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The dramatic consequences of climate change

There would seem to be hardly a spot on earth which isn't experiencing the effects of climate change.   And the predictions are that if we all don't so something, like immediately, things are going to get worse.

"The world is hot.

The world is melting.

The world is burning.

This is what climate change looks like.

According to new data released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) on Tuesday, April 2014 tied the one in 2010 as the hottest April since records began.

Also this week, new studies and surveys of scientific findings focused on climate change show that from historic flooding in the Balkans, to 'unprecedented' wildfires in southern California, melting ice sheets in Antarctica to deteriorating glaciers in Greenland—the fast-pace of global warming is pushing the planet further and further into a loop of climate extremes.

It's what author and climate campaigner Bill McKibben describes as the planet "Eaarth" in his book of the same name when he wrote: "Our old familiar globe is suddenly melting, drying, acidifying, flooding, and burning in ways that no human has ever seen. We've created, in very short order, a new planet, still recognizable but fundamentally different. We may as well call it Eaarth."

On Monday of this week, the Associated Press reported how "in the past three months, at least three different studies and reports have warned that wildfires are getting bigger, that man-made climate change is to blame, and it's only going to get worse with more fires starting earlier in the year."

According to AP:

Since 1984, the area burned by the West's largest wildfires — those of more than 1,000 acres — have increased by about 87,700 acres a year, according to an April study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. And the areas where fire has been increasing the most are areas where drought has been worsening and "that certainly points to climate being a major contributor," study main author Philip Dennison of the University of Utah said Friday.

The top five years with the most acres burned have all happened in the last decade, according to federal records. From 2010-2013, about 6.4 million acres a year burned on average; in the 1980s it was 2.9 million acres a year.


Meanwhile, what doesn't easily burn—namely the world's polar ice sheets and glaciers—are melting at alarming rates due to what experts criticize as modern society's fossil fuel gluttony."

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