climate change (Page 141)

According to a leading medical journal, climate change will have a huge impact on human health and bold decisions are needed now to protect the world’s population.

Writing in the British Medical Journal, Professor McMichael says that the risks to health are many, and include the impact of heat waves, floods and wildfires, changes in infectious disease patterns, the effect of worsening food yields and loss of livelihoods. He says, “Climate change is beginning to damage our natural life-support system.”
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Climate change could cause severe crop losses in South Asia and southern Africa over the next 20 years, because these countries could lose more than a third of their main crop, which is corn, due to heat and drought?or floods. The Israelis, who have experience growing crops in the desert, have developed a way to help plants adapt to the harsh conditions caused by global warming.
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A surge of Antarctic glaciers into the oceans could cause a dramatic rise in sea levels, and an area of the continent the size of Texas could be about to do just that. This area is known to be the least stable in the Antarctic.

The largest of the glaciers, the Pine Island Glacier, seems to be the least stable. It is now dropping more ice into the ocean than any other glacier in Antarctica. The ice is over a mile deep, twenty miles wide and is moving into the ocean at two miles a year.
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While scientists are searching for an auto fuel that does not release dangerous greenhouse gases, other researchers are working on a strategy to capture, store and eventually recycle carbon dioxide from vehicles to prevent the pollutant from finding its way from car tailpipes into the atmosphere.

Technologies to capture carbon dioxide emissions from large-scale sources such as power plants have recently gained some impressive ground, but nearly two-thirds of global carbon emissions are created by much smaller polluters, especially cars and other transportation vehicles.
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