'Unseen' News and Views – By Baher Kamal & The Like
– When UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres addressed the 193-member General Assembly last December, he focused on the smoldering climate crisis– pointing out that the last five years have been the hottest ever recorded.
Ice caps are melting, he said, In Greenland alone, 179 billion tonnes of ice melted in July. Permafrost in the Arctic is thawing 70 years ahead of projections. Antarctica is melting three times as fast as a decade ago.
“Ocean levels are rising quicker than expected, putting some of our biggest and most economically important cities at risk.
– In an annual ritual early in the year, most major economic organizations have released forecasts for the global economy in 2020. Incredibly, almost as a reminder of where financial power resides in this day and age, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) released its forecasts at the World Economic Forum’s 50th annual meeting in Davos.
Anis Chowdhury
Although the IMF revised its global economic growth prognosis slightly downwards from its October 2019 forecast, it still offers the most optimistic prospect of 3.3% growth in 2020.
The World Bank’s forecast of 2.5% – identical to the United Nations (UN) estimate – is the lowest, with the OECD’s at 2.9%.
(UN News)* — Many animals – including birds, fish and mammals – migrate along set routes in search of food or breeding grounds. How best to protect them in a rapidly changing world is the focus of a major UN wildlife meeting which opened in Gandhinagar, India, on Monday [17 February 2020].
Gandhinagar, 18 February 2020 (CMS)* – a short film titled „You, come home when I am big“ depicting the hazardous first moments in the lives of turtle hatchlings has been produced to coincide with the CMS COP13.
A short film titled „You, come home when I am big“ depicts the hazardous first moments in the lives of turtle hatchlings
Gandhinagar (UN Environment)* – The Thirteenth Meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals (CMS COP13) opened in Gandhinagar, India on 17 February 2020.
The Conference kicks off ‘the super year’ for nature, which will include a UN Summit in September and culminate in the UN Biodiversity Conference at the end of 2020, when a new global biodiversity strategy for the next decade will be adopted – the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework.
Our Addiction to Fossil Fuels Can Kill Us
The Industrial Revolution marked the start of a massive human use of fossil fuels. The stored energy from several hundred million years of plant growth began to be used at roughly a million times the rate at which it had been formed.
John Scales Avery
The effect on human society was like that of a narcotic. There was a euphoric (and totally unsustainable) surge of growth of both population and industrial production.
Meanwhile, the carbon released by the burning of fossil fuels began to duplicate the conditions that lead to the 5 geologically-observed mass extinction events during each of which more than half of all living species disappeared forever.
We all know that drug addicts can die from their addiction.
The world’s scientists are unanimous in telling us that unless we take immediate action to kick the habit, our addiction to fossil fuels will kill human society and much of the biosphere.
– When President Saddam Hussein ran one of the world’s most authoritarian regimes in the militarily-volatile Middle East during 1979-2003, US newspapers routinely described him as “the strongman of Iraq” — as most journalists rightly view dictators worldwide.
Credit: Iraqi News
But one of his political aides, described as “Saddam’s right-hand man” (what if Saddam was left-handed?), took issue with a visiting US journalist when he rather hilariously challenged the description.
14 February 2020 (UN Environment)* — Data from satellite sources assembled by the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) World Environment Situation Room confirms that the wildfires in Australia in the last two months of 2019 and the first six weeks of 2020 were far from normal.
The Orroral Valley Fire viewed from Tuggeranong in southern Canberra |Nick-D | CC BY-SA 4.0
2019 was the second hottest year on record since 1880, and Australia recorded its warmest temperatures ever in December 2019.
