Re: SC19

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=4bd9b871-9f05-476c-b599-361f16917d91

Doom and gloom abound in report on Earth's future

Leafing through Vital Signs 2006-2007, the Worldwatch Institute's annual look at the trends shaping our future, readers might be forgiven for concluding that the world is headed to hell in the proverbial handbasket.

And there's plenty in the Washington-based research institute's report, released yesterday, to support such a gloomy conclusion.

Many global ecosystems are being stressed beyond sustainable limits, slum populations are expanding rapidly, fossil fuel use is still rising, and growing millions of us are dangerously fat.

Perhaps most ominously, says Vital Signs, accelerating levels of greenhouse gases may be triggering a "positive feedback loop" that simultaneously impedes the ability of natural systems to absorb carbon dioxide while causing some ecosystems to release more of it into the atmosphere. In other words, global warming may be fuelling more global warming.

In 2005, the average atmospheric carbon concentration reached 379.2 parts per million, an increase of 0.6 per cent over the previous record level in 2004. The average global temperature of 14.6 degrees made 2005 the warmest year recorded on the Earth's surface.

"We could be on the verge of a tipping point at which climate change shifts from a gradual process that can be forecast by computer models to one that is sudden, violent and chaotic," warns Christopher Flavin, Worldwatch president. "Government leaders and private citizens will have to mobilize in an unprecedented way if we are to have any chance of passing a healthy and secure world on to the next generation."..........

At the rate we are going, what kind of world will we really be handing off to our kids, when we get done with it, in our time.