::The Crying Earth::

A poem about the climate change

By: Julia Melnikova, St. Petersburg, Russia

I don`t want my children to see the Earth die,

Without fish swim and without birds fly,

With no air for breathing, no water to drink,

When global conditions will make the land sink.

I don`t want emissions to stay in the air,

To fill our lungs and to spread everywhere,

To cause global warming, submerging the land!

To stop all this mess we should lend our hand!

The nature is dying together with us,

We wouldn`t exist here but for the green grass…

We must prevent nature from saying «farewell»

In case it is dying, we`re dying as well!

5.2.4 What are the impacts of climate change?

Melting Polar ice caps: The area of Arctic ice at the North Pole has shrunk by 10% in recent decades, and the thickness of the ice above the water has decreased by about 40%. On the other side of the world, parts of the ice sheet above the Antarctic continent have become unstable.

Rising sea levels: Over the last century sea levels have risen by between 12 and 22 cm and are projected to rise even more rapidly in the future.

Extreme weather: In the last decade, there were three times more weather-related natural catastrophes in the world than in the 1960s, including heat waves, floods, droughts and forest fires. All these types of events have a big human and economic cost.

Nature under threat: Many animals and plants will not be able to cope with higher temperatures and changes to their natural habitats.

How Environmental Disaster occur?

Many environmental disaster happen because of human errors such as flood, haze and land slide. This is because human would destructive the jungle and cut plant without deliberate environment situation also one of the coursed environmental disaster. Human activity such as throw away domestic waste and industrial waste like toxic also one of the factor which effort water pollution and flood.

Actually one of factor that flood and land slide is because our attitude when develop the residential area. This happen because many developments are builds at the hill especially for human residential. When it’s happen their structure land movement was disturbed, sowhen that area gains more rain, land movements become unusual. When this happen, land slide occur and sometime give flood suddenly because land will cover the irrigation. Like as tragedy in Highland Tower and Bukit Antarabangsa, this because urban process.

Example for haze is when air contaminated with other dangerous gases from transportation, industrial sector, and nuclear bomb. For example people who work with hazardous materials get training. They learn how to keep dangerous materials safely inside factories. But sometimes workers make mistakes. Dangerous materials get loose in the environment. Then these materials cause disasters.For example tragedy in Jilin, China (2005), workers at a chemical factory in the city of Jilin in China made one mistake. They were supposed to shut off a value. But they left it running.

As result, part of the chemical factory exploded. Five people were killed and sixty others were badly hurt in the Jilin factory explosion. Poisonous yellow smoke poured out from factory. More then ten thousand people living nearby had to flee their homes. About 100 tons of poison also leaked into the Songhua River. Water in the city had to be shut off for a four days. People had to drink bottled water. They could not take showers. People were very frightened. Nobody knows how many became ill because of the poison.