eTwinning project
'' Building resilience to disasters and climate change ''
2020
Positive sides of Climate Change !?
What do YOU think?
I have compiled some useful information for and against climate change. Ruzan Ad.
Agriculture
Plant growth entirely depens on both CO2 and steady water supplies. Climate change is likely to disrupt those supplies through floods and droughts. It has been suggested that higher latitudes – Siberia, for example – may become productive due to global warming, but the soil in Arctic and bordering territories is very poor, and the amount of sunlight reaching the ground in summer will not change because it is governed by the tilt of the earth.
Agriculture can also be disrupted by wildfires and changes in seasonal periodicity, which is already taking place, and changes to grasslands and water supplies could impact grazing and welfare of domestic livestock.
Increased warming may also have a greater effect on countries whose climate is already near or at a temperature limit over which yields reduce or crops fail – in the tropics or sub-Sahara, for example.
Health
On one side, warmer winters would mean fewer deaths, particularly among vulnerable groups like the aged.
However, the same groups are also vulnerable to additional heat, and deaths attributable to heatwaves are expected to be approximately five times as great as winter deaths prevented.
It is widely believed that warmer climate will encourage migration of disease-bearing insects like mosquitoes and malaria is already appearing in places it hasn’t been seen before.
Migration of viruses and microbes can also be triggered with climate change.
Melting Glaciers
The effects of glaciers melting are largely concerning:
The principle impact is that many millions of people (one-seventh of the world’s population) depend on fresh water supplied each year by natural spring melt and regrowth cycles. Because of this the water supplies like drinking water, agriculture – may fail.
Sea Level Rise
Many parts of the world are low-lying and will be severely affected by modest sea rises.
Rice paddies are being flooded with salt water, which destroys the crops.
Seawater is contaminating rivers as it mixes with fresh water and aquifers are becoming polluted. Given that the IPCC did not include melt-water from the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps due to uncertainties at that time, estimates of sea-level rise are feared to considerably underestimate the scale of the problem.
There are no proposed benefits to sea-level rise.
Environmental
Positive effects of climate change may include:
*greener rainforests
*enhanced plant growth in the Amazon
*increased vegitation in northern latitudes
*possible increases in plankton biomass in some parts of the ocean.
Negative responses may include further growth of oxygen poor ocean zones, contamination or exhaustion of fresh water, increased incidence of natural fires, extensive vegetation die-off due to droughts, increased risk of coral extinction, decline in global photoplankton, changes in migration patterns of birds and animals, changes in seasonal periodicity, disruption to food chains and species loss.
