Posted on 06/15/2004 6:17:32 PM PDT by wagglebee
UNITED NATIONS (AP) - The world is turning to dust, with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year and the problem threatening to send millions of people fleeing to greener countries, the United Nations says.
One-third of the Earth's surface is at risk, driving people into cities and destroying agriculture in vast swaths of Africa. Thirty-one percent of Spain is threatened, while China has lost 36,000 square miles to desert - an area the size of Indiana - since the 1950s.
This week the United Nations marks the 10th anniversary of the Convention to Combat Desertification, a plan aimed at stopping the phenomenon. Despite the efforts, the trend seems to be picking up speed - doubling its pace since the 1970s.
"It's a creeping catastrophe," said Michel Smitall, a spokesman for the U.N. secretariat that oversees the 1994 accord. "Entire parts of the world might become uninhabitable."
Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame. But global warming is taking its toll, too.
The United Nations is holding a ceremony in Bonn, Germany, on Thursday to mark World Day to Combat Desertification, and will hold a meeting in Brazil this month to take stock of the problem.
The warning comes as a controversial movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" is whipping up interest in climate change, and as rivers and lakes dry up in the American West, giving Americans a taste of what's to come elsewhere.
The United Nations says:
- From the mid-1990s to 2000, 1,374 square miles have turned into deserts each year - an area about the size of Rhode Island. That's up from 840 square miles in the 1980s, and 624 square miles during the 1970s.
- By 2025, two-thirds of arable land in Africa will disappear, along with one-third of Asia's and one-fifth of South America's.
- Some 135 million people - equivalent to the populations of France and Germany combined - are at risk of being displaced.
Most at risk are dry regions on the edges of deserts - places like sub-Saharan Africa or the Gobi Desert in China, where people are already struggling to eke out a living from the land.
As populations expand, those regions have become more stressed. Trees are cut for firewood, grasslands are overgrazed, fields are over-farmed and lose their nutrients, water becomes scarcer and dirtier.
Technology can make the problem worse. In parts of Australia, irrigation systems are pumping up salty water and slowly poisoning farms. In Saudi Arabia, herdsmen can use water trucks instead of taking their animals from oasis to oasis - but by staying in one place, the herds are getting bigger and eating all the grass.
In Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece, coastal resorts are swallowing up water that once moistened the wilderness. Many farmers in those countries still flood their fields instead of using more miserly "drip irrigation," and the resulting shortages are slowly baking the life out of the land.
The result is a patchy "rash" of dead areas, rather than an easy-to-see expansion of existing deserts, scientists say. These areas have their good times and bad times as the weather changes. But in general, they are getting bigger and worse-off.
"It's not as dramatic as a flood or a big disaster like an earthquake," said Richard Thomas of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas in Aleppo, Syria. "There are some bright spots and hot spots. But overall, there is a trend toward increasing degradation."
The trend is speeding up, but it has been going on for centuries, scientists say. Fossilized pollen and seeds, along with ancient tools like grinding stones, show that much of the Middle East, the Mediterranean and North Africa were once green. The Sahara itself was a savanna, and rock paintings show giraffes, elephants and cows once lived there.
Global warming contributes to the problem, making many dry areas drier, scientists say. In the last century, average temperatures have risen over 1 degree Fahrenheit worldwide, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program.
As for the American Southwest, it is too early to tell whether its six-year drought could turn to something more permanent. But scientists note that reservoir levels are dropping as cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas expand.
"In some respects you may have greener vegetation showing up in people's yards, but you may be using water that was destined for the natural environment," said Stuart Marsh of the University of Arizona's Office of Arid Lands Studies. "That might have an effect on the biodiversity surrounding that city."
The Global Change Research Program says global warming could eventually make the Southwest wetter - but it will also cause more extreme weather, meaning harsher droughts that could kill vegetation. Now, the Southwest drought has become so severe that even the sagebrush is dying.
"The lack of water and the overuse of water, that is going to be a threat to the United States," Thomas said. "In other parts of the world, the problem is poverty that causes people to overuse the land. Most of these ecological systems have tipping points, and once you go past them, things go downhill."
And they better not even think about moving to the Great Lakes region.
The U.S.A is looking pretty verdant to me.
Kofi can come mow my lawn,he might feel better.
Now just where is the water going? Out into space?
Let me guess, they want money to fix it. Not money to fix the problem, just money so they can wine and dine in their usual extravegant manner while they contemplate what to do. Anything coming out of the UN is not even worth the paper it is written on.
Strange...it doesn't appear that our deserts are growing! And we didn't even sign that stupid Kyoto thingy...
My question exactly. I believe that there are the same number of molecules of H2O no matter whether we use it or not. What a bunch of ID10T's.
It must be those melting glaciers that are sucking up all that moisture.
"It must be those melting glaciers that are sucking up all that moisture."
Well, you see, it is like this, when the glaciers melt due to global warming then the water flow is converted to atmospheric moisture which holds more heat which causes more global warming which causes more glacier melt until the heat rises so high that it evaporates all the water into outer space? Dangit, this stuff is so hard to follow.
"The warning comes as a controversial movie, "The Day After Tomorrow" is whipping up interest"
In the movie, New York is buried under 100 feet of snow. The rest of the world is inundated by rain. Problem solved.
Bring back the dinosaurs, problem solved!
The answer to desertification is out there. They are called Megaflora trees. All we have to do is plant them.
Question..how much overgrazing did the Bison do?
But I do agree with you on one thing. Much of CO. and places like that should have never been farmed. But with todays no till methods, they can be farmed. Its that the water reserves have but all been pumped dry. So the next step is water storage basins.
The goofy? weather across the globe is and has never been caused by GLOBAL pollution. It may be caused by the ongoing destruction of the rain forests in South America. And mind you..this opinion is from a logger. We dont need any finished forest products from there. We got all the raw reserves in N America to satisfy our needs for-EVER! But, left to the waste and burn the eco freaks want, we will loose even that in time.
The result is a patchy "rash" of dead areas, rather than an easy-to-see expansion of existing deserts, scientists say. These areas have their good times and bad times as the weather changes. But in general, they are getting bigger and worse-off.
Anyway, all the reasons listed here for these marked areas are cultural and unamenable to our influence or the U.N.'s.
Slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtaxed water supplies and soaring populations are mostly to blame.
They can't figure out what is really going on, so the tactic seems to be "fear everything." First the article claims this....
with lands the size of Rhode Island becoming desert wasteland every year
or is THIS the truth?
From the mid-1990s to 2000, 1,374 square miles have turned into deserts each year - an area about the size of Rhode Island.
Is it one year or five?
What about the global warming melting the polar ice caps? Will rising sea levels cause the spread of deserts?? Will the increased rainfall rates cause the land to be stripped away?
See what I mean? Total panic mongering.
There is more.
Most at risk are dry regions on the edges of deserts - places like sub-Saharan Africa or the Gobi Desert in China, where people are already struggling to eke out a living from the land.
Soooo, the areas suffering are the areas populated by the dummies that continue to use slash-and-burn agriculture, sloppy conservation, overtax the water supplies continue to have soaring populations.
Lets see... soaring populations ... expanding areas of used up land. Must be caused by "global warming." Right. Never mind the locals that are living longer with antiboitocs and emergency food are causing this. In the past the population would have been curbed by nature when the land could not support them. But the answer is "global warming." Sure thing zippy. A fifth grader could pull this fairy tale apart.
Damn!
The sky is falling AGAIN!
Aesop had a fable I remember from the second grade: it had to do with a boy who cried wolf too often.
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