Some 15,000 scientists from 184 countries worldwide have signed a letter warning that Earth’s environment is on the road to destruction. The “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: Second Notice,” calls for action to avert irreversible damage to the planet. The number of signatories may be the largest for any published scientific paper ever, said co-author Thomas Newsome, a research fellow at Deakin University and The University of Sydney.
[Selected excerpts from the
letter below. Click above to read entire Notice]
"To prevent widespread
misery and catastrophic biodiversity loss, humanity must practice a more
environmentally sustainable alternative to business as usual. This prescription
was well articulated by the world’s leading scientists 25 years ago, but in
most respects, we have not heeded their warning. Soon it will be too late to
shift course away from our failing trajectory, and time is running out. We must
recognize, in our day-to-day lives and in our governing institutions, that
Earth with all its life is our only home."
Twenty-five years ago, the
Union of Concerned Scientists and more than 1500 independent scientists,
including the majority of living Nobel laureates in the sciences, penned the
1992 “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity." These concerned
professionals called on humankind to curtail environmental destruction and
cautioned that “agreat change in our stewardship of the Earth and the life on
it is required, if vast human misery is to be avoided.”
In their manifesto, they
showed that humans were on a collision course with the natural world. They
expressed concern about current, impending, or potential damage on planet Earth.
It also involves ozone
depletion, freshwater availability, marine fishery collapses, ocean dead zones,
forest loss, biodiversity destruction, climate change, and continued human
population growth. They proclaimed that fundamental changes were urgently
needed to avoid the consequences our present course would bring.
The authors of the 1992
declaration feared that humanity was pushing Earth’s ecosystems beyond their
capacities to support the web of life. They described how we are fast
approaching many of the limits of what the planet can tolerate without
substantial and irreversible harm.
Image above, credit: climaterealityproject |
The scientists pleaded that
we stabilize the human population, describing how our large numbers— swelled by
another 2 billion people since 1992, a 35 percent increase—exert stresses on
Earth that can overwhelm other efforts to realize a sustainable future. They
implored that we cut greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and phase out fossil fuels,
reduce deforestation, and reverse the trend of collapsing biodiversity.
On the 25th anniversary of
their call, we look back at their warning and evaluate the human response by
exploring available time-series data. Since 1992, with the exception of
stabilizing the stratospheric ozone layer, humanity has failed to make
sufficient progress in generally solving these foreseen environmental
challenges, and alarmingly, most of them are getting far worse.
Need a vaccine that causes human girls to be immune to sperm. Given randomly over the Earth over 30 years. No one would know for about 30 years. Decrease human population which is our main problem.
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