SoRo class

"Even as Europe wrestles over how to absorb the migrant tide, experts warn that the flood is likely to get worse as climate change becomes a driving factor." http://wp.me/P2dv5Z-1YS ;

"It can be difficult to conceive of the long process that's led the world to having its nine hottest years on record all after 2000. That's why it's nice that NASA has generated this nifty animation, which shows temperature abnormalities for every month of the past 13 decades. Watch reddish warm zones spread over the globe as time rolls past, like a virulent fever covering the body of a sick host."

Scientists have issued a new warning to the world’s coastal megacities that the threat from subsiding land is a more immediate problem than rising sea levels caused by global warming.

A new paper from the Deltares Research Institute in the Netherlands published in April identified regions of the globe where the ground level is falling 10 times faster than water levels are rising - with human activity often to blame.

In Jakarta, Indonesia’s largest city, the population has grown from around half a million in the 1930s to just under 10 million today, with heavily populated areas dropping by as much as six and a half feet as groundwater is pumped up from the Earth to drink.

The same practice led to Tokyo’s ground level falling by two meters before new restrictions were introduced, and in Venice, this sort of extraction has only compounded the effects of natural subsidence caused by long-term geological processes.

Tags: coastal, climate change, urban, megacities, water, environment, urban ecology.