Welcome To Festive Earth Society

Climate change is with us. A decade ago, it was conjecture. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canada's Inuit see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost. The shantytown dwellers of Latin America and Southern Asia see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves.

Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores. These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more. The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years - a period when natural influences on global temperatures, such as solar cycles and volcanoes should have cooled us down. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.

Climatologists reporting for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) say we are seeing global warming caused by human activities and there are growing fears of feedbacks that will accelerate this warming.

The UNEP Year Book 2008 (formerly the GEO Year Book) is the fifth annual report on the changing environment produced by the United Nations Environment Programme in collaboration with many world environmental experts.

The UNEP Year Book 2008 highlights the increasing complexity and interconnections of climate change, ecosystem integrity, human well-being, and economic development. It examines the emergence and influence of economic mechanisms and market driven approaches for addressing environmental degradation, and it describes recent research findings and policy decisions that affect our awareness of and response to changes in our global climate and environment.

There are a number of natural factors responsible for climate change. Some of the more prominent ones are continental drift, volcanoes, ocean currents, the earth's tilt, and comets and meteorites. Let's look at them in a little detail.

Continental drift
You may have noticed something peculiar about South America and Africa on a map of the world - don't they seem to fit into each other like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle?
About 200 million years ago they were joined together! Scientists believe that back then, the earth was not as we see it today, but the continents were all part of one large landmass. Proof of this comes from the similarity between plant and animal fossils and broad belts of rocks found on the eastern coastline of South America and western coastline of Africa, which are now widely separated by the Atlantic Ocean. The discovery of fossils of tropical plants (in the form of coal deposits) in Antarctica has led to the conclusion that this frozen land at some time in the past, must have been situated closer to the equator, where the climate was tropical, with swamps and plenty of lush vegetation.

Another effect of air pollution is acid rain. The phenomenon occurs when sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides from the burning of fossil fuels such as, petrol, diesel, and coal combine with water vapour in the atmosphere and fall as rain, snow or fog. These gases can also be emitted from natural sources like volcanoes. Acid rain causes extensive damage to water, forest, soil resources and even human health. Many lakes and streams have been contaminated and this has led to the disappearance of some species of fish in Europe,