Carbon Dioxide Emissions and Global Warming can start the process of desertification of the Planet Earth as Sahara was Jungle a millennium ago

Sahara Jungle 10 000 years ago

A recent study brings us extremely worrying news: in 50 years, rising temperatures will dramatically affect the lives of more than three billion people.

10,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert was one of the wettest areas on Earth

This situation is proving extremely unfortunate, especially if we take into account the problems related to food security for these people whose agricultural land will become useless, notes Futurism.

Desert Earth Planet by Fragile-stock on DeviantArt

Fortunately, if we can say so, this is one of the darkest scenarios, but it starts from the reality we live in: insufficient actions related to stopping global warming and the continuous increase of carbon dioxide emissions globally.

Desert Earth ~ 3D Model ~ Download

The study points out that on every inhabited continent there will be a series of regions whose conditions will be extremely harsh and will not allow human life, among these regions are: Brazil, North Africa or India. This increase in temperatures will lead to the expansion of the temperate climate to more northern regions: Canada or even the Arctic.

Earth's Deserts: Definition Study.com

The direct consequence of these changes in environmental conditions will be the increase in the number of climate refugees, who will have to move from regions close to the equator to the north and south of the planet in search of less affected regions.



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Earth is Flat, Vaccines are bad and Global Warming is a myth. What makes people reject scientific research?

Credit: JooJoo41/Pixabay

A lot happened in 2016, but one of the biggest cultural shifts was the rise of fake news - where claims with no evidence behind them (e.g. the world is flat) get shared as fact alongside evidence-based, peer-reviewed findings (e.g. climate change is happening).

Researchers have coined this trend the 'anti-enlightenment movement', and there's been a lot of frustration and finger-pointing over who or what's to blame. But a team of psychologists has identified some of the key factors that can cause people to reject science - and it has nothing to do with how educated or intelligent they are.

In fact, the researchers found that people who reject scientific consensus on topics such as climate change, vaccine safety, and evolution are generally just as interested in science and as well-educated as the rest of us.

City climate change Credit: NASA Climate Change

The issue is that when it comes to facts, people think more like lawyers than scientists, which means they 'cherry pick' the facts and studies that back up what they already believe to be true.

So if someone doesn't think humans are causing climate change, they will ignore the hundreds of studies that support that conclusion, but latch onto the one study they can find that casts doubt on this view. This is also known as cognitive bias. 

"We find that people will take a flight from facts to protect all kinds of belief including their religious belief, their political beliefs, and even simple personal beliefs such as whether they are good at choosing a web browser," said one of the researchers, Troy Campbell from the University of Oregon.

"People treat facts as relevant more when the facts tend to support their opinions. When the facts are against their opinions, they don't necessarily deny the facts, but they say the facts are less relevant."

This conclusion was based on a series of new interviews, as well as a meta-analysis of the research that's been published on the topic, and was presented in a symposium called over the weekend as part of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology annual convention in San Antonio.

The goal was to figure out what's going wrong with science communication in 2017, and what we can do to fix it. 

The research has yet to be published, so isn't conclusive, but the results suggest that simply focussing on the evidence and data isn't enough to change someone's mind about a particular topic, seeing as they'll most likely have their own 'facts' to fire back at you. 

"Where there is conflict over societal risks - from climate change to nuclear-power safety to impacts of gun control laws, both sides invoke the mantel of science," said one of the team, Dan Kahan from Yale University.

Instead, the researchers recommend looking into the 'roots' of people's unwillingness to accept scientific consensus, and try to find common ground to introduce new ideas.

So where is this denial of science coming from? A big part of the problem, the researchers found, is that people associate scientific conclusions with political or social affiliations.

New research conducted by Kahan showed that people have actually always cherry picked facts when it comes to science - that's nothing new. But it hasn't been such a big problem in the past, because scientific conclusions were usually agreed on by political and cultural leaders, and promoted as being in the public's best interests. 

Now, scientific facts are being wielded like weapons in a struggle for cultural supremacy, Kahan told Melissa Healy over at the LA Times, and the result is a "polluted science communication environment". 

So how can we do better? 

"Rather than taking on people's surface attitudes directly, tailor the message so that it aligns with their motivation," said Hornsey. "So with climate skeptics, for example, you find out what they can agree on and then frame climate messages to align with these."

The researchers are still gathering data for a peer-reviewed publication on their findings, but they presented their work to the scientific community for further dissemination and discussion in the meantime.

Hornsey told the LA Times that the stakes are too high to continue to ignore the 'anti-enlightenment movement'.

"Anti-vaccination movements cost lives," said Hornsey. "Climate change skepticism slows the global response to the greatest social, economic and ecological threat of our time."

"We grew up in an era when it was just presumed that reason and evidence were the ways to understand important issues; not fear, vested interests, tradition or faith," he added.

"But the rise of climate skepticism and the anti-vaccination movement made us realise that these enlightenment values are under attack."

Other articles on the same theme:

• 10,000 years ago, the Sahara Desert was one of the wettest areas on Earth

• India has planted 50 million trees in just 24 hours

• Great Blue Hole, the most impressive place in the world for diving

• Top 10 extinct species that will be recreated a genetic

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The above post is reprinted from materials provided by Sciencealert . Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.

Earth's temperature increasing. Three years in a row, record heat has been exceeded. How will it be next year?

Earth's temperature continues to rise every month, surpassing the record temperatures every year. 2016 will face the same fate.

Although the heating occurs from month to month, after a 12-month priod researchers said the phenomenon is disturbingly consistent. In the period June 2015 - May 2016 were the hottest months, that record was surpassed for the ninth time, according to The Guardian.

This means that every 12 months, the record is played down novelty is that the years 2014 and 2015 were very welcome. All events so far predict that 2016 will be as warm. Rapid heating of the planet is most felt in Antarctica, which until now had the lowest rate of expansion of ice in summer.

This phenomenon is due to the increased level of heat in the area, which is two times higher than the global average, which is having a disastrous impact on humans, animals, and the planet in general. While some reports show that the level of ice in the area increases, the layers are still thin, can be found on the sea surface and can not replace the glaciers.

Researchers say that the effects could be devastating. Even if we did not use fossil fuel, still we could not stop warming in coming decades.

The above post is reprinted from materials provided by  Ifl Science. Note: Materials may be edited for content and length.