scientists have moved the hands of the doomsday clock toward midnight – as a visible metaphor for our lessened security due to our fuelish ways.  It is notoriously hard to change our social (i.e., automotive) ways, but the consequences of our not taking a long term view are increasingly resulting in massive storm and economic damage today to societies across the globe.

Disaster risks are judged by multiplying the estimated severity of an issue by the likelihood that it might come to pass. Given the huge impacts already visible from messing with the earth’s weather and then multiplying that major severity by the global scale of those affected -- it is easy to see that that Climate Change is one of the worst disasters we could ever face – and it is happening now. That it is comes on slowly, and erratically, does nothing to diminish its impact on us all.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientist’s Doomsday Clock represents the danger to society from Nuclear Weapons, Climate Change and Biosecurity.

Climate Change

Fossil-fuel technologies such as coal-burning plants powered the industrial revolution, bringing unparalleled economic prosperity to many parts of the world. But in the 1950s, scientists began measuring year-to-year changes in the carbon-dioxide concentration in the atmosphere that they could relate to fossil-fuel combustion, and they began to see the implications for Earth's temperature and for climate change.

Today, the concentration of carbon dioxide is higher than at any time during the last 650,000 years. These gases warm Earth's continents and oceans by acting like a giant blanket that keeps the sun's heat from leaving the atmosphere, melting ice and triggering a number of ecological changes that cause an increase in global temperature. Even if carbon-dioxide emissions were to cease immediately, the extra gases already added to the atmosphere, which linger for centuries, would continue to raise sea level and change other characteristics of the Earth for hundreds of years.

The most authoritative scientific group on the issue, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), suggests that warming on the order of 2-10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next 100 years is a distinct possibility if the industrialized world doesn't curb its carbon dioxide emissions habit. Effects could include wide-ranging, dramatic changes. One drastic result: a 3- to 34-inch rise in sea level, leading to more coastal erosion, increased flooding during storms, and, in some regions such as the Indus River Delta in Bangladesh and the Mississippi River Delta in the United States, permanent inundation. This sea-level rise will affect coastal cities (New York, Miami, Shanghai, London) the most, compelling major shifts in human settlement patterns.

Inland, the IPCC predicts that another century of temperature increases could place severe stress on forests, alpine regions, and other ecosystems, threaten human health as mosquitoes and other disease-carrying insects and rodents spread lethal viruses and bacteria over larger geographical regions, and harm agricultural efforts by reducing rainfall in many food-producing areas while at the same time increasing flooding in others--any of which could contribute to mass migrations and wars over arable land, water, and other natural resources.

-- from www.thebulletin.org/content/doomsday-clock/overview

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