Climate change is no longer a doomsday theory about our distant future – it’s here. Farmers around the world are already dealing with more variable climates and dramatic weather events, like the drought in California and gigantic typhoons in Asia.
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Life has never been easy for just-hatched Magellanic penguins, but climate change is making it worse, according to a decades-long study of the largest breeding colony of the birds. The chicks are already vulnerable to predation and starvation. Now, the study at Punta Tombo, Argentina, found that intense storms and warmer temperatures are increasingly taking a toll. “Rainfall is killing a lot of penguins, and so is heat,” said P. Dee Boersma, a University of Washington scientist and lead author of thestudy. “And those are two new causes.”
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Global warming has continued rapidly in recent years, mostly accumulating in the oceans. Yet there remains a pervasive myth that it has somehow magically stopped. Most recently displaying this confusion was Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, who testified about climate change before a US Senate committee. Curry’s testimony was riddled with mistakes and misleading arguments, in her testimony, the worst of which involved disputing that climate scientists are more confident in human-caused global warming than they were six years ago.
Kofi Annan is chair of The Elders, a group of independent leaders who work for peace, justice and human rights worldwide. When Nelson Mandela formed the Elders in 2007 to promote peace and human rights across the world, he challenged us to be bold and to give a voice to those who have none. No issue demands these qualities more than our collective failure to tackle climate change.
Le condizioni ambientali influenzano la qualità di vita e la salute degli individui. E’ sempre più diffusa la consapevolezza dei rischi che possono emergere, per esempio, da una scarsa qualità dell’acqua o dall’alta concentrazione di sostanze inquinanti nell’aria, e i dati parlano chiaro: l’inquinamento dell’aria è causa, ogni anno, di circa 1,3 milioni di decessi nel mondo. Una recente revisione di un migliaio di ricerche scientifiche svolta dall’International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), agenzia specializzata dell’Organizzazione Mondiale della Sanità (OMS), ha classificato l’inquinamento atmosferico tra le cause principali del cancro ai polmoni [1]; un quarto dei decessi di bambini a livello mondiale sono attribuibili ad ambienti insalubri e insicuri.
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