Don't expect the mainstream media to help alert the world to the environmental crisis at hand. In many cases, they've become the Leni Fiefenstahls of our time, creating distracting and misleading propaganda to support a tiny handful of climate change deniers.
As Dr. Brian Moench, President of Utah Physicians for a Health Environment, points out, "Media coverage of the likely end of civilization has plummeted and is now 70-90% less than two years ago. Snooki gets more media attention. Worse still, most of the coverage is of climate denier politicians. On the Sunday talk shows no scientists have been interviewed in the last three years. Of 839 questions asked by the media in the recent Republican presidential debates, two were about the climate crisis."
But the consensus of thousands of reputable scientists worldwide is that the "debate" on global warming is over. Whatever the precise causes, humans are accelerating the change - in a way never before seen.
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Sea Level Rise and Acidity
"Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double of the last century." - NASA
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Rising Temperatures
"All three major global surface temperature reconstructions show that Earth has warmed since 18u80. Most of this warming has occurred since the 1970's, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981, and with all 10 of the warmest years occurring in the past 12 years." - NASA
"The heat wave in the United States in July 2011 broke temperature records in many locations, killed dozens and saw nearly half of all Americans under heat advisories at its peak." - NASA/JPL
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Ice Melting
"Data from NASA;s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment show Greenland lost 150 to 250 cubic kilometers (36 to 60 cubic miles) of ice per year between 2002 and 2006, while Antarctica lost about 152 cubic kilometers (36 cubic miles) of ice between 2002 and 2005."
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Ozone Destruction
"The amount of ozone destroyed in the Arctic in 2011 was comparable to that seen in some years in theAntarctic, where an ozone "hole" has formed each spring since the mid-1980's. The stratospheric ozone layer, extending from about 10-20 miles (15 to 35 kilometers) above the surface, protects life on Earth from the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays." -NASA/JPL-Caltech
Ozone in Earth's stratosphere at an altitude of approximately 12 miles (20 kilometers) in mid-March 2011, near the peak of the 2011 Arctic ozone loss. On the right, chlorine monoxide - the primary agent of chemical ozone destruction in the cold polar lower stratosphere - for the same day and altitude.
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