This n That

Africa News
----------------------------------------------------------------
Lake Chad, which provides irreplaceable resources to four African
countries, is disappearing. Lake Chad has shrunk from 15,000 to 500 sq
miles in 40 years. Global warming and increased water extraction are
some of the causes. Read more about why this great lake has receded to
less than 20% ?? of its former volume at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/4906692.stm .
------------------------------

An effect of global warming and/or "aid" money.. not wisely spent. eg. in building dams , irrigation which diverts valuable water away from river and eventually the lake.

Vision; true understanding of environment, lacking in major projects and no real incentive to prevent global warming..

I guess it's just NOT happening in the US..

The US (and Europe) are not drying out.The increase in hurricanes severity and frequency is really not that significant. If they had many hurricane-style disasters every year and increasing, would there be enough incentive to change then?
How much does it take?
Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Of Mexico in 2005 severely damaged oil production platforms desined to withstand a one-in-five -hundred-year weather event. Such catastrophic weather events are thought to be due to the increased rate of global warming, which is thought to be due to the increase in CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere.
Climate extremes appear to be more frequent.
Events like Katrina are expected to increase in that area, and the drying up of parts of the world is expected to increase..and flooding in other parts...like Europe (the Danube recently, April, 2006)
It's the drying up thats very difficult for communities to survive, but thats not all climate change I guess.

Australia too is drying out, vast salt lakes areas increasing, less arable land.(as well as heating up Sydney is definitely hotter, we had 45C this year, and 33C last week in April!!)
Governments don't seem to be able to have the requisite vision or feeling of responsibility to genuinely consider the problem (it won't affect the bottom line in the next 3 yrs much will it, and the cost of taking some action is comparatively more , considering a 3 years time frame or less ie the time to the next election?). .. ignoring or not even acknowledging, and buckpassing between states/commonwealth appears to be the typical action...make this years budget look good
The environment just doesn't "fit" neatly into any politics...and also not into any of the major religions of the world these days.
Some of the more "ancient" religions appeared to place a greater emphsis on looking after the environment.

You'd be surprised just how much figures can be fiddled too in producing greenhouse emission figures, making them meaningless? ... changing forestation figures?

Recently, Germany conducted some scientific exploration involving their best scientists. Core drilling samples of earth were taken to a depth of 50m and during the core examinations, small pieces of copper were discovered. After running many arduous tests on these samples, the German government announced that the ancient Germans 25,000 years ago had a nationwide telephone network.

Naturally, the British government was not that easily impressed. So they ordered their own scientists to take their core samples at a depth of 100m. From these samples, they found small pieces of glass and soon announced that the ancient Brits 35,000 years ago already had a nationwide optical fibre network.

Irish scientists were outraged. So immediately after this announcement, they ordered their scientist to take samples at a depth of 200m but found absolutely nothing. They concluded that the ancient Irish 55,000 years ago were an even more advanced civilisation, as they already had a mobile telephone network in place.