Mankind is the 'Earth's biggest threat'

By Roger Highfield Science Editor
Last Updated: 3:18AM BST 15 May 2008


Researchers who analysed 30,000 academic studies dating back to 1970 said man was responsible for changes that ranged from the loss of ice sheets to the collapse in numbers of many species of wildlife.

"Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems," said Cynthia Rosenzweig, at the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The effects on living things include the earlier appearance of leaves on trees and plants; the movement of animals and birds to more northerly latitudes and to higher altitudes in the northern hemisphere; rapid advances in flowering time and earlier egg-laying in Britain; and changes in bird migrations in Europe, North America and Australia.

On a planetary scale the changes include the melting of glaciers on all continents; earlier spring river run-off; and the warming of oceans, lakes and rivers.

The study's conclusions go further than the most recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which concluded last year that man-made climate change was "likely" to have had a discernible effect on the planet.

It says natural climate variations cannot explain the changes to the Earth's natural systems.

In the study, published in the journal Nature, Miss Rosenzweig and researchers from 10 institutions across the world analysed data from published papers on 829 physical systems – such as glaciers and ice sheets – and 28,800 plant and animal systems. They produced a picture of the changes to each continent. The changes were most marked in North America, Asia and Europe but mainly because far more studies had been carried out there.

more:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1955916/Mankind-is-the-Earths-biggest-threat.html

http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1911taylor.html

"In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first."

Humans are just expendable and interchangeable parts of the machine today. Every species impacts the environment, no matter how big or small. They just don't have a global network of ever increasing efficient mass production turning life into digits on a bank account screen.

that human activity has affected the earth both physically and biologically more than any other single identifiable process in the last couple of thousand years. The 10,000 year population/agriculture race has been responsible for most of it, with fossil fuel use coming on strong in the last two hundred years.

"The Earth" will go on without us, but there's no denying we have changed its trajectory.