A senior U.N. environmental official
says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising
sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures
would create an exodus of ”eco-refugees,’’ threatening political chaos,
said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment
Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar ice caps,
ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives
and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an
interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated;
one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90
million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would
be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and
U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
”Ecological refugees will become a
major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to
drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support
life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to
live in the Sahara?’’ he said.
UNEP estimates it would cost the United States at least $100 billion to protect its east coast alone.
Shifting climate patterns would bring
back 1930s Dust Bowl conditions to Canadian and U.S. wheatlands, while
the Soviet Union could reap bumper crops if it adapts its agriculture in
time, according to a study by UNEP and the International Institute for
Applied Systems Analysis.
Excess carbon dioxide is pouring into
the atmosphere because of humanity’s use of fossil fuels and burning of
rain forests, the study says. The atmosphere is retaining more heat than
it radiates, much like a greenhouse.
The most conservative scientific
estimate that the Earth’s temperature will rise 1 to 7 degrees in the
next 30 years, said Brown.
The difference may seem slight, he
said, but the planet is only 9 degrees warmer now than during the
8,000-year Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago....<<<Read More>>>...
