The very survival and salvation of humanity and Mother Earth is at stake

[Guest guest]

, " jagbir singh "

<adishakti_org wrote:

>

> Dear devotees of the Adi Shakti,

>

> Namskaar - i bow to the Holy Spirit that resides in you,

>

> i just came across this quote:

>

> " His Message was so great and so deep but He had disciples who were

> not prepared for the battle they had to fight. It's the same thing

> that sometimes happen in Sahaja Yoga. "

>

> Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

> Give up your Antichrist Behaviour, Christmas Puja,

> Ganapatipule, India — December 24, 1996

>

> That was more than a decade ago. Today it is obvious that Shri

> Mataji's disciples are by far the worst any incarnation could ever

> hope for. They are easily the most cowardly, hypocritical and un-

> conscientious disciples in the history of spirituality. Never have

> there been so many been collectively involved in the corruption of

> their guru's teachings and suppression of the Message. It is beyond

> belief that tens and thousands of SYs can remain silent and fearful

> while leaders and their lackeys rape, pillage and plunder their

> Guru, Her Teachings and Will before their very eyes.

>

> Jesus' Message was indeed great and deep but He had disciples who

> were not prepared for the battle they had to fight. Shri Mataji's

> Message of the Last Judgment and Resurrection is easily much greater

> as the very survival and salvation of humanity and Mother Earth is

> at stake. Yet, even as this eleventh hour, the silence from the vast

> majority of Her disciples is deafening. It is unbelievable that only

> a handful of Her devotees, labeled as " rebellious non-SYs " by WCASY

> and SYs, are prepared for the battle they have to fight. There is no

> question that the Adi Shakti brought along those fully prepared to

> fight to the end. It is indeed a great blessing and honor to serve

> Her. No matter what the odds, She will eventually triumph.

>

> Jai Ganapathy,

>

>

> jagbir

>

 

 

To the end of the Earth - Six Degrees

Sunday Times 15 March 07

SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE – COVER STORY:

 

This is our future – famous cities are submerged, a third of the

world is desert, the rest struggling for food and fresh water.

Richard Girling investigates the reality behind the science of

climate change.

 

Mark Lynas rummages through his filing cabinet like a badger raking

out his bedstraw, much of the stuff so crumpled that he might have

been sleeping on it for years. Eventually he finds what he is looking

for – four sheets of printed paper, stapled with a page of notes.

 

It is an article, dated November 2000, which he has clipped from the

scientific journal Nature: " Acceleration of global warming due to

carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model " . Even when they

are mapping a short cut to Armageddon, scientists do not go in for

red-top words like " crisis " . If you speak the language, however, you

get the message – and the message, delivered by the UK Met Office's

Hadley Centre for Climate Change, was cataclysmic.

 

" There should have been panic on the streets, " says Lynas in his new

book, Six Degrees, " people shouting from the rooftops, statements to

parliament and 24-hour news coverage. "

 

In layman's language, Hadley's message was that newly

discovered " positive feedbacks " would make nonsense of accepted

global-warming estimates. It would not be a gradual, linear increase

with nature slowly succumbing to human attrition. Nature itself was

about to turn nasty. Instead of absorbing and retaining greenhouse

gases from the atmosphere, the figures suggested, it would suddenly

spew them out again – billions of years' worth of carbon and methane,

incontinently released in blazing surges that would drown or

incinerate whole cities. Ice would melt in torrents, and the Earth's

essential green lung, the Amazon rainforest, could be moribund as

early as 2050. A vicious spiral would have begun which would threaten

not just our way of life but the very existence of our own and every

other species on Earth. Lynas's notes, still fixed to the report,

have the dour humour of the gallows: " The end of the world is nigh,

and it's already been published in Nature. "

 

Next day's newspapers ignored the rescheduling of Armageddon – the

headlines were all about faulty counts in the US presidential

election, Gordon Brown's fiddling with National Insurance and Lord

Falconer's refusal to resign over " the Dome fiasco " . Lynas, however,

was energised like the hero of a disaster movie. Inconveniently, he

had a book to write, but as soon as he'd finished it he pedalled

from his Oxford home to the nearby Radcliffe Science Library. He did

it every working day for a year: arriving at 10am and sitting till

five in the afternoon, being served sheaves of paper by librarians

who – even though professionally attuned to world-class standards of

eccentricity – must have wondered at the power of the man's obsession.

 

Lynas wanted to see every scrap of paper the library held on global

warming. Scanning at speed, he worked his way through two or three

hundred every day, tens of thousands in all. Then as now, new pieces

of research were emerging almost weekly as computer models were

improved, new data collected and analysed. Then as now, there was no

single, provable prediction of the future. Without knowing how much

more fossil fuel will be burnt, the best science can offer is a range

of plausible " scenarios " . These vary so widely that the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Third

Assessment report in 2001, was able to suggest only that global

average temperatures by the end of the 21st century will have risen

between 1.4 and 5.8C above the average for 1990 – an estimate which

last month it pushed up to a possible maximum of 6.4C. It doesn't

look much, but it could measure the difference between survival and

the near-extinction of human life.

 

On Lynas's laptop were six spreadsheets – one for each degree of

warming from one to six. As he worked, he would slot each paper into

the appropriate file. Many of them included predictions from climate

models, but there was more: " Some of the most interesting came from

palaeoclimate studies – investigations of how variations in

temperature, calculated by analysis of soil strata and ancient ice-

cores, affected the planet in prehistory. " It was these that would

give some of the most terrifying insights into what the future might

be like. Which parts of the globe would be abandoned first? What was

the precise mechanism that, eventually, would wipe us out?

 

The spreadsheets became the six core chapters of Lynas's book – a

detailed, carefully annotated, degree-by-degree guide not just to our

grandchildren's futures but to our own.

 

UP TO ONE DEGREE OF WARMING

 

Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight – of which there is

about as much chance as Tony Blair holidaying in Skegness – the

concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global

rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely

perceptible to human skin, but it's not human skin we're talking

about. It's the planet; and an average increase of one degree across

its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.

 

Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it

is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was

desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of

the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of

refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further

west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great

feat of imagination.

 

" The western United States once again could suffer perennial

droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear

particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and

Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn day

into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads,

roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand. "

 

What's bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to

the equator. The Hadley centre calculates that a one-degree increase

would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world's land surface

by 2100. Again we have seen what this means. Lynas describes an

incident in the summer of 2005: " One tributary fell so low that miles

of exposed riverbank dried out into sand dunes, with winds whipping

up thick sandstorms. As desperate villagers looked out onto baking

mud instead of flowing water, the army was drafted in to ferry

precious drinking water up the river – by helicopter, since most of

the river was too low to be navigable by boat. " The river in question

was not some small, insignificant trickle in Sussex. It was the

Amazon.

 

While tropical lands teeter on the brink, the Arctic already may have

passed the point of no return. Warming near the pole is much faster

than the global average, with the result that Arctic icecaps and

glaciers have lost 400 cubic kilometres of ice in 40 years.

Permafrost – ground that has lain frozen for thousands of years – is

dissolving into mud and lakes, " destabilising whole areas as the

ground collapses beneath buildings, roads and pipelines " . As polar

bears and Inuits are being pushed off the top of the planet, previous

predictions are starting to look optimistic. " Earlier snowmelt, " says

Lynas, " means more summer heat goes into the air and ground rather

than into melting snow, raising temperatures in a positive feedback

effect. More dark shrubs and forest on formerly bleak tundra means

still more heat is absorbed by vegetation. "

 

Out at sea the pace is even faster. " Whilst snow-covered ice reflects

more than 80% of the sun's heat, the darker ocean absorbs up to 95%

of solar radiation. Once sea ice begins to melt, in other words, the

process becomes self-reinforcing. More ocean surface is revealed,

absorbing solar heat, raising temperatures and making it unlikelier

that ice will re-form next winter. The disappearance of 720,000

square kilometres of supposedly permanent ice in a single year

testifies to the rapidity of planetary change. If you have ever

wondered what it will feel like when the Earth crosses a tipping

point, savour the moment. "

 

Mountains, too, are starting to come apart. In the Alps, most ground

above 3,000 metres is stabilised by permafrost. In the summer of

2003, however, the melt zone climbed right up to 4,600 metres, higher

than the summit of the Matterhorn and nearly as high as Mont Blanc.

With the glue of millennia melting away, rocks showered down and 50

climbers died. As temperatures go on edging upwards, it won't just be

mountaineers who flee. " Whole towns and villages will be at risk, "

says Lynas. " Some towns, like Pontresina in eastern Switzerland, have

already begun building bulwarks against landslides. "

 

At the opposite end of the scale, low-lying atoll countries such as

the Maldives will be preparing for extinction as sea levels rise, and

mainland coasts – in particular the eastern US and Gulf of Mexico,

the Caribbean and Pacific islands and the Bay of Bengal – will be hit

by stronger and stronger hurricanes as the water warms. Hurricane

Katrina, which in 2005 hit New Orleans with the combined impacts of

earthquake and flood, was a nightmare precursor of what the future

holds.

 

" Most striking of all, " says Lynas, " was seeing how people behaved

once the veneer of civilisation had been torn away. Most victims were

poor and black, left to fend for themselves as the police either

joined in the looting or deserted the area. Four days into the

crisis, survivors were packed into the city's Superdome, living next

to overflowing toilets and rotting bodies as gangs of young men with

guns seized the only food and water available. Perhaps the most

memorable scene was a single military helicopter landing for just a

few minutes, its crew flinging food parcels and water bottles out

onto the ground before hurriedly taking off again as if from a war

zone. In scenes more like a Third World refugee camp than an American

urban centre, young men fought for the water as pregnant women and

the elderly looked on with nothing. Don't blame them for behaving

like this, I thought. It's what happens when people are desperate. "

 

Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero.

 

BETWEEN ONE AND TWO DEGREES OF WARMING

 

At this level, expected within 40 years, the hot European summer of

2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a

heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average

years, people will die of heat stress.

 

" The first symptoms, " says Lynas, " may be minor. A person will feel

slightly nauseous, dizzy and irritable. It needn't be an emergency:

an hour or so lying down in a cooler area, sipping water, will cure

it. But in Paris, August 2003, there were no cooler areas, especially

for elderly people.

 

" Once body temperature reaches 41C (104F) its thermoregulatory system

begins to break down. Sweating ceases and breathing becomes shallow

and rapid. The pulse quickens, and the victim may lapse into a coma.

Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the body's core

temperature, the brain is starved of oxygen and vital organs begin to

fail. Death will be only minutes away unless the emergency services

can quickly get the victim into intensive care.

 

" These emergency services failed to save more than 10,000 French in

the summer of 2003. Mortuaries ran out of space as hundreds of dead

bodies were brought in each night. " Across Europe as a whole, the

heatwave is believed to have cost between 22,000 and 35,000 lives.

Agriculture, too, was devastated. Farmers lost $12 billion worth of

crops, and Portugal alone suffered $12 billion of forest-fire damage.

The flows of the River Po in Italy, Rhine in Germany and Loire in

France all shrank to historic lows. Barges ran aground, and there was

not enough water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. Melt rates in

the Alps, where some glaciers lost 10% of their mass, were not just a

record – they doubled the previous record of 1998. According to the

Hadley centre, more than half the European summers by 2040 will be

hotter than this. Extreme summers will take a much heavier toll of

human life, with body counts likely to reach hundreds of thousands.

Crops will bake in the fields, and forests will die off and burn.

Even so, the short-term effects may not be the worst:

 

" From the beech forests of northern Europe to the evergreen oaks of

the Mediterranean, plant growth across the whole landmass in 2003

slowed and then stopped. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the

stressed plants began to emit it. Around half a billion tonnes of

carbon was added to the atmosphere from European plants, equivalent

to a twelfth of global emissions from fossil fuels. This is a

positive feedback of critical importance, because it suggests that,

as temperatures rise, carbon emissions from forests and soils will

also rise. If these land-based emissions are sustained over long

periods, global warming could spiral out of control. "

 

In the two-degree world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean

holidays. " The movement of people from northern Europe to the

Mediterranean is likely to reverse, switching eventually into a mass

scramble as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med. " People

everywhere will think twice about moving to the coast. When

temperatures were last between 1 and 2C higher than they are now,

125,000 years ago, sea levels were five or six metres higher too. All

this " lost " water is in the polar ice that is now melting.

Forecasters predict that the " tipping point " for Greenland won't

arrive until average temperatures have risen by 2.7C. The snag is

that Greenland is warming much faster than the rest of the world –

2.2 times the global average. " Divide one figure by the other, " says

Lynas, " and the result should ring alarm bells across the world.

Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures

rise past a mere 1.2C. " The ensuing sea-level rise will be far more

than the half-metre that the IPCC has predicted for the end of the

century. Scientists point out that sea levels at the end of the last

ice age shot up by a metre every 20 years for four centuries, and

that Greenland's ice, in the words of one glaciologist, is

now " thinning like mad and flowing much faster than [it] ought to " .

Its biggest outflow glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, has thinned by 15

metres every year since 1997, and its speed of flow has doubled. " At

this rate, " says Lynas, " the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish

within 140 years. Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan.

Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay and Shanghai would

lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move

to higher ground. "

 

Not only coastal communities will suffer. As mountains lose their

glaciers, so people will lose their water supplies. The entire Indian

subcontinent will be fighting for survival. " As the glaciers

disappear from all but the highest peaks, their runoff will cease to

power the massive rivers that deliver vital freshwater to hundreds of

millions. Water shortages and famine will be the result,

destabilising the entire region. And this time the epicentre of the

disaster won't be India, Nepal or Bangladesh, but nuclear-armed

Pakistan. "

 

Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel as species either migrate or fall

out of synch with each other. By the time global temperatures reach

two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living

species will face extinction.

 

Chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming: 93%, but only if

emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced by 60% over the next 10

years.

 

BETWEEN TWO AND THREE DEGREES OF WARMING

 

Up to this point, assuming that governments have planned carefully

and farmers have converted to more appropriate crops, not too many

people outside subtropical Africa need have starved. Beyond two

degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as

halting the cycles of the moon. " First millions, then billions, of

people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive, " says Lynas.

 

To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene – last

epoch of the Tertiary period, 3m years ago. There were no continental

glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and

sea levels were 25 metres higher than today's. In this kind of heat,

the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of Greenland.

The paper spelling it out is the very one whose apocalyptic message

so shocked Lynas in 2000. Scientists at the Hadley centre feared that

earlier climate models, which showed global warming as a

straightforward linear progression, were too simplistic in their

assumption that land and the oceans would remain inert as their

temperatures rose. Correctly as it would turn out, they predicted

positive feedback.

 

" Warmer seas, " explains Lynas, " absorb less carbon dioxide, leaving

more to accumulate in the atmosphere and intensify global warming. On

land, matters would be even worse. Huge amounts of carbon are stored

in the soil, the half-rotted remains of dead vegetation. The

generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir

contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon

content of the atmosphere. As soil warms, bacteria accelerate the

breakdown of this stored carbon, releasing it into the atmosphere. "

 

The Hadley team factored this new feedback into their climate model,

with results that fully explain Lynas's black-comic note to himself:

The end of the world is nigh. A three-degree increase in global

temperature – possible as early as 2050 – would throw the carbon

cycle into reverse. " Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, " says

Lynas, " vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon

pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric concentrations

by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another

1.5C. In other words, the Hadley team had discovered that carbon-

cycle feedbacks could tip the planet into runaway global warming by

the middle of this century – much earlier than anyone had expected. "

 

Confirmation came from the land itself. Climate models are routinely

tested against historical data. In this case, scientists checked 25

years' worth of soil samples from 6,000 sites across the UK. The

result was another black joke. " As temperatures gradually rose, " says

Lynas, " the scientists found that huge amounts of carbon had been

released naturally from the soils. They totted it all up and

discovered – irony of ironies – that the 13m tonnes of carbon British

soils were emitting annually was enough to wipe out all the country's

efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. " All soils will be

affected by the rising heat, but none as badly as the

Amazon's. " Catastrophe " is almost too small a word for the loss of

the rainforest. Its 7m square kilometres produce 10% of the world's

entire photosynthetic output from plants. Drought and heat will

cripple it; fire will finish it off. In human terms, the effect on

the planet will be like cutting off oxygen during an asthma attack.

 

In the US and Australia, people will curse the climate-denying

governments of Bush and Howard. No matter what later administrations

may do, it will not be enough to keep the mercury down. With

new " super-hurricanes " growing from the warming sea, Houston could be

destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. " Farming and

food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will

creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher

temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation

and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs. " In state

capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000

mainly elderly people.

 

It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In

Central America, too, tens of millions will have little to put on

their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds of

thousands had to rely on food aid. This won't be an option when world

supplies are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by

10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero).

Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As

the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will

lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at

the first spark.

 

The Indian subcontinent meanwhile will be choking on dust. " All of

human history, " says Lynas, " shows that, given the choice between

starving in situ and moving, people move. In the latter part of the

century tens of millions of Pakistani citizens may be facing this

choice. Pakistan may find itself joining the growing list of failed

states, as civil administration collapses and armed gangs seize what

little food is left. "

 

As the land burns, so the sea will go on rising. Even by the most

optimistic calculation, 80% of Arctic sea ice by now will be gone,

and the rest will soon follow. New York will flood; the catastrophe

that struck eastern England in 1953 will become an unremarkable

regular event; and the map of the Netherlands will be torn up by the

North Sea. Everywhere, starving people will be on the move – from

Central America into Mexico and the US, and from Africa into Europe,

where resurgent fascist parties will win votes by promising to keep

them out.

 

Chance of avoiding three degrees of global warming: poor if the rise

reaches two degrees and triggers carbon-cycle feedbacks from soils

and plants.

 

BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING

 

The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to

safer interiors – millions at a time when storms hit. Where they

persist, coastal cities will become fortified islands. The world

economy, too, will be threadbare. " As direct losses, social

instability and insurance payouts cascade through the system, the

funds to support displaced people will be increasingly scarce. " Sea

levels will be rampaging upwards – in this temperature range, both

poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 metres. " I

am not suggesting it would be instantaneous, " says Lynas. " In fact it

would take centuries, and probably millennia, to melt all of the

Antarctic's ice. But it could yield sea-level rises of a metre or so

every 20 years – far beyond our capacity to adapt. " Oxford would sit

on one of many coastlines in a UK reduced to an archipelago of tiny

islands.

 

More immediately, China is on " a collision course with the planet " .

By 2030, if its people are consuming at the same rate as Americans,

they will eat two-thirds of the entire global harvest and burn 100m

barrels of oil a day, or 125% of current world output. That prospect

alone contains all the ingredients of catastrophe. But it's worse

than that: " By the latter third of the 21st century, if global

temperatures are more than three degrees higher than now, China's

agricultural production will crash. It will face the task of feeding

1.5bn much richer people – 200m more than now – on two thirds of

current supplies. " For people throughout much of the world,

starvation will be a regular threat; but it will not be the only one.

 

" The summer will get longer still, as soaring temperatures reduce

forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures in

the Home Counties could reach 45C – the sort of climate experienced

today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on

the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing

against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs.

 

" Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool.

This in turn will put ever more stress on energy systems, which could

pour more greenhouse gases into the air if coal and gas-fired power

stations ramp up their output, hydroelectric sources dwindle and

renewables fail to take up the slack. " The abandonment of the

Mediterranean will send even more people north to " overcrowded

refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles " .

 

Britain will have problems of its own. " As flood plains are more

regularly inundated, a general retreat out of high risk areas is

likely. Millions of people will lose their lifetime investments in

houses that become uninsurable and therefore unsaleable. The

Lancashire/Humber corridor is expected to be among the worst affected

regions, as are the Thames Valley, eastern Devon and towns around the

already flood-prone Severn estuary like Monmouth and Bristol. The

entire English coast from the Isle of Wight to Middlesbrough is

classified as at `very high' or `extreme' risk, as is the whole of

Cardigan Bay in Wales. "

 

One of the most dangerous of all feedbacks will now be kicking in –

the runaway thaw of permafrost. Scientists believe at least 500

billion tonnes of carbon are waiting to be released from the Arctic

ice, though none yet has put a figure on what it will add to global

warming. One degree? Two? Three? The pointers are ominous.

 

" As with Amazon collapse and the carbon-cycle feedback in the three-

degree world, " says Lynas, " stabilising global temperatures at four

degrees above current levels may not be possible. If we reach three

degrees, therefore, that leads inexorably to four degrees, which

leads inexorably to five. "

 

Chance of avoiding four degrees of global warming: poor if the rise

reaches three degrees and triggers a runaway thaw of permafrost.

 

BETWEEN FOUR AND FIVE DEGREES OF WARMING

 

We are looking now at an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have

vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to

desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising

seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. One temptation may

be to shift populations from dry areas to the newly thawed regions of

the far north, in Canada and Siberia. Even here, though, summers may

be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts; and there is

no guarantee that northern governments will admit southern refugees.

Lynas recalls James Lovelock's suspicion that Siberia and Canada

would be invaded by China and the US, each hammering another nail

into humanity's coffin. " Any armed conflict, particularly involving

nuclear weapons, would of course further increase the planetary

surface area uninhabitable for humans. "

 

When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago, following a

very sudden burst of global warming in the early Eocene, alligators

and other subtropical species were living high in the Arctic. What

had caused the climate to flip? Suspicion rests on methane hydrate –

" an ice-like combination of methane and water that forms under the

intense cold and pressure of the deep sea " , and which escapes with

explosive force when tapped. Evidence of a submarine landslide off

Florida, and of huge volcanic eruptions under the North Atlantic,

raises the possibility of trapped methane – a greenhouse gas 20 times

more potent than carbon dioxide – being released in a giant belch

that, as Lynas puts it, " pushed global temperatures through the roof " .

 

" Summer heatwaves scorched the vegetation out of continental Spain,

leaving a desert terrain which was heavily eroded by winter

rainstorms. Palm mangroves grew as far north as England and Belgium,

and the Arctic Ocean was so warm that Mediterranean algae thrived. In

short, it was a world much like the one we are heading into this

century. " Although the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere

during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, as scientists

call it, was more than today's, the rate of increase in the 21st

century may be 30 times faster. It may well be the fastest increase

the world has ever seen – faster even than the episodes that caused

catastrophic mass extinctions.

 

Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something

more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because

producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of

international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the few

remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.

 

" Where no refuge is available, " says Lynas, " civil war and a collapse

into racial or communal conflict seems the likely outcome. " Isolated

survivalism, however, may be as impracticable as dialling for room

service. " How many of us could really trap or kill enough game to

feed a family? Even if large numbers of people did successfully

manage to fan out into the countryside, wildlife populations would

quickly dwindle under the pressure. Supporting a hunter-gatherer

lifestyle takes 10 to 100 times the land per person that a settled

agricultural community needs. A large-scale resort to survivalism

would turn into a further disaster for biodiversity as hungry humans

killed and ate anything that moved. " Including, perhaps, each

other. " Invaders, " says Lynas, " do not take kindly to residents

denying them food. History suggests that if a stockpile is

discovered, the householder and his family may be tortured and

killed. Look for comparison to the experience of present-day Somalia,

Sudan or Burundi, where conflicts over scarce land and food are at

the root of lingering tribal wars and state collapse. "

 

Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the

rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea

bed.

 

BETWEEN FIVE AND SIX DEGREES OF WARMING

 

Although warming on this scale lies within the IPCC's officially

endorsed range of 21st-century possibilities, climate models have

little to say about what Lynas, echoing Dante, describes as " the

Sixth Circle of Hell " . To see the most recent climatic lookalike, we

have to turn the geological clock back between 144m and 65m years, to

the Cretaceous, which ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

There was an even closer fit at the end of the Permian, 251m years

ago, when global temperatures rose by – yes – six degrees, and 95% of

species were wiped out.

 

" That episode, " says Lynas, " was the worst ever endured by life on

Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and

desolate rock in space. " On land, the only winners were fungi that

flourished on dying trees and shrubs. At sea there were only

losers. " Warm water is a killer. Less oxygen can dissolve, so

conditions become stagnant and anoxic. Oxygen-breathing water-

dwellers – all the higher forms of life from plankton to sharks –

face suffocation. Warm water also expands, and sea levels rose by 20

metres. " The resulting " super-hurricanes " hitting the coasts would

have " triggered flash floods that no living thing could have

survived " .

 

There are aspects of the so-called " end-Permian extinction " that are

unlikely to recur – most importantly, the vast volcanic eruption in

Siberia that spread magma hundreds of metres thick over an area

bigger than western Europe and shot billions of tonnes of CO² into

the atmosphere. That is small comfort, however, for beneath the

oceans, another monster stirred – the same that would bring a

devastating end to the Palaeocene nearly 200m years later, and that

still lies in wait today. Methane hydrate.

 

Lynas describes what happens when warming water releases pent-up gas

from the sea bed. " First, a small disturbance drives a gas-saturated

parcel of water upwards. As it rises, bubbles begin to appear, as

dissolved gas fizzles out with reducing pressure – just as a bottle

of lemonade overflows if the top is taken off too quickly. These

bubbles make the parcel of water still more buoyant, accelerating its

rise through the water. As it surges upwards, reaching explosive

force, it drags surrounding water up with it. At the surface, water

is shot hundreds of metres into the air as the released gas blasts

into the atmosphere. Shockwaves propagate outwards in all directions,

triggering more eruptions nearby. "

 

The eruption is more than just another positive feedback in the

quickening process of global warming. Unlike CO², methane is

flammable. " Even in air-methane concentrations as low as 5%, " says

Lynas, " the mixture could ignite from lightning or some other spark

and send fireballs tearing across the sky. " The effect would be much

like that of the fuel-air explosives used by the US and Russian

armies – so-called " vacuum bombs " that ignite fuel droplets above a

target. According to the CIA, " Those near the ignition point are

obliterated. Those at the fringes are likely to suffer many internal

injuries, including burst eardrums, severe concussion, ruptured lungs

and internal organs, and possibly blindness. " Such tactical weapons,

however, are squibs when set against methane-air clouds from oceanic

eruptions. Scientists calculate that they could " destroy terrestrial

life almost entirely " (251m years ago, only one large land animal,

the pig-like lystrosaurus, survived). It has been estimated that a

large eruption in future could release energy equivalent to 108

megatonnes of TNT – 100,000 times more than the world's entire

stockpile of nuclear weapons. Not even Lynas, for all his scientific

propriety, can avoid the Hollywood ending. " It is not too difficult

to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions

near large population centres wiping out billions of people – perhaps

in days. Imagine a `fuel-air explosive' fireball racing towards a

city – London, say, or Tokyo – the blast wave spreading out from the

explosive centre with the speed and force of an atomic bomb.

Buildings are flattened, people are incinerated where they stand, or

left blind and deaf by the force of the explosion. Mix Hiroshima with

post-Katrina New Orleans to get some idea of what such a catastrophe

might look like: burnt survivors battling over food, wandering far

and wide from empty cities. "

 

Then would come hydrogen sulphide from the stagnant oceans. " It would

be a silent killer: imagine the scene at Bhopal following the Union

Carbide gas release in 1984, replayed first at coastal settlements,

then continental interiors across the world. At the same time, as the

ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun's rays burning

into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering

outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived. Dante's hell was a

place of judgment, where humanity was for ever punished for its sins.

With all the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people,

livestock and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree

world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of

burning fossil energy. "

 

RED ALERT

 

If global warming continues at the current rate, we could be facing

extinction. So what exactly is going to happen as the Earth heats up?

Here is a degree-by-degree guide

 

1c Increase

 

Ice-free sea absorbs more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh

water lost from a third of the world's surface; low-lying coastlines

flooded

 

2c Increase

 

Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed

plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of

all species face extinction

 

3c Increase

 

Carbon release from vegetation and soils speeds global warming;

death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities;

starvation in Africa

 

4c Increase

 

Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of

Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region

abandoned

 

5c Increase

 

Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from

both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live

like animals off the land

 

6c Increase

 

Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen

sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the

power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive

 

Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise

passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out

of control

 

To the end of the Earth - Six Degrees

http://www.marklynas.org/2007/3/15/to-the-end-of-the-earth-six-

degrees-in-the-sunday-times

[Guest guest]

Winter warmth breaks all records

BBC: Friday, 16 March 2007, 01:38 GMT

 

A lack of snow in Europe has affected business at ski resorts

Winter in the northern hemisphere this year has been the warmest

since records began more than 125 years ago, a US government agency

says.

 

The combined land and ocean surface temperature from December to

February was 0.72C (1.3F) above average.

 

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said El Nino, a

seasonal warming of parts of the Pacific Ocean, had also contributed

to the warmth.

 

But it did not see the high temperature as evidence of man-made

global warming.

 

The NOAA said that temperatures are continuing to rise by a fifth of

a degree every decade. The 10 warmest years on record have occurred

since 1995.

 

Weather experts predict that 2007 could be the hottest year on

record.

 

" Contributing factors were the long-term trend toward warmer

temperatures as well as a moderate El Nino in the Pacific, " said Jay

Lawrimore of NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.

 

He added: " We don't say this winter is evidence of the influence of

greenhouse gases. "

 

However, Mr Lawrimore said the research was part of the

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process, which

released a report last month that found global climate change " very

likely " has a human cause.

 

" We know as a part of that, the conclusions have been reached and the

warming trend is due in part to rises in greenhouse gas emissions, "

he said.

 

The IPCC panel concluded that it was at least 90% certain that human

emissions of greenhouse gases rather than natural variations are

warming the planet's surface.

 

They projected that temperatures would probably rise by between 1.8C

and 4C by the end of the century, though increases as small as 1.1C

(2F) or as large as 6.4C (11.5F) were possible.

 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6456897.stm

 

 

 

 

, " jagbir singh "

<adishakti_org wrote:

>

> , " jagbir singh "

> <adishakti_org@> wrote:

> >

> > Dear devotees of the Adi Shakti,

> >

> > Namskaar - i bow to the Holy Spirit that resides in you,

> >

> > i just came across this quote:

> >

> > " His Message was so great and so deep but He had disciples who

were

> > not prepared for the battle they had to fight. It's the same thing

> > that sometimes happen in Sahaja Yoga. "

> >

> > Shri Mataji Nirmala Devi

> > Give up your Antichrist Behaviour, Christmas Puja,

> > Ganapatipule, India — December 24, 1996

> >

> > That was more than a decade ago. Today it is obvious that Shri

> > Mataji's disciples are by far the worst any incarnation could ever

> > hope for. They are easily the most cowardly, hypocritical and un-

> > conscientious disciples in the history of spirituality. Never have

> > there been so many been collectively involved in the corruption of

> > their guru's teachings and suppression of the Message. It is

beyond

> > belief that tens and thousands of SYs can remain silent and

fearful

> > while leaders and their lackeys rape, pillage and plunder their

> > Guru, Her Teachings and Will before their very eyes.

> >

> > Jesus' Message was indeed great and deep but He had disciples who

> > were not prepared for the battle they had to fight. Shri Mataji's

> > Message of the Last Judgment and Resurrection is easily much

greater

> > as the very survival and salvation of humanity and Mother Earth is

> > at stake. Yet, even as this eleventh hour, the silence from the

vast

> > majority of Her disciples is deafening. It is unbelievable that

only

> > a handful of Her devotees, labeled as " rebellious non-SYs " by

WCASY

> > and SYs, are prepared for the battle they have to fight. There is

no

> > question that the Adi Shakti brought along those fully prepared to

> > fight to the end. It is indeed a great blessing and honor to serve

> > Her. No matter what the odds, She will eventually triumph.

> >

> > Jai Ganapathy,

> >

> >

> > jagbir

> >

>

>

> To the end of the Earth - Six Degrees

> Sunday Times 15 March 07

> SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE – COVER STORY:

>

> This is our future – famous cities are submerged, a third of the

> world is desert, the rest struggling for food and fresh water.

> Richard Girling investigates the reality behind the science of

> climate change.

>

> Mark Lynas rummages through his filing cabinet like a badger raking

> out his bedstraw, much of the stuff so crumpled that he might have

> been sleeping on it for years. Eventually he finds what he is

looking

> for – four sheets of printed paper, stapled with a page of notes.

>

> It is an article, dated November 2000, which he has clipped from the

> scientific journal Nature: " Acceleration of global warming due to

> carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model " . Even when they

> are mapping a short cut to Armageddon, scientists do not go in for

> red-top words like " crisis " . If you speak the language, however, you

> get the message – and the message, delivered by the UK Met Office's

> Hadley Centre for Climate Change, was cataclysmic.

>

> " There should have been panic on the streets, " says Lynas in his new

> book, Six Degrees, " people shouting from the rooftops, statements to

> parliament and 24-hour news coverage. "

>

> In layman's language, Hadley's message was that newly

> discovered " positive feedbacks " would make nonsense of accepted

> global-warming estimates. It would not be a gradual, linear increase

> with nature slowly succumbing to human attrition. Nature itself was

> about to turn nasty. Instead of absorbing and retaining greenhouse

> gases from the atmosphere, the figures suggested, it would suddenly

> spew them out again – billions of years' worth of carbon and

methane,

> incontinently released in blazing surges that would drown or

> incinerate whole cities. Ice would melt in torrents, and the Earth's

> essential green lung, the Amazon rainforest, could be moribund as

> early as 2050. A vicious spiral would have begun which would

threaten

> not just our way of life but the very existence of our own and every

> other species on Earth. Lynas's notes, still fixed to the report,

> have the dour humour of the gallows: " The end of the world is nigh,

> and it's already been published in Nature. "

>

> Next day's newspapers ignored the rescheduling of Armageddon – the

> headlines were all about faulty counts in the US presidential

> election, Gordon Brown's fiddling with National Insurance and Lord

> Falconer's refusal to resign over " the Dome fiasco " . Lynas, however,

> was energised like the hero of a disaster movie. Inconveniently, he

> had a book to write, but as soon as he'd finished it he pedalled

> from his Oxford home to the nearby Radcliffe Science Library. He did

> it every working day for a year: arriving at 10am and sitting till

> five in the afternoon, being served sheaves of paper by librarians

> who – even though professionally attuned to world-class standards of

> eccentricity – must have wondered at the power of the man's

obsession.

>

> Lynas wanted to see every scrap of paper the library held on global

> warming. Scanning at speed, he worked his way through two or three

> hundred every day, tens of thousands in all. Then as now, new pieces

> of research were emerging almost weekly as computer models were

> improved, new data collected and analysed. Then as now, there was no

> single, provable prediction of the future. Without knowing how much

> more fossil fuel will be burnt, the best science can offer is a

range

> of plausible " scenarios " . These vary so widely that the

> Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its Third

> Assessment report in 2001, was able to suggest only that global

> average temperatures by the end of the 21st century will have risen

> between 1.4 and 5.8C above the average for 1990 – an estimate which

> last month it pushed up to a possible maximum of 6.4C. It doesn't

> look much, but it could measure the difference between survival and

> the near-extinction of human life.

>

> On Lynas's laptop were six spreadsheets – one for each degree of

> warming from one to six. As he worked, he would slot each paper into

> the appropriate file. Many of them included predictions from climate

> models, but there was more: " Some of the most interesting came from

> palaeoclimate studies – investigations of how variations in

> temperature, calculated by analysis of soil strata and ancient ice-

> cores, affected the planet in prehistory. " It was these that would

> give some of the most terrifying insights into what the future might

> be like. Which parts of the globe would be abandoned first? What was

> the precise mechanism that, eventually, would wipe us out?

>

> The spreadsheets became the six core chapters of Lynas's book – a

> detailed, carefully annotated, degree-by-degree guide not just to

our

> grandchildren's futures but to our own.

>

> UP TO ONE DEGREE OF WARMING

>

> Even if greenhouse emissions stopped overnight – of which there is

> about as much chance as Tony Blair holidaying in Skegness – the

> concentrations already in the atmosphere would still mean a global

> rise of between 0.5 and 1C. A shift of a single degree is barely

> perceptible to human skin, but it's not human skin we're talking

> about. It's the planet; and an average increase of one degree across

> its entire surface means huge changes in climatic extremes.

>

> Six thousand years ago, when the world was one degree warmer than it

> is now, the American agricultural heartland around Nebraska was

> desert. It suffered a short reprise during the dust- bowl years of

> the 1930s, when the topsoil blew away and hundreds of thousands of

> refugees trailed through the dust to an uncertain welcome further

> west. The effect of one-degree warming, therefore, requires no great

> feat of imagination.

>

> " The western United States once again could suffer perennial

> droughts, far worse than the 1930s. Deserts will reappear

> particularly in Nebraska, but also in eastern Montana, Wyoming and

> Arizona, northern Texas and Oklahoma. As dust and sandstorms turn

day

> into night across thousands of miles of former prairie, farmsteads,

> roads and even entire towns will be engulfed by sand. "

>

> What's bad for America will be worse for poorer countries closer to

> the equator. The Hadley centre calculates that a one-degree increase

> would eliminate fresh water from a third of the world's land surface

> by 2100. Again we have seen what this means. Lynas describes an

> incident in the summer of 2005: " One tributary fell so low that

miles

> of exposed riverbank dried out into sand dunes, with winds whipping

> up thick sandstorms. As desperate villagers looked out onto baking

> mud instead of flowing water, the army was drafted in to ferry

> precious drinking water up the river – by helicopter, since most of

> the river was too low to be navigable by boat. " The river in

question

> was not some small, insignificant trickle in Sussex. It was the

> Amazon.

>

> While tropical lands teeter on the brink, the Arctic already may

have

> passed the point of no return. Warming near the pole is much faster

> than the global average, with the result that Arctic icecaps and

> glaciers have lost 400 cubic kilometres of ice in 40 years.

> Permafrost – ground that has lain frozen for thousands of years – is

> dissolving into mud and lakes, " destabilising whole areas as the

> ground collapses beneath buildings, roads and pipelines " . As polar

> bears and Inuits are being pushed off the top of the planet,

previous

> predictions are starting to look optimistic. " Earlier snowmelt, "

says

> Lynas, " means more summer heat goes into the air and ground rather

> than into melting snow, raising temperatures in a positive feedback

> effect. More dark shrubs and forest on formerly bleak tundra means

> still more heat is absorbed by vegetation. "

>

> Out at sea the pace is even faster. " Whilst snow-covered ice

reflects

> more than 80% of the sun's heat, the darker ocean absorbs up to 95%

> of solar radiation. Once sea ice begins to melt, in other words, the

> process becomes self-reinforcing. More ocean surface is revealed,

> absorbing solar heat, raising temperatures and making it unlikelier

> that ice will re-form next winter. The disappearance of 720,000

> square kilometres of supposedly permanent ice in a single year

> testifies to the rapidity of planetary change. If you have ever

> wondered what it will feel like when the Earth crosses a tipping

> point, savour the moment. "

>

> Mountains, too, are starting to come apart. In the Alps, most ground

> above 3,000 metres is stabilised by permafrost. In the summer of

> 2003, however, the melt zone climbed right up to 4,600 metres,

higher

> than the summit of the Matterhorn and nearly as high as Mont Blanc.

> With the glue of millennia melting away, rocks showered down and 50

> climbers died. As temperatures go on edging upwards, it won't just

be

> mountaineers who flee. " Whole towns and villages will be at risk, "

> says Lynas. " Some towns, like Pontresina in eastern Switzerland,

have

> already begun building bulwarks against landslides. "

>

> At the opposite end of the scale, low-lying atoll countries such as

> the Maldives will be preparing for extinction as sea levels rise,

and

> mainland coasts – in particular the eastern US and Gulf of Mexico,

> the Caribbean and Pacific islands and the Bay of Bengal – will be

hit

> by stronger and stronger hurricanes as the water warms. Hurricane

> Katrina, which in 2005 hit New Orleans with the combined impacts of

> earthquake and flood, was a nightmare precursor of what the future

> holds.

>

> " Most striking of all, " says Lynas, " was seeing how people behaved

> once the veneer of civilisation had been torn away. Most victims

were

> poor and black, left to fend for themselves as the police either

> joined in the looting or deserted the area. Four days into the

> crisis, survivors were packed into the city's Superdome, living next

> to overflowing toilets and rotting bodies as gangs of young men with

> guns seized the only food and water available. Perhaps the most

> memorable scene was a single military helicopter landing for just a

> few minutes, its crew flinging food parcels and water bottles out

> onto the ground before hurriedly taking off again as if from a war

> zone. In scenes more like a Third World refugee camp than an

American

> urban centre, young men fought for the water as pregnant women and

> the elderly looked on with nothing. Don't blame them for behaving

> like this, I thought. It's what happens when people are desperate. "

>

> Chance of avoiding one degree of global warming: zero.

>

> BETWEEN ONE AND TWO DEGREES OF WARMING

>

> At this level, expected within 40 years, the hot European summer of

> 2003 will be the annual norm. Anything that could be called a

> heatwave thereafter will be of Saharan intensity. Even in average

> years, people will die of heat stress.

>

> " The first symptoms, " says Lynas, " may be minor. A person will feel

> slightly nauseous, dizzy and irritable. It needn't be an emergency:

> an hour or so lying down in a cooler area, sipping water, will cure

> it. But in Paris, August 2003, there were no cooler areas,

especially

> for elderly people.

>

> " Once body temperature reaches 41C (104F) its thermoregulatory

system

> begins to break down. Sweating ceases and breathing becomes shallow

> and rapid. The pulse quickens, and the victim may lapse into a coma.

> Unless drastic measures are taken to reduce the body's core

> temperature, the brain is starved of oxygen and vital organs begin

to

> fail. Death will be only minutes away unless the emergency services

> can quickly get the victim into intensive care.

>

> " These emergency services failed to save more than 10,000 French in

> the summer of 2003. Mortuaries ran out of space as hundreds of dead

> bodies were brought in each night. " Across Europe as a whole, the

> heatwave is believed to have cost between 22,000 and 35,000 lives.

> Agriculture, too, was devastated. Farmers lost $12 billion worth of

> crops, and Portugal alone suffered $12 billion of forest-fire

damage.

> The flows of the River Po in Italy, Rhine in Germany and Loire in

> France all shrank to historic lows. Barges ran aground, and there

was

> not enough water for irrigation and hydroelectricity. Melt rates in

> the Alps, where some glaciers lost 10% of their mass, were not just

a

> record – they doubled the previous record of 1998. According to the

> Hadley centre, more than half the European summers by 2040 will be

> hotter than this. Extreme summers will take a much heavier toll of

> human life, with body counts likely to reach hundreds of thousands.

> Crops will bake in the fields, and forests will die off and burn.

> Even so, the short-term effects may not be the worst:

>

> " From the beech forests of northern Europe to the evergreen oaks of

> the Mediterranean, plant growth across the whole landmass in 2003

> slowed and then stopped. Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, the

> stressed plants began to emit it. Around half a billion tonnes of

> carbon was added to the atmosphere from European plants, equivalent

> to a twelfth of global emissions from fossil fuels. This is a

> positive feedback of critical importance, because it suggests that,

> as temperatures rise, carbon emissions from forests and soils will

> also rise. If these land-based emissions are sustained over long

> periods, global warming could spiral out of control. "

>

> In the two-degree world, nobody will think of taking Mediterranean

> holidays. " The movement of people from northern Europe to the

> Mediterranean is likely to reverse, switching eventually into a mass

> scramble as Saharan heatwaves sweep across the Med. " People

> everywhere will think twice about moving to the coast. When

> temperatures were last between 1 and 2C higher than they are now,

> 125,000 years ago, sea levels were five or six metres higher too.

All

> this " lost " water is in the polar ice that is now melting.

> Forecasters predict that the " tipping point " for Greenland won't

> arrive until average temperatures have risen by 2.7C. The snag is

> that Greenland is warming much faster than the rest of the world –

> 2.2 times the global average. " Divide one figure by the other, " says

> Lynas, " and the result should ring alarm bells across the world.

> Greenland will tip into irreversible melt once global temperatures

> rise past a mere 1.2C. " The ensuing sea-level rise will be far more

> than the half-metre that the IPCC has predicted for the end of the

> century. Scientists point out that sea levels at the end of the last

> ice age shot up by a metre every 20 years for four centuries, and

> that Greenland's ice, in the words of one glaciologist, is

> now " thinning like mad and flowing much faster than [it] ought to " .

> Its biggest outflow glacier, Jakobshavn Isbrae, has thinned by 15

> metres every year since 1997, and its speed of flow has doubled. " At

> this rate, " says Lynas, " the whole Greenland ice sheet would vanish

> within 140 years. Miami would disappear, as would most of Manhattan.

> Central London would be flooded. Bangkok, Bombay and Shanghai would

> lose most of their area. In all, half of humanity would have to move

> to higher ground. "

>

> Not only coastal communities will suffer. As mountains lose their

> glaciers, so people will lose their water supplies. The entire

Indian

> subcontinent will be fighting for survival. " As the glaciers

> disappear from all but the highest peaks, their runoff will cease to

> power the massive rivers that deliver vital freshwater to hundreds

of

> millions. Water shortages and famine will be the result,

> destabilising the entire region. And this time the epicentre of the

> disaster won't be India, Nepal or Bangladesh, but nuclear-armed

> Pakistan. "

>

> Everywhere, ecosystems will unravel as species either migrate or

fall

> out of synch with each other. By the time global temperatures reach

> two degrees of warming in 2050, more than a third of all living

> species will face extinction.

>

> Chance of avoiding two degrees of global warming: 93%, but only if

> emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced by 60% over the next 10

> years.

>

> BETWEEN TWO AND THREE DEGREES OF WARMING

>

> Up to this point, assuming that governments have planned carefully

> and farmers have converted to more appropriate crops, not too many

> people outside subtropical Africa need have starved. Beyond two

> degrees, however, preventing mass starvation will be as easy as

> halting the cycles of the moon. " First millions, then billions, of

> people will face an increasingly tough battle to survive, " says

Lynas.

>

> To find anything comparable we have to go back to the Pliocene –

last

> epoch of the Tertiary period, 3m years ago. There were no

continental

> glaciers in the northern hemisphere (trees grew in the Arctic), and

> sea levels were 25 metres higher than today's. In this kind of heat,

> the death of the Amazon is as inevitable as the melting of

Greenland.

> The paper spelling it out is the very one whose apocalyptic message

> so shocked Lynas in 2000. Scientists at the Hadley centre feared

that

> earlier climate models, which showed global warming as a

> straightforward linear progression, were too simplistic in their

> assumption that land and the oceans would remain inert as their

> temperatures rose. Correctly as it would turn out, they predicted

> positive feedback.

>

> " Warmer seas, " explains Lynas, " absorb less carbon dioxide, leaving

> more to accumulate in the atmosphere and intensify global warming.

On

> land, matters would be even worse. Huge amounts of carbon are stored

> in the soil, the half-rotted remains of dead vegetation. The

> generally accepted estimate is that the soil carbon reservoir

> contains some 1600 gigatonnes, more than double the entire carbon

> content of the atmosphere. As soil warms, bacteria accelerate the

> breakdown of this stored carbon, releasing it into the atmosphere. "

>

> The Hadley team factored this new feedback into their climate model,

> with results that fully explain Lynas's black-comic note to himself:

> The end of the world is nigh. A three-degree increase in global

> temperature – possible as early as 2050 – would throw the carbon

> cycle into reverse. " Instead of absorbing carbon dioxide, " says

> Lynas, " vegetation and soils start to release it. So much carbon

> pours into the atmosphere that it pumps up atmospheric

concentrations

> by 250 parts per million by 2100, boosting global warming by another

> 1.5C. In other words, the Hadley team had discovered that carbon-

> cycle feedbacks could tip the planet into runaway global warming by

> the middle of this century – much earlier than anyone had expected. "

>

> Confirmation came from the land itself. Climate models are routinely

> tested against historical data. In this case, scientists checked 25

> years' worth of soil samples from 6,000 sites across the UK. The

> result was another black joke. " As temperatures gradually rose, "

says

> Lynas, " the scientists found that huge amounts of carbon had been

> released naturally from the soils. They totted it all up and

> discovered – irony of ironies – that the 13m tonnes of carbon

British

> soils were emitting annually was enough to wipe out all the

country's

> efforts to comply with the Kyoto Protocol. " All soils will be

> affected by the rising heat, but none as badly as the

> Amazon's. " Catastrophe " is almost too small a word for the loss of

> the rainforest. Its 7m square kilometres produce 10% of the world's

> entire photosynthetic output from plants. Drought and heat will

> cripple it; fire will finish it off. In human terms, the effect on

> the planet will be like cutting off oxygen during an asthma attack.

>

> In the US and Australia, people will curse the climate-denying

> governments of Bush and Howard. No matter what later administrations

> may do, it will not be enough to keep the mercury down. With

> new " super-hurricanes " growing from the warming sea, Houston could

be

> destroyed by 2045, and Australia will be a death trap. " Farming and

> food production will tip into irreversible decline. Salt water will

> creep up the stricken rivers, poisoning ground water. Higher

> temperatures mean greater evaporation, further drying out vegetation

> and soils, and causing huge losses from reservoirs. " In state

> capitals, heat every year is likely to kill between 8,000 and 15,000

> mainly elderly people.

>

> It is all too easy to visualise what will happen in Africa. In

> Central America, too, tens of millions will have little to put on

> their tables. Even a moderate drought there in 2001 meant hundreds

of

> thousands had to rely on food aid. This won't be an option when

world

> supplies are stretched to breaking point (grain yields decline by

> 10% for every degree of heat above 30C, and at 40C they are zero).

> Nobody need look to the US, which will have problems of its own. As

> the mountains lose their snow, so cities and farms in the west will

> lose their water and dried-out forests and grasslands will perish at

> the first spark.

>

> The Indian subcontinent meanwhile will be choking on dust. " All of

> human history, " says Lynas, " shows that, given the choice between

> starving in situ and moving, people move. In the latter part of the

> century tens of millions of Pakistani citizens may be facing this

> choice. Pakistan may find itself joining the growing list of failed

> states, as civil administration collapses and armed gangs seize what

> little food is left. "

>

> As the land burns, so the sea will go on rising. Even by the most

> optimistic calculation, 80% of Arctic sea ice by now will be gone,

> and the rest will soon follow. New York will flood; the catastrophe

> that struck eastern England in 1953 will become an unremarkable

> regular event; and the map of the Netherlands will be torn up by the

> North Sea. Everywhere, starving people will be on the move – from

> Central America into Mexico and the US, and from Africa into Europe,

> where resurgent fascist parties will win votes by promising to keep

> them out.

>

> Chance of avoiding three degrees of global warming: poor if the rise

> reaches two degrees and triggers carbon-cycle feedbacks from soils

> and plants.

>

> BETWEEN THREE AND FOUR DEGREES OF WARMING

>

> The stream of refugees will now include those fleeing from coasts to

> safer interiors – millions at a time when storms hit. Where they

> persist, coastal cities will become fortified islands. The world

> economy, too, will be threadbare. " As direct losses, social

> instability and insurance payouts cascade through the system, the

> funds to support displaced people will be increasingly scarce. " Sea

> levels will be rampaging upwards – in this temperature range, both

> poles are certain to melt, causing an eventual rise of 50 metres. " I

> am not suggesting it would be instantaneous, " says Lynas. " In fact

it

> would take centuries, and probably millennia, to melt all of the

> Antarctic's ice. But it could yield sea-level rises of a metre or so

> every 20 years – far beyond our capacity to adapt. " Oxford would sit

> on one of many coastlines in a UK reduced to an archipelago of tiny

> islands.

>

> More immediately, China is on " a collision course with the planet " .

> By 2030, if its people are consuming at the same rate as Americans,

> they will eat two-thirds of the entire global harvest and burn 100m

> barrels of oil a day, or 125% of current world output. That prospect

> alone contains all the ingredients of catastrophe. But it's worse

> than that: " By the latter third of the 21st century, if global

> temperatures are more than three degrees higher than now, China's

> agricultural production will crash. It will face the task of feeding

> 1.5bn much richer people – 200m more than now – on two thirds of

> current supplies. " For people throughout much of the world,

> starvation will be a regular threat; but it will not be the only

one.

>

> " The summer will get longer still, as soaring temperatures reduce

> forests to tinderwood and cities to boiling morgues. Temperatures in

> the Home Counties could reach 45C – the sort of climate experienced

> today in Marrakech. Droughts will put the south-east of England on

> the global list of water-stressed areas, with farmers competing

> against cities for dwindling supplies from rivers and reservoirs.

>

> " Air-conditioning will be mandatory for anyone wanting to stay cool.

> This in turn will put ever more stress on energy systems, which

could

> pour more greenhouse gases into the air if coal and gas-fired power

> stations ramp up their output, hydroelectric sources dwindle and

> renewables fail to take up the slack. " The abandonment of the

> Mediterranean will send even more people north to " overcrowded

> refuges in the Baltic, Scandinavia and the British Isles " .

>

> Britain will have problems of its own. " As flood plains are more

> regularly inundated, a general retreat out of high risk areas is

> likely. Millions of people will lose their lifetime investments in

> houses that become uninsurable and therefore unsaleable. The

> Lancashire/Humber corridor is expected to be among the worst

affected

> regions, as are the Thames Valley, eastern Devon and towns around

the

> already flood-prone Severn estuary like Monmouth and Bristol. The

> entire English coast from the Isle of Wight to Middlesbrough is

> classified as at `very high' or `extreme' risk, as is the whole of

> Cardigan Bay in Wales. "

>

> One of the most dangerous of all feedbacks will now be kicking in –

> the runaway thaw of permafrost. Scientists believe at least 500

> billion tonnes of carbon are waiting to be released from the Arctic

> ice, though none yet has put a figure on what it will add to global

> warming. One degree? Two? Three? The pointers are ominous.

>

> " As with Amazon collapse and the carbon-cycle feedback in the three-

> degree world, " says Lynas, " stabilising global temperatures at four

> degrees above current levels may not be possible. If we reach three

> degrees, therefore, that leads inexorably to four degrees, which

> leads inexorably to five. "

>

> Chance of avoiding four degrees of global warming: poor if the rise

> reaches three degrees and triggers a runaway thaw of permafrost.

>

> BETWEEN FOUR AND FIVE DEGREES OF WARMING

>

> We are looking now at an entirely different planet. Ice sheets have

> vanished from both poles; rainforests have burnt up and turned to

> desert; the dry and lifeless Alps resemble the High Atlas; rising

> seas are scouring deep into continental interiors. One temptation

may

> be to shift populations from dry areas to the newly thawed regions

of

> the far north, in Canada and Siberia. Even here, though, summers may

> be too hot for crops to be grown away from the coasts; and there is

> no guarantee that northern governments will admit southern refugees.

> Lynas recalls James Lovelock's suspicion that Siberia and Canada

> would be invaded by China and the US, each hammering another nail

> into humanity's coffin. " Any armed conflict, particularly involving

> nuclear weapons, would of course further increase the planetary

> surface area uninhabitable for humans. "

>

> When temperatures were at a similar level 55m years ago, following a

> very sudden burst of global warming in the early Eocene, alligators

> and other subtropical species were living high in the Arctic. What

> had caused the climate to flip? Suspicion rests on methane hydrate –

> " an ice-like combination of methane and water that forms under the

> intense cold and pressure of the deep sea " , and which escapes with

> explosive force when tapped. Evidence of a submarine landslide off

> Florida, and of huge volcanic eruptions under the North Atlantic,

> raises the possibility of trapped methane – a greenhouse gas 20

times

> more potent than carbon dioxide – being released in a giant belch

> that, as Lynas puts it, " pushed global temperatures through the

roof " .

>

> " Summer heatwaves scorched the vegetation out of continental Spain,

> leaving a desert terrain which was heavily eroded by winter

> rainstorms. Palm mangroves grew as far north as England and Belgium,

> and the Arctic Ocean was so warm that Mediterranean algae thrived.

In

> short, it was a world much like the one we are heading into this

> century. " Although the total amount of carbon in the atmosphere

> during the Paleocene-Eocene thermal maximum, or PETM, as scientists

> call it, was more than today's, the rate of increase in the 21st

> century may be 30 times faster. It may well be the fastest increase

> the world has ever seen – faster even than the episodes that caused

> catastrophic mass extinctions.

>

> Globalism in the five-degree world will break down into something

> more like parochialism. Customers will have nothing to buy because

> producers will have nothing to sell. With no possibility of

> international aid, migrants will have to force their way into the

few

> remaining habitable enclaves and fight for survival.

>

> " Where no refuge is available, " says Lynas, " civil war and a

collapse

> into racial or communal conflict seems the likely outcome. " Isolated

> survivalism, however, may be as impracticable as dialling for room

> service. " How many of us could really trap or kill enough game to

> feed a family? Even if large numbers of people did successfully

> manage to fan out into the countryside, wildlife populations would

> quickly dwindle under the pressure. Supporting a hunter-gatherer

> lifestyle takes 10 to 100 times the land per person that a settled

> agricultural community needs. A large-scale resort to survivalism

> would turn into a further disaster for biodiversity as hungry humans

> killed and ate anything that moved. " Including, perhaps, each

> other. " Invaders, " says Lynas, " do not take kindly to residents

> denying them food. History suggests that if a stockpile is

> discovered, the householder and his family may be tortured and

> killed. Look for comparison to the experience of present-day

Somalia,

> Sudan or Burundi, where conflicts over scarce land and food are at

> the root of lingering tribal wars and state collapse. "

>

> Chance of avoiding five degrees of global warming: negligible if the

> rise reaches four degrees and releases trapped methane from the sea

> bed.

>

> BETWEEN FIVE AND SIX DEGREES OF WARMING

>

> Although warming on this scale lies within the IPCC's officially

> endorsed range of 21st-century possibilities, climate models have

> little to say about what Lynas, echoing Dante, describes as " the

> Sixth Circle of Hell " . To see the most recent climatic lookalike, we

> have to turn the geological clock back between 144m and 65m years,

to

> the Cretaceous, which ended with the extinction of the dinosaurs.

> There was an even closer fit at the end of the Permian, 251m years

> ago, when global temperatures rose by – yes – six degrees, and 95%

of

> species were wiped out.

>

> " That episode, " says Lynas, " was the worst ever endured by life on

> Earth, the closest the planet has come to ending up a dead and

> desolate rock in space. " On land, the only winners were fungi that

> flourished on dying trees and shrubs. At sea there were only

> losers. " Warm water is a killer. Less oxygen can dissolve, so

> conditions become stagnant and anoxic. Oxygen-breathing water-

> dwellers – all the higher forms of life from plankton to sharks –

> face suffocation. Warm water also expands, and sea levels rose by 20

> metres. " The resulting " super-hurricanes " hitting the coasts would

> have " triggered flash floods that no living thing could have

> survived " .

>

> There are aspects of the so-called " end-Permian extinction " that are

> unlikely to recur – most importantly, the vast volcanic eruption in

> Siberia that spread magma hundreds of metres thick over an area

> bigger than western Europe and shot billions of tonnes of CO² into

> the atmosphere. That is small comfort, however, for beneath the

> oceans, another monster stirred – the same that would bring a

> devastating end to the Palaeocene nearly 200m years later, and that

> still lies in wait today. Methane hydrate.

>

> Lynas describes what happens when warming water releases pent-up gas

> from the sea bed. " First, a small disturbance drives a gas-saturated

> parcel of water upwards. As it rises, bubbles begin to appear, as

> dissolved gas fizzles out with reducing pressure – just as a bottle

> of lemonade overflows if the top is taken off too quickly. These

> bubbles make the parcel of water still more buoyant, accelerating

its

> rise through the water. As it surges upwards, reaching explosive

> force, it drags surrounding water up with it. At the surface, water

> is shot hundreds of metres into the air as the released gas blasts

> into the atmosphere. Shockwaves propagate outwards in all

directions,

> triggering more eruptions nearby. "

>

> The eruption is more than just another positive feedback in the

> quickening process of global warming. Unlike CO², methane is

> flammable. " Even in air-methane concentrations as low as 5%, " says

> Lynas, " the mixture could ignite from lightning or some other spark

> and send fireballs tearing across the sky. " The effect would be much

> like that of the fuel-air explosives used by the US and Russian

> armies – so-called " vacuum bombs " that ignite fuel droplets above a

> target. According to the CIA, " Those near the ignition point are

> obliterated. Those at the fringes are likely to suffer many internal

> injuries, including burst eardrums, severe concussion, ruptured

lungs

> and internal organs, and possibly blindness. " Such tactical weapons,

> however, are squibs when set against methane-air clouds from oceanic

> eruptions. Scientists calculate that they could " destroy terrestrial

> life almost entirely " (251m years ago, only one large land animal,

> the pig-like lystrosaurus, survived). It has been estimated that a

> large eruption in future could release energy equivalent to 108

> megatonnes of TNT – 100,000 times more than the world's entire

> stockpile of nuclear weapons. Not even Lynas, for all his scientific

> propriety, can avoid the Hollywood ending. " It is not too difficult

> to imagine the ultimate nightmare, with oceanic methane eruptions

> near large population centres wiping out billions of people –

perhaps

> in days. Imagine a `fuel-air explosive' fireball racing towards a

> city – London, say, or Tokyo – the blast wave spreading out from the

> explosive centre with the speed and force of an atomic bomb.

> Buildings are flattened, people are incinerated where they stand, or

> left blind and deaf by the force of the explosion. Mix Hiroshima

with

> post-Katrina New Orleans to get some idea of what such a catastrophe

> might look like: burnt survivors battling over food, wandering far

> and wide from empty cities. "

>

> Then would come hydrogen sulphide from the stagnant oceans. " It

would

> be a silent killer: imagine the scene at Bhopal following the Union

> Carbide gas release in 1984, replayed first at coastal settlements,

> then continental interiors across the world. At the same time, as

the

> ozone layer came under assault, we would feel the sun's rays burning

> into our skin, and the first cell mutations would be triggering

> outbreaks of cancer among anyone who survived. Dante's hell was a

> place of judgment, where humanity was for ever punished for its

sins.

> With all the remaining forests burning, and the corpses of people,

> livestock and wildlife piling up in every continent, the six-degree

> world would be a harsh penalty indeed for the mundane crime of

> burning fossil energy. "

>

> RED ALERT

>

> If global warming continues at the current rate, we could be facing

> extinction. So what exactly is going to happen as the Earth heats

up?

> Here is a degree-by-degree guide

>

> 1c Increase

>

> Ice-free sea absorbs more heat and accelerates global warming; fresh

> water lost from a third of the world's surface; low-lying coastlines

> flooded

>

> 2c Increase

>

> Europeans dying of heatstroke; forests ravaged by fire; stressed

> plants beginning to emit carbon rather than absorbing it; a third of

> all species face extinction

>

> 3c Increase

>

> Carbon release from vegetation and soils speeds global warming;

> death of the Amazon rainforest; super-hurricanes hit coastal cities;

> starvation in Africa

>

> 4c Increase

>

> Runaway thaw of permafrost makes global warming unstoppable; much of

> Britain made uninhabitable by severe flooding; Mediterranean region

> abandoned

>

> 5c Increase

>

> Methane from ocean floor accelerates global warming; ice gone from

> both poles; humans migrate in search of food and try vainly to live

> like animals off the land

>

> 6c Increase

>

> Life on Earth ends with apocalyptic storms, flash floods, hydrogen

> sulphide gas and methane fireballs racing across the globe with the

> power of atomic bombs; only fungi survive

>

> Chance of avoiding six degrees of global warming: zero if the rise

> passes five degrees, by which time all feedbacks will be running out

> of control

>

> To the end of the Earth - Six Degrees

> http://www.marklynas.org/2007/3/15/to-the-end-of-the-earth-six-

> degrees-in-the-sunday-times

>