What The World Would Look Like If All The Ice Melted

(North America)


(South America)


(Africa)


(Europe)


(Asia)


(Australia)


(Antarctica)

If all of the ice in the world melted, sea levels would raise some 216 feet. But what exactly would that look like? And more specifically, what would such a worse-case scenario mean for the Earth’s population?

National Geographic has created a fascinating visual representation of this thought experiment and provided an analysis of how each continent would be affected by such a catastrophic change.

First off, this is not a blanket statement about climate change. As National Geographic notes, even scientists tracking the melting of ice around the world say it would take some 5,000 years for all the world’s ice to melt.

Still, it’s interesting to look at exactly what would happen if this scenario was taken to its most extreme conclusion.

As a result of the drastic rise in sea levels, the average temperature around the Earth would rise from 58 degrees to 80 degrees.

In North America, the entire Atlantic seaboard would vanish beneath the waves, including Florida and the Gulf Coast. Much of California would be underwater. Millions of Americans would be permanently dislocated from their homes to say nothing of the potentially insurmountable impact on natural wildlife.

And again, this scenario is only based on current population figures. Who knows what the Earth will look like in 5,000 years and how many people will be living here?

In South America, Buenos Aires, coastal Uruguay and most of Paraguay would be submerged.

Africa would technically be largely untouched but much of its would become inhabitable because of the increased temperature. In Egypt, Alexandria and Cairo would be “swamped” by flooding waters from the Mediterranean.

Many of Europe’s greatest landmarks would be destroyed: London would disappear, Venice, gone. The Netherlands and most of Denmark would also be entirely underwater.

In Asia, National Geographic says land currently inhabited by 600 million Chinese would be underwater, as would all of Bangladesh and coastal India.

As for Australia, they would gain a new sea in the center of the continent, but lose the coastal strip where more than 80 percent of the population lives.

And Antarctica? Virtually unrecognizable. After all, that’s where the vast majority of the Earth’s ice resides today.

The Environmental Protection Agency says that overall ice reduction will depend on several factors, including: The rate at which levels of greenhouse gas concentrations in our atmosphere continue to increase, how strongly features of the climate (e.g., temperature, precipitation, and sea level) respond to the expected increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and natural influences on climate (e.g., from volcanic activity and changes in the sun's intensity) and natural processes within the climate system (e.g., changes in ocean circulation patterns)

(Photo credit: Jason Treat, Matthew Twombly, Web Barr, Maggie Smith, NGM Staff; Art: Kees Veenenbos. Sources: Philippe Huybrechts, Vrije Universiteit Brussel; Richard S. Williams Jr., Woods Hole Research Center; James C. Zachos, University of California Santa Cruz; USGS, NOAA, ETOPO1 Bedrock; 1 Arc-Minute Global Relief Model)

By Eric Pfeiffer

Evacuate Earth

Courtesy Of "The National Geographic Channel"

The Future Says:

Dear mortals;
I know you are busy with your colourful lives;
I have no wish to waste the little time that remains
On arguments and heated debates;
But before I can appear
Please, close your eyes, sit still
And listen carefully
To what I am about to say;
I haven't happened yet, but I will.
I can't pretend it's going to be
Business as usual.
Things are going to change.
I'm going to be unrecognisable.
Please, don't open your eyes, not yet.
I'm not trying to frighten you.
All I ask is that you think of me
Not as a wish or a nightmare, but as a story
You have to tell yourselves -
Not with an ending
In which everyone lives happily ever after,
Or a B-movie apocalypse,
But maybe starting with the line
'To be continued...'
And see what happens next.
Remember this; I am not
Written in stone
But in time - 
So please don't shrug and say
What can we do?
It's too late, etc, etc, etc.
Dear mortals,
You are such strange creatures
With your greed and your kindness,
And your hearts like broken toys;
You carry fear with you everywhere
Like a tiny god
In its box of shadows.
You love festivals and music
And good food.
You lie to yourselves
Because you're afraid of the dark.
But the truth is: you are in my hands
And I am in yours.
We are in this together,
Face to face and eye to eye;
We're made for each other.
Now those of you who are still here;
Open your eyes and tell me what you see.” 
Poem by Nick Drake

Art Name: No-Ticia
By Delacruz-Art
Via: Deviant Art

The Security Implications Of The American Lifestyle

By Michael Shank,
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

The riots across the Muslim world give warning to something much direr than a diplomat's death, however deplorable the Benghazi tragedy. What we say, do, and eat has global implications, and on these three major security frontiers we must do better: Religious, food and climate security. Each of us has a role to play, and each of us is capable of making a difference.

On religious security, when are we going to prioritise co-existence over intentionally blatant expressions of free speech? This is for Europe's Dutch and Danish press and for America's Google and YouTube and the powers that can prevent "a clear and present danger" (the clause that allows companies to pull offensive content in order to avoid crises).

We must do better at respecting, not enabling the denigration of, religion, while preserving rights and liberties. All religions have experienced extensive persecution, some longer than others, some more devastating. Now, thanks to the internet, it is quite easy to offend and then defend the offence by citing freedom of expression. There must be a better way to balance this, and leaders must find a way to legislate responsible parameters lest this continues.

On food security, America's summer drought - which devastated food crops - highlights a trend that will become prevalent. We keep kicking this food security can down the road by reassuring ourselves that we have enough food supply and that it's merely a matter of distribution. The answer is sustainable agriculture: Ensuring that people have an opportunity to pursue it (see Africa's underdeveloped farmland) and that those who have access to agriculture use it sustainably.

To the first point, we have all but forgotten Africa, reneging on donor pledges, letting impoverished countries, like Somalia, get poorer unless they have a terrorism connection. Case in point: Libya. The invasion was all we cared about. We employed excessive force but little focus on post-Gaddafi institutions. We distributed weapons to opposition groups, but did little to develop necessary long-term democratic infrastructure for sustainable governance.

To the second point, the West doesn't do sustainability well. As meat-eaters, our diets are heavily energy- and- environmentally intensive. When a pound of meat consumes 10 to 15 times the water, land and grains that a pound of vegetables/legumes consumes, this is not smart or sustainable. We do not have ample amounts of water, land or grain to sustain meat diets. Resource wars are happening and will become more frequent as resources become scarcer, polluted or privatised.


On climate security, since 2000 we've witnessed the hottest nine years on record (2012 was the hottest ever), an unprecedented Arctic ice melt, and more extreme and erratic weather patterns. We are in radically different times and yet few seem ready to do things radically different. With Americans emitting some of highest carbon per capita, at 20 to 25 tonnes of carbon per year, and the rest - notably China and India - playing catch-up on western-style consumerism, we will have a serious problem on our hands in the next decade.

While China and India's per capita carbon contribution is only at 5 tonnes and 1 tonne, respectively, their populations have the potential to triple the damage that America did. Before adaptation becomes our recourse, producing galactic mirrors that reflect sun rays and cloud-producing machines that cool the planet, we must find ways to do more with less, to conserve and to be cognizant of the security implications of lifestyle choices.

This is not a moral imperative; this is a security situation. All of these are security situations, from religion to food to climate, and it is time we do something about it. Collaborating on the real and lasting security quagmires of this century is exactly how we should be spending our time and energy. We must think at least 50 to 100 years out with everything we do today, because if we don't, there won't be a tomorrow to write or worry about.

Michael Shank is an adjunct professor at George Mason University's School for Conflict Analysis and Resolution, on the National Peace Academy's board of directors, and a senior fellow at the French American Global Forum.

Animal Cruelty

Post by "CavalierZee"



Animals must be off the menu because tonight they are screaming in terror in the slaughterhouse, in crates, and cages. Vile ignoble gulags of despair.


I heard the screams of my dying father as his body was ravaged by the cancer that killed him. And I realised I had heard these screams before.


In the slaughterhouse, eyes stabbed out and tendons slashed, on the cattle ships to the Middle East and the dying mother whale as a Japanese harpoon explodes in her brain as she calls out to her calf.

Earth Has Less Water Than You Think

All the water on Earth would fit into a sphere 860 miles (1,385 km) wide. (Jack Cook/WHOI/USGS) 

By JASON MAJOR
On MAY 8, 2012
Courtesy Of "Universe Today"

If you were to take all of the water on Earth — all of the fresh water, sea water, ground water, water vapor and water inside our bodies — take all of it and somehow collect it into a single, giant sphere of liquid, how big do you think it would be? 

According to the U. S. Geological Survey, it would make a ball 860 miles (1,385 km) in diameter, about as wide edge-to-edge as the distance between Salt Lake City to Topeka, Kansas. That’s it. Take all the water on Earth and you’d have a blue sphere less than a third the size of the Moon.

Feeling a little thirsty?

And this takes into consideration all the Earth’s water… even the stuff humans can’t drink or directly access, like salt water, water vapor in the atmosphere and the water locked up in the ice caps. In fact, if you were to take into consideration only the fresh water on Earth (which is 2.5% of the total) you’d get a much smaller sphere… less than 100 miles (160 km) across.

Even though we think of reservoirs, lakes and rivers when we picture Earth’s fresh water supply, in reality most of it is beneath the surface — up to 2 million cubic miles (8.4 million cubic km) of Earth’s available fresh water is underground. But the vast majority of it — over 7 million cubic miles (29.2 cubic km) is in the ice sheets that cover Antarctica and Greenland.

Of course, the illustration above (made by Jack Cook at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution) belies the real size and mass of such a sphere of pure liquid water. The total amount of water contained within would still be quite impressive — over 332.5 million cubic miles (1,386 cubic km)! (A single cubic mile of water equals 1.1 trillion gallons.) Still, people tend to be surprised at the size of such a hypothetical sphere compared with our planet as a whole, especially when they’ve become used to the description of Earth as a “watery world”.

Makes one a little less apt to take it for granted.

Read more on the USGS site here, and check out some facts on reducing your water usage here.

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

– from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Welcome To The Anthropocene

Posted by "CavalierZee"



A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes. 

The film was commissioned by the Planet Under Pressure conference, London 26-29 March, a major international conference focusing on solutions.planetunderpressure2012.net

The Anthropocene is a recent and informal geologic chronological term that serves to mark the evidence and extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth's ecosystems. 

The term was coined by ecologist Eugene F. Stoermer but has been widely popularized by the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen, who regards the influence of human behavior on the Earth's atmosphere in recent centuries as so significant as to constitute a new geological era for its lithosphere.

In 2008 a proposal was presented to the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London to make the Anthropocene a formal unit of geological time.

A large majority of that Stratigraphy Commission decided the proposal had merit and should therefore be examined further. Steps are being taken by independent working groups of scientists from various geological societies to determine if the Anthropocene will be formally accepted into the Geological Time Scale.

Many scientists are now using the term and the Geological Society of America titled its 2011 annual meeting: Archean to Anthropocene: The past is the key to the future. 

The Anthropocene has no precise start date, but based on atmospheric evidence may be considered to start with the Industrial Revolution (late 18th century). Other scientists link it to earlier events, such as the rise of agriculture.

Evidence of relative human impact such as the growing human influence on land use, ecosystems, biodiversity and species extinction is controversial, some scientists believe the human impact has significantly changed (or halted) the growth of biodiversity.

The Anthropocene may have begun as early as 14,000 to 15,000 years before present, based on lithospheric evidence; this has led other scientists to suggest that "the onset of the Anthropocene should be extended back many thousand years"; this would be closely synchronous with the current term, Holocene. 


[Info via: WikiPedia]

Primitive Us

Posted by "Sayf Maslul"



Here We Stand
In the Middle
Of this New World
With our Primitive Brain
Attuned to the Simple Cave Life
With Terrific Forces at our Disposal
Which we are Clever enough to Release
But whose Consequences
We Cannot Comprehend

A Battle To 'Carve Up' The Arctic

Energy experts estimate that the Arctic contains more than one fifth of the world's petroleum [GALLO/GETTY]


Resource Wars Are Possible As Global Warming Melts Polar Ice - Opening New Areas To Oil Exploitation, Cables Indicate.

By Chris Arsenault
Last Modified: 21 May 2011 15:27
Courtesy Of "Al-Jazeera"

It is considered the final frontier for oil and gas exploitation, and secret US embassy cables published by WikiLeaks confirm that nations are battling to "carve up" the Arctic's vast resources.

"The twenty-first century will see a fight for resources," Russian Ambassador to NATO Dmitry Rogozin was quoted as saying in a 2010 cable. "Russia should not be defeated in this fight."

Along with exposing an estimated 22 per cent of the world's oil, ice melting due to global warming will open new shipping lanes, the arteries of global commerce, which nations are competing to control. And Russia certainly is not the only country eyeing the frozen prize.

Per Stig Moller, then Danish foreign minister, mused in a 2009 cable that "new shipping routes and natural resource discoveries would eventually place the region at the centre of world politics".

Canada, the US, Russia, Norway, Denmark, and perhaps even China, have competing claims to the Arctic, a region about the size of Africa, comprising some six per cent of the Earth's surface.

'Resource Wars'

"The WikiLeaks cables show us realpolitik in its rarest form," says Paul Wapner, director of the global environmental politics programme at American University in Washington. "Diplomats continue to think of this as a zero sum world. When they see exploitable resources, all things being equal, they are going to approach them through a competitive nation state system."

The cables come to light at a time when academics and activists fear resource scarcity, particularly over dwindling oil and drinking water supplies, could lead to new international conflicts.

Sir David King, the UK government's former chief scientific adviser, called the invasion of Iraq "the first of [this century's] resource wars", warning that "powerful nations will secure resources for their own people at the expense of others".

In 2007, Russia planted its flag 4,000 metres below the Arctic Ocean, in an attempt to claim that its continental shelf, the geological formation by which claims are measured, extends far into the frozen zone.
"Behind Russia's policy are two potential benefits accruing from global warming, the prospect for an [even seasonally] ice-free shipping route from Europe to Asia, and the estimated oil and gas wealth hidden beneath the Arctic sea floor," noted a 2009 cable articulating US beliefs.

Presently, the Russians are far ahead of the US and other Arctic countries to take advantage of what will happen offshore, says Bruce Forbes, a research professor at the Arctic Centre at the University of Lapland in Finland. "The cables confirm what we as scientists already know; [global warming means] the Arctic is not just this hinterland, as it is portrayed in the mainstream media."

In its 2010 Quadrennial Defence Review report, the Pentagon stated: "Climate change and energy are two issues that will play a significant role in shaping the future security environment."

Global Warning

If humans do not drastically reduce their fossil fuel consumption, and current trends continue, the world is heading for a significant temperature increase, melting polar ice caps and causing sea levels to rise between 0.9 and 1.6 meters this century, according to a study from the Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Programme released in early May.

The idea that global warming will melt polar icecaps and allow for new petroleum exploitation in the far north represents a terrible irony, says Andrea Harden-Donahue, a researcher with the Council of Canadians, a social justice organisation.

"Climate change is making these resources easier to exploit, while burning these resources will only contribute to more climate change," she says.

"In Canada, we have seen a number of well-known actors, including BP and Chevron, exploring for oil and gas in the Beaufort Sea. In the US, Shell is consistently trying to get access to resources off the coast of Alaska; BP hopes to develop off the coast of Russia and Cairn energy have already been awarded licenses in Greenland and they are likely to start [drilling] this year.

"If [these companies] are allowed to move forward, I don't think it is unreasonable that we would see a scramble for these resources."

A 2008 cable quotes Russian Navy head Admiral Vladimir Vysotsky as saying: "While in the Arctic there is peace and stability, however, one cannot exclude that in the future there will be a redistribution of power, up to armed intervention."

Partisan Politics

But verbose rhetoric about conflict could be linked to politicians who want to support the military-industrial complex and boost their own stature, rather than actual fears of impending violence, cables suggest.

Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Stoere is referred to in a 2009 cable, describing "how, during his March 2009 visit to Moscow, he thanked [Russian Foreign Minister Sergei] Lavrov for making it so much easier for him to justify the Joint Strike Fighter purchase to the Norwegian public, given Russia's regular military flights up and down Norway's coast".

The programme to develop the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is expected to cost the US and its allies more than $380 billion, meaning it is likely the most expensive military project in history - and politicians seem to feel the need to justify such a massive outlay of resources to sceptical electorates.


Environmentalists worry that oil exploitation in the Arctic will damage fragile ecosystems [GALLO/GETTY]




Canadian politicians, including recently re-elected Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper, are also capitalising on fears of northern conflict to buttress narrow partisan agendas.

Harper has made several high profile visits to the far north, boasting that: "From Afghanistan to the Arctic, from the coast of Somalia to the shores of Nootka Sound [on Vancouver island] we will be able to see what the bad guys are up to," with new military satellites.

Commenting on Harper's rhetoric in a 2010 cable, US diplomats note that: "The persistent high public profile which this government has accorded 'Northern Issues' and the Arctic is, however, unprecedented and reflects the PM's views that 'the North has never been more important to our country' - although one could perhaps paraphrase to state 'the North has never been more important to our Party'."

While politicians pound their chests over resource claims, Prof Forbes says the risk of actual conflict is minimal, because there are international institutions and treaties governing competing claims.

The Arctic Council, composed of eight Arctic nations, is the main discussion forum for issues related to the far north and the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, which the US has not signed, is supposed to govern resource claims in the region.

During a meeting of the Arctic Council held on May 12 in Greenland, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that US ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention was "way overdue".

Clinton's desire to change US policy to sign the convention may have more to do with resource battles than respect for international institutions.

"If you stay out [of the convention]" then-Danish foreign minister Moller is quoted as saying in 2009 cables, "then the rest of us will have more to carve up in the Arctic".

The US position of not ratifying the convention means it cannot put forward a formal claim to the seabed directly north of Alaska, says Oran Young, a professor of environmental science at the University of California.

"If I knew why the US hasn't signed, I'd be happy," Young says, speculating that lobbyists for the mining industry and some senators who display "knee jerk negativism to the UN in general" were driving the decision.

'Doomsday Scenario'

In a 1987 speech, Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the former USSR, described the "threatening character" of NATO in the far north. Today, NATO's role in the Arctic is unclear.

"There is no reason for NATO to have a strong Arctic profile," says Timo Koivurova, a visiting professor specialising in northern issues at the University of New South Wales in Australia. "All the Arctic Ocean coastal states have behaved exactly as the Law of the Sea dictates."

But plenty of other people, from scholars to diplomats and military officials, do not entirely share Koivurova's optimistic view.

"The very best case scenario [for peace in the arctic] is that we move beyond fossil fuels," says American University's Paul Wapner. "The best case scenario is that we have cooperative institutions - with representatives of indigenous people - who use peaceful and cooperative means to ensure fair access to these resources.

"The doomsday would be competitive resource wars. As climate change gets worse, people will be pushed to get more resources to run their air conditioners and so forth. My prediction is that we are still going to be addicted to oil [when the main icecaps melt] and these resources are going to be extracted by the most powerful lot - which would include Russia, the US and China."