Donald Trump in America and Tony Abbott in Australia think global warming is " crap " ! A lot of other world leaders at least pay lip service to the coming danger but hesitate to put in place the legislation needed to turn back the tide. The scientific community tell us we are fast approaching the " point of no return " That rising sea levels are now inevitable !
If we haven't made up our mind on this matter we might do well to get a map of the world, put it on the wall, and sit back and give the matter some thought. The first thing that becomes apparent is that water covers a vast area of the surface of planet earth and we humans live on just five basic great land masses protruding from that ocean.
They are north America and South America, Africa, Australia - and the biggest of them all is that great continent that encompasses Europe, Asia and the Middle east and has the biggest concentration of citizens. To the far north and south we have the Arctic and AntArctic, which just happen to store our biggest supply of fresh drinking water.
Every one of those continents has at least one major river which name is familiar to us. In North America it is the Mississippi. In South America the Amazon. In Africa the Congo. In Russia the Volga and in that great European/Asia land mass we have the Nile, The Yangtze, the Mekong, the Ganges,and the Brahmaputra. In Australia we have the Murray.
The first of humankind settled beside those rivers and used the water to irrigate their crops. Each river had is headwaters in a mountain range and flows to the sea. The surrounding land is the bread basket of the world and sees the greatest concentration of the people of this earth.
It is now apparent that the ice of the Arctic and AntArctic are melting and the great ice sheets of Greenland will soon contribute to rising sea levels. As the sea levels rise the flow of these great rivers will be reversed. Salty seawater will intrude further inland and the agriculture the rivers sustained will be lost. We face a coming world famine. The land inundation will see great masses of people forced to relocate to higher - less productive - ground. It will create a new world refugee problem.
The other danger is that northern parts of Alaska, Canada and Russia never thaw. The land maintains permafrost through each summer, but rising temperatures are reversing that trend. If the soil thaws it will reveal dead animals and humans from the distant past and they may contain the bacteria of diseases that have fortunately died out on this planet. We could see a repeat of the " Spanish flu " that swept the earth in the 1920's and killed millions.
It doesn't take the mind of Einstein to connect the dots. Most of the worlds great rivers start their journey to the sea fed by melting glaciers and the melt of winter snow. It is quite clear the glaciers are failing and each year winter brings less snow. As the river flow diminishes, rising sea levels will reverse that flow inland with salty water, and that is inimical to agriculture.
Politicians are a self serving lot. Many choose to disbelieve because the measures necessary to avoid catastrophe would be unpopular with the voters and they will have departed from office when it happens. A little time studying that world map and giving it intelligent thought to what inertia has in store for us would be helpful.
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