Jammed: Full into Capacity

The feared harmful effects of global warming are said to show up decades from now. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a draft document which focuses on global warming’s effects. The report, which is currently revised by over a thousand scientists from dozens of countries, will be shown at a convention next month in Belgium.

The report included these likely effects of global warming: Source: Yahoo! News

• Hundreds of millions of Africans and tens of millions of Latin Americans who now have water will be short of it in less than 20 years. By 2050, more than 1 billion people in Asia could face water shortages. By 2080, water shortages could threaten 1.1 billion to 3.2 billion people, depending on the level of greenhouse gases that cars and industry spew into the air.
• Death rates for the world’s poor from global warming-related illnesses, such as malnutrition and diarrhea, will rise by 2030. Malaria and dengue fever, as well as illnesses from eating contaminated shellfish, are likely to grow.
• Europe’s small glaciers will disappear with many of the continent’s large glaciers shrinking dramatically by 2050. And half of Europe’s plant species could be vulnerable, endangered or extinct by 2100.
• By 2080, between 200 million and 600 million people could be hungry because of global warming’s effects.
• About 100 million people each year could be flooded by 2080 by rising seas.
• Smog in U.S. cities will worsen and “ozone-related deaths from climate (will) increase by approximately 4.5 percent for the mid-2050s, compared with 1990s levels,” turning a small health risk into a substantial one.
• Polar bears in the wild and other animals will be pushed to extinction.
• At first, more food will be grown. For example, soybean and rice yields in Latin America will increase starting in a couple of years. Areas outside the tropics, especially the northern latitudes, will see longer growing seasons and healthier forests.

While this brings bad news to all of us, there’s still hope that we can prevent these harmful effects of global warming if the world slows down its emissions of carbon dioxide and if the level of greenhouse gases sticking around in the atmosphere stabilizes. If that’s the case, the report says “most major impacts on human welfare would be avoided; but some major impacts on ecosystems are likely to occur.”

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