climate change (Page 140)

Either way, it means the end of nations – The Maldives are drowning and the president-elect of that country is trying to buy a new homeland, since they can’t get any other country to take them in as refugees.

The nation of Maldives is a group of over 1,000 islands in the Indian Ocean that together comprise the lowest country in the world, only about 3 feet about sea level.

President-elect Mohamed Nasheed wants to use tourist revenues (the Maldives is a popular tourist destination) to buy land somewhere in the area with a similar culture?maybe India or Sri Lanka?where his 300,000 citizens can relocate.
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One remedy: white paint! – Twelve pathogens could spread into new regions of the world, as a result of global warming. The “Deadly Dozen” list?including such diseases as malaria, bird flu, Ebola, cholera, and tuberculosis?show the broad range of diseases that threaten both humans and animals as the world gets warmer.
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(sort of?for now, anyway) – Researchers say that ocean levels will definitely rise during the next 100 years, but they’re not likely to rise more than 7 feet. This would still be high enough to flood most coastal cities around the world. Is this good news or bad news?

In BBC News, Richard Black quotes USGS researcher Shad O?Neel as saying, “Even a sea level rise of 8 inches in a century will have quite dramatic implications. This work is in no way meant to undermine the seriousness of climate change, and sea level rise is something we’re going to have to deal with.”

Art credit: gimp-savvy.com
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Birds react by moving north – There is a colossal ice shelf collapse going on in our close neighbor Canada. Farther away, Greenland’s glaciers are not doing well. That’s not the only thing that’s happening in the North: Bird habitats are moving that way, as the weather gets warmer.

The ice shelves in Canada have lost a huge amount of ice this year?ice which had been in place for thousands of years. Now almost one-fourth of it is gone. BBC News quotes researcher Derek Mueller as saying, “These changes are irreversible under the present climate.”
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