Over the past century activities such as deforestation, the of burning fossil fuels and rampant production of livestock have released substantial amounts of heat-trapping, greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It is well known that this excess of greenhouse gases are causing the earth’s temperature to rise. As the planet warms, more energy is released into the climate system which is causing regular patterns to change and we are seeing an increase in unpredictable and severe weather conditions – just take a look at California’s drought!
Scientists have come to the consensus that climate change is the direct result of human interference with the earth’s natural systems, be it in the form of burning fossil fuels or deforestation. Although we often hear about climate change on the news the reports are often saturated with debate over the prevailing causes of climate change rather than focusing on what measures need to be taken to stop it. As Green Monsters, we know there are many things we can do in our everyday lives to minimize our own impact on the planet, and as we learn more about the wide sweeping effects of climate change it becomes even more apparent that our action is more needed than ever.
The coverage of the impact of climate change has been largely relegated to animal species, but people are being negatively affected by climate change as well.
Small island nations are some of the most at risk and least recognized when it comes to those impacted by climate change. Since 1955 the oceans have absorbed more than 90 percent of the earth’s extra heat. With the warming of our oceans we’ve seen an increase in thermal expansion as well as melting of polar ice caps and glaciers – ultimately leading to a rise in the ocean levels. Islands that sit only a meter or two above sea level are especially vulnerable. As sea levels continue to rise more and more people are becoming climate refuges, forced to leave their homes and find a new livelihood. As climate change progresses, it is expected that many island nations will be completely submerged and lost forever.
Today we want to bring your attention to these islands and the people who call them home.
1. Carteret Islands
This year the people of the Carteret Islands of Papa New Guinea became the first ever climate change refugees after they were displaced due to rising sea levels (as well as a shift in tectonic plates). The people of Carteret lived their lives mostly free of automobiles and only used only minimal electricity. Their collective carbon footprint was practically nonexistent. This was a population that lived off of the crops they grew, and were forced to relocate to the island of Bougainville after years of salt water inundated their crops and infiltrated the fresh water wells. While the people of Carteret may have found safety on a new island, scientists believe their native islands will be uninhabitable by 2015 and all islands will be completely submerged by 2020.
2.Torres Strait Islands
The Torres Strait Islands are situated between Australia and Papa New Guinea. The 6,700 people inhabiting the 100+ islands are in danger of becoming the first Australian climate change refugees. In February of this year the Australian Government confirmed it would invest $12 million to build a sea wall to protect six of the low-lying islands from king tides and costal erosion that have already displaced families and damaged infrastructures. Despite securing the funds for the sea wall, construction has been delayed repeatedly.
3. The Federated States of Micronesia
The Federated States of Micronesia is comprised of 607 islands scattered throughout the western Pacific Ocean. They, like many pacific islanders, have felt the devastating effects of climate change. Home to over 100,000 people, the sea level of Micronesian islands has risen 10mm every year, three times more than the global average. The rising seas have eroded away land and damaged villages. Last year the Federated States of Micronesia passed the climate change law that would require all state sectors to augment future policies by developing specific climate change action plans.
4. Kiribati
Kiribati is a small island nation south of Hawaii. Home to just over 100,000 people, the island sits just two meters above sea level. In September of this year President Anote Tong purchased land in Fiji to secure a new home that would be able to feed and house his people in the event that they are displaced due to rising sea levels. For now, the land will be used for agricultural needs and fish-farming to assure the people of Kiribati will have enough food to sustain them.
5. The Marshall Islands
The Marshall Islands lie in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and already many residents have begun to relocate due to the rising sea level. Tony deBrum, the Foreign Minister for the Marshall Islands, has stated that the displacement has been a hard one for some of the islanders who are attached to their home and the culture and traditions that come with it. The wall shielding the airport from saltwater has been breached and even some graveyards have begun to disappear after the encroaching salt water eroded away the land. In early October some schools of the Marshall Islands were closed for upwards of a week due to a lack of drinking water after salt water infiltrated their wells. Sadly, for many, relocation is the only remedy; but deBrum has not given up on his home yet. Last year deBrum appealed to the United Nations Security Council to argue that the climate change displacement should be treated as a security threat.
How You Can Help
For most of us climate change is personal and felt only within our own individual circumstances. Often times we don’t even think twice about how our consumption habits contribute to our carbon footprint. No matter where you live in the world climate change IS happening and it’s only a matter of time before it starts to play a pivotal role that will greatly affect our environment and our economy. The impact of our actions is being felt by these island nations and we cannot forget the role we play in their current suffering.
As Marshall Island’s Tony deBum says, “We are being put under the water by the pollution of large countries who don’t see it as their problem … [these nations] see only their development and economic progress as the reason for continuing their behavior that is causing the demise of these small island countries.”
Estimates today believe that climate change could displace upwards of 200 million people by 2050, unless we start taking action now. You can help slow the progress of climate change by lowering your own impact on the planet. By and large, animal agriculture is the driving source of greenhouse gas emissions, so by lowering your consumption of animal products you can conserve precious land and water resources and keep thousands of pounds of carbon from entering the atmosphere. Did you know that if you eliminated cheese from your diet you could keep 401 pounds of carbon dioxide out the atmosphere every year! Don’t ever think you can’t help make a positive impact!
Lead image source: 350.org
June 23, 2014
Tags: global warming, fabricated data, scientific fraud
(NaturalNews) When drug companies are caught faking clinical trial data, no one is surprised anymore. When vaccine manufacturers spike their human trial samples with animal antibodies to make sure their vaccines appear to work, we all just figure that\’s how they do business: lying, cheating, deceiving and violating the law.
Now, in what might be the largest scientific fraud ever uncovered, NASA and the NOAA have been caught red-handed altering historical temperature data to produce a "climate change narrative" that defies reality. This finding, originally documented on the Real Science website, is detailed here.
We now know that historical temperature data for the continental United States were deliberately altered by NASA and NOAA scientists in a politically-motivated attempt to rewrite history and claim global warming is causing U.S. temperatures to trend upward. The data actually show that we are in a cooling trend, not a warming trend (see charts below).
This story is starting to break worldwide right now across the media, with The Telegraph now reporting (1), "NOAA\’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been \’adjusting\’ its record by replacing real temperatures with data \’fabricated\’ by computer models."
Because the actual historical temperature record doesn\’t fit the frenzied, doomsday narrative of global warming being fronted today on the political stage, the data were simply altered using "computer models" and then published as fact.
Here\’s the proof of the climate change fraud
Here\’s the chart of U.S. temperatures published by NASA in 1999. It shows the highest temperatures actually occurred in the 1930\’s, followed by a cooling trend ramping downward to the year 2000:
The authenticity of this chart is not in question. It is published by James Hansen on NASA\’s website. (2) On that page, Hansen even wrote, "Empirical evidence does not lend much support to the notion that climate is headed precipitately toward more extreme heat and drought."
After the Obama administration took office, however, and started pushing the global warming narrative for political purposes, NASA was directed to alter its historical data in order to reverse the cooling trend and show a warming trend instead. This was accomplished using climate-modeling computers that simply fabricated the data the researchers wished to see instead of what was actually happening in the real world.
Using the exact same data found in the chart shown above (with a few years of additional data after 2000), NASA managed to misleadingly distort the chart to depict the appearance of global warming:
The authenticity of this chart is also not in question. It can be found right now on NASA\’s servers. (4)
This new, altered chart shows that historical data — especially the severe heat and droughts experienced in the 1930\’s — are now systematically suppressed to make them appear cooler than they really were. At the same time, temperature data from the 1970\’s to 2010 are strongly exaggerated to make them appear warmer than they really were.
This is a clear case of scientific fraud being carried out on a grand scale in order to deceive the entire world about global warming.
EPA data also confirm the global warming hoax
What\’s even more interesting is that even the EPA\’s "Heat Wave Index" data further support the notion that the U.S. was far hotter in the 1930\’s than it is today.
The following chart, published on the EPA.gov website (4), clearly shows modern-day heat waves are far smaller and less severe than those of the 1930\’s. In fact, the seemingly "extreme" heat waves of the last few years were no worse than those of the early 1900\’s or 1950\’s.
Short-sighted agricultural practices cause more global warming than CO2
Seeing these charts, you might wonder how the extremely high temperatures of the 1930\’s came about. Were we releasing too much CO2 by burning fossil fuels?
Nope. That entire episode of massive warming and drought was caused by conventional agricultural practices that clear-cut forests, poisoned the soils with chemicals and plowed the top soil away. Lacking trees to retain moisture, areas that were once thriving plains, grasslands and forests turned to desert. Suddenly, the cooling effects of moisture transpiration from healthy plant ecosystems was lost, causing extreme temperatures and deadly drought.
Shortsighted agricultural practices, in other words, really did cause "warming," while a restoration of a more natural ecosystem reversed the trend and cooled the region.
Reforestation is the answer
This brings us to the simple, obvious solution to all this. If you want to cool the planet, focus on reforestation efforts. If you want to retain moisture and keep your soils alive, you need diverse plant-based ecosystems, not clear-cut fields running monoculture operations.
Forests act like sponges that soak up rainwater, and then they turn around and slowly release that water back into the air, "moisturizing" the atmosphere and keeping humidity levels high enough to support other nearby grasses, shrubs and plants. When you clear-cut forests — as has been done all across the world to make room for mechanized agriculture — you effectively raise temperatures by eliminating nature\’s plant-based water retention and cooling systems.
Industrialized farming, in other words, has already been historically shown to radically increase continental temperatures and "warm" the region. So why isn\’t the White House warning the world about the dangers of industrialized agriculture?
The answer: Because it doesn\’t accomplish anything that\’s politically important to this administration. It\’s far more important to use the false panic of global warming to shut down clean coal power plants (U.S. coal plants are FAR cleaner than China\’s) and drive the population into a state of subservient obedience through doomsday scare tactics.
Now we conclusively know the government is lying about global warming
As an environmentalist, I\’m always concerned about pollutants and emissions, especially heavy metals being dumped into the atmosphere. But I\’ve also learned over the years that almost everything the federal government aggressively promotes to the public is a blatant lie. Rarely does anything resembling the truth ever come out of Washington D.C.
These people are experts at lying with bad science, hiding their deceptions behind the cover of "scientific thinking" and making outlandish claims such as saying that anyone who doesn\’t believe their fabricated data must also believe the Earth is flat. Remember, the people who are telling you that burning fossils fuels is causing runaway global warming are the very same people who also claim mercury in vaccines is safe to inject in unlimited quantities, toxins in GMOs are safe to eat, chemotherapy works great for cancer patients and that there\’s no such thing as any food or nutrient that prevents disease.
These are the same government people who build massive networks of underground bunkers and caves in complete secrecy while publicly claiming preppers are conspiracy theorists. It\’s the same government that lied about running inhumane medical experiments on prisoners via the National Institutes of Health, then got caught and had to apologize decades later.
If you think this same government is telling you the truth about global warming, you probably need to have your head examined. But not by a government-licensed psychiatrist, or she\’ll dose your head full of psychiatric medications that cause you to lose so much of your cognitive function, you\’ll actually start to believe CNN\’s broadcasts.
Sources for this article include:
(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment…
(2) http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/han…
(3) http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/…
(4) http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/ind…
(5) http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2014/06/2…
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/045695_global_warming_fabricated_data_scientific_fraud.html##ixzz35YL3oV45