UN: Humanity speeding down "unsustainable path"
An Indian boy looks for reusable material in the polluted waters of the Yamuna River in New Delhi, India, Sunday, April 22, 2012. / AP Photo
(CBS/AP) RIO DE JANEIRO - A United Nations report warns that the earth's environmental systems "are being pushed towards their biophysical limits" and that sudden, irreversible and potentially catastrophic changes are looming.
The UN's Environment Program says that climate change, the depletion of the ozone layer, plummeting fish stocks and the mass extinction of animals are among the most worrisome environmental threats.
"The world continues to speed down an unsustainable path despite over 500 internationally agreed goals and objectives to support the sustainable management of the environment and improve human wellbeing," a press release for the report states.
The 525-page report released Wednesday said little or no progress has been made in recent years toward meeting international targets for reducing environmental destruction.
The report calls on policymakers to take urgent action. Achim Steiner is the UN program's head and he says the UN's mega-conference on sustainable development to be held in Rio de Janeiro this month would be the ideal forum to take the steps needed to prevent an environmental catastrophe.
"If humanity does not urgently change its ways, several critical thresholds may be exceeded, beyond which abrupt and generally irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet could occur," a press release on the report states.
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Some key facts and figures from the report:
- Under current models, greenhouse gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, leading to rise in global temperature of 3 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century.
- Indoor air pollution from particulate matter is responsible for nearly 2 million premature deaths annually - including 900,000 deaths in children under the age of five.
- Outdoor particulate matter may be responsible for around 3.7 million deaths annually.
- Ground-level ozone is responsible for 700,000 respiratory deaths, over 75 per cent of which occur in Asia.
- Global economic losses due to reduced agricultural yields caused by air pollution are estimated at US $14-26 billion annually.
- The extinction risk is increasing faster for corals than for any other group of living organisms, with the condition of coral reefs declining by 38 per cent since 1980. Rapid contraction is projected by 2050.
- Though catches more than quadrupled from the early 1950s to the mid-1990s, they have stabilized or diminished since then - despite increased fishing. In 2000, catches could have been 7-36 percent higher were it not for stock depletion. This translated into economic losses to the value of $4-36 billion.
- Water quality in at least parts of most major river systems still fails to meet World Health Organization (standards.
- More than 600 million people are expected to lack access to safe drinking water by 2015, while more than 2.5 billion people will lack access to basic sanitation.
- By 2030, an estimated $9-11 billion will be spent annually on additional infrastructure to provide sufficient quantities of water, especially in developing countries.
- The number of flood and drought disasters rose by 230 per cent and 38 per cent respectively between the 1980s and 2000s, while the number of people exposed to floods rose by 114 per cent.
- The cost of coastal adaptation to climate change is estimated to reach between US $26 billion and US $89 billion by the 2040s, depending on the magnitude of sea-level rise.
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Plus some 35 to 45 Million Illegal Aliens, and criminal and terrorist infiltrators, who seek to weaken, harm, and destroy America ...
... as is Barack Obama's purpose.
Sunlight falls on the earth and over millions of years, plants absorb the CO2 and trap it in their cell structures. Structures that get compressed over millions of years and turn into oil.
When we burn the oil, releasing tons of greenhouse gasses that had already been trapped and stored away over millions of years. It's stored energy and chemicals that took millions of years for the Earth to pack away.
What's so crazy in seeing that in the past 100 years, through burning oil, we have literally released tons of stored energy and gases back into the environment and atmosphere that the Earth had already dealt with and stored away? Is that too difficult to comprehend? That's the imbalance.
There is no mechanism on Earth that can re-trap those foul gases and store them away again at the same rate we are releasing them. The system was big enough to absorb some of it without showing any effects, but it's been so long now and we have released so much that we CAN see the effects.
You'd have to be blind not to see it, or just don't care because your making money off it or you don't care about anything or anybody after your dead and gone.
308,745,538 - MOST RECENT US CENSUS
... as is Barack Obama's purpose.
. . .
We KNOW how to deal with these issues. It's only the greed and short-sightedness of our elites that keeps us from taking steps in the right direction!
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Do we? Do we really know how to deal with these issues? Apparently we do not, otherwise we would be dealing with them. You see, like it or not, the greed and shortsightedness you speak of is a part of the problem. So you can't just wish that part away under the fantasy that you could then address the technical parts unabated by politics.
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. . .
Here are a couple of practical suggestions:
People on earth need CLEAN WATER. There's no way we should be injecting oceans of clean water into Alberta and North Dakota and Pennsylvania and New York to release natural gas via hydraulic fracking. If we can't do fracking with dirty water or salt water, we shouldn't do fracking. And we should definitely be doing more research on economically workable desalinization of ocean water.
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As most fracking efforts tend to place fresh water aquifers in jeopardy, you would not want to use non-potable water to frack with.
******
People on earth need FOOD. It's insane to grow corn and then turn it into ethanol...and now big American conglomerates want to turn palm oil into biofuel. Biofuels are fine if they're based on plants that no one can eat, but we've got to stop using food for fuel!
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I agree 100 percent.
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People on earth need breathable AIR. We cannot allow corporations -- and cars -- to spew poisons into the sky. Those poisons are a cost of doing business that should be borne by the companies -- and drivers -- that produce them, not neighbors forced to breathe them.
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If you can do this without fracking the economy then go for it. And no, I'm not placing money over human life. But without a sustainable economy, no civilization will last very long.
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Yes, population is an issue, but the best way to convince parents they DON'T need large families is to raise their standard of living and establish a minimal safety net for their old age. I don't know of a society that accomplished those two things that didn't see a precipitous drop in its average family size.
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See my previous post regarding population reduction.
Where do you think T. Boone Pickens (a local boy) got the idea?
I'm a person who drinks lots of bottled water "
Bottled water? you spend all that money and the water comes in plastic containers which leech bisphenol into the water in it.
Why dont you just do what I did- buy a quality stainless steel water distiller like the Purewater ll, they will make about a gallon of the purest distilled water in 3-1/2 hours and these are built extremely well in the USA. They run about $600.
I bought mine to ditill my tap water for myself and my dogs, to get rid of the clorine, fluorides, lyme and anything else in there.
It boils the water and collects and condenses the pure clean steam into a gallon sized glass container. I run 3 batches a day and it's performed flawlessly for the year so far Ive owned it.
This is a pretty depressing thread...depressing both for the people whose knee-jerk reaction to a UN report is to attack or ignore it, and for the people whose best suggestion is spaceflight to...where?
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To where? Just off of the planet, actually. Right now, it's not practical and really not even achievable to begin an off-world migration. We should probably first focus on building city-sized orbital habitats for people to live, work and produce among other things, their food in.
Relocating to some place like Mars is just too far beyond us at the moment. But if we started working on it now, we could probably achieve its *beginnings* in about a century. Then we could consider an actual migration.
Yes I do think this is the best approach. Even if we somehow manage to save the environment without returning to the Stone Age, it is still only a matter of time before some other calamity occurs and ends this planet's ability to sustain life.
That doesn't have to be an asteroid impact, either. A super massive volcanic eruption would pretty much end civilization. It probably would not sterilize Earth, but we would in fact and indeed be back in the Stone Age.
Also, the population issue would be resolved as well as such an event would likely reduce our numbers by at least 30 percent within weeks; another 40 + percent to follow within a few months as food and medical supplies are depleted.
Further, I do not believe we can "save the environment" without returning to the Stone Age, or at least something very close. Consider a previous post of legalbutnotjust who lauded the efforts of the Mohawk people to take care of the environment.
Perhaps what went wrong was civilization developing past that stage to begin with.