climate

Written by Jan Lundberg
Thursday, 20 July 2006

Culture Change Letter # 137

Ecovillages and isotherms
CUTTING OUT FOSSIL FUELS BY BUILDING COMMUNITY

The urgent need to slash today's extreme consumption of fossil fuels is not a numbers game, nor is it a matter of degree. Rather, it is a matter of reduction in kind.

We cannot break our hyper-addiction to our fossil-fuelled economy of hyper-consumption incrementally, or gradually, or by means of some pain-free twelve-step program. We have to go cold turkey wherever we can. Right now. We have to begin by taking a good hard look at every single thing we do - at every single thing we have, at every single thing we want. Then we have to start the hard job of cutting out every single thing we can do without. http://i.am/jah/environ.htm

Rising population, water shortages, climate change, and the growing costs of fossil fuel-based fertilisers point to a calamitous shortfall in the world's grain supplies in the near future, according to Canada's National Farmers Union (NFU).

Thirty years ago, the oceans were teeming with fish, but today more people rely on farmers to produce their food than ever before, says Stewart Wells, NFU's president.

In five of the last six years, global population ate significantly more grains than farmers produced.

One in six countries in the world face food shortages this year because of severe droughts that could become semi-permanent under climate change, UN scientists warned yesterday...

Floods, storms and droughts. Melting Arctic ice, shrinking glaciers, oceans
turning to acid. The world's top scientists warned last week that dangerous
climate change is taking place today, not the day after tomorrow. You don't
believe it? Then, says Geoffrey Lean, read this..

Climate change over the next 50 years is expected to drive a quarter of land animals and plants into extinction, according to the first
omprehensive study into the effect of higher temperatures on the natural world.