In today’s Financial Times is a story of how Spain is increasingly experiencing desertification with one-fifth of Spain already affected.
Once land becomes desert there’s not much that can be done and it poses an obvious problem.
The main cause is often human action, such as overfarming and excessive irrigation, which erodes soil and drains aquifers. The problem exists on a daunting scale in Spain, where agriculture has steadily industrialised and three-quarters of the landmass is already generally dry or semi-arid. “Spain is the EU country at greatest risk of desertification,” Teresa Ribera, deputy prime minister and minister for the environment, told the Financial Times. She said the government was planning to set out a national strategy this autumn, its first in 13 years. Regions in Spain’s south-east and east are among Europe’s worst affected…
I noticed some changes to the walks around here this year, it’s like the soil has eroded and dried up significantly, and the gaps where the water used to run has widened and deepened by quite a bit, here’s a pic:
I don’t think there is anything called climate change as such. If you look back through earths history we had the Ice age for example that comes to mind. The earth has a natural cycle of different climates and this is just another one of those cycles we are experencing. It is the “panic” mongers stirring up the issue
Yes RS, but don’t you think that humans are making it happen so much faster? And so quick that the earth cannot recover itself? We might be in a “cycle” of change, but our ways are accelerating it ten fold. In my opinion anyway.
There might well be some truth in the suggestion that some are “stirring up the issue”.
But that misses the point entirely because, like it or not, our climate is changing.
And because it is changing it is already causing problems which, by the look of things, are going to increase in number and in severity.
In the case of this story, where will food production take place when one of the world’s great powers in the production of fruit and veg. becomes instead a barren wasteland, at a time when an increasing population means more mouths to feed?
Apportioning blame won’t help matters; positive action is needed.
Now.
And not just in Spain.
Very well put @Zaphod. We are living in very frightening times indeed. From a global viewpoint, the planet would have a better chance of survival if Covid-19 had killed many, many millions of people, a couple of billion even. That would go a long way to restore the balance, as we may be in danger of outgrowing the planet’s ability to sustain us, unless man learns to be altruistic, which is a bit of a pipedream. As Gandhi said, “The world has enough for everyone’s need, but not enough for everyone’s greed.”
And note, I said ‘from a global viewpoint’. I am not detracting from the terrible suffering that Covid has inflicted and continues to inflict.
Since it is unlikely that a) a couple of billion will be killed off, and b) humanity is converted to altruism, then yes, we do need to act very, very quickly.
I am shocked that people just think the earth changes it’s climate but never question why it happens.
We live in a galaxy where I am sure many major changes take place but if the other planets don’t have life forms I wonder if it would have such a disastrous effect for them?
What if all life forms on earth die? Shouldn’t we be listening to the scientists , because they may be right?
Nearly all life forms depend on other ones, so life on earth may be destroyed forever. Do we want to risk being responsible for the possible death of all life?
Life will be impossible if we do nothing and, if the scientists are right, won’t we all be responsible for not wanting future generations to survive , even if the chance is small. We are not talking about the distant future, we are now thinking that it will be much sooner, or aren’t people prepared to make big changes in the hope that our grandchildren may live?
There are three cycles that affect the worlds climate I can’t remember exactly what they are without looking it up but they are things like the eccentricity of Earths orbit round the sun and the procession of the poles (not magnetic). They are called something like the Milankovitch cycles (I looked it up to get the spelling right)
For example the southern hemisphere currently gets more sunlight than the northern hemisphere in summer because it is slightly closer to the sun. This changes as the cycles progress over many thousands of years, each cycle has a different frequency so they add and subtract from each other.
However all of these changes are very small indeed compared to the changes that are being propelled by human activity.
For example greenhouse gases emitted by all the volcanoes on the planet are tiny compared to those emitted by human activity.
It is a complete nonsense to say that climate change is just part of Earth’s natural cycle because it is not and all scientific evidence shows that to be so.
Somebody with a new computer has done some modelling…Come on! They can’t even predict the weather next week, never mind 2100. They used to say it’s God’s word to frighten people to death, now it’s ‘Scientific Evidence’…
