Global warming will kill third world children firstSuffer, little childrenBy Sylvie Barak: Tuesday, 29 April 2008, 5:10 PMUNICEF HAS JUST RELEASED a report which claims that climate change hurts the world’s poorest children the most, making them more likely to fall victim to severe flooding, droughts and diseases.The report, put together by the UN’s child watchdog, reckoned that while first world countries had the infrastructure to cope with such situations, third world countries did not, because they lacked the proper resources and funds. This basically means that the poorest and most underdeveloped nations will be paying the price for the damage mankind has done to the environment.David Bull, executive director of Unicef UK noted that "those who have contributed least to climate change - the world's poorest children - are suffering the most," and begged governments of developed nations to slash carbon emissions whilst sending cash relief to poor countries. His plea will very likely fall on deaf ears, just like the Kyoto Protocol, signed 10 years to the day before Unicef’s damning report.The Unicef report included the 2006 Stern Review, which predicts that global warming will hike the number of child fatalities up by a staggering further 160,000 across South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, just resulting from loss of GDP.Sir Nicholas Stern warned in the report’s introduction that "all the essential effects we are seeing now are associated with a temperature increase since 1850 of less than 1°C," ominously adding that "past actions and the likely trend of emissions... imply that another 1-2°C will be hard to avoid”.The report comes as boffins from the University of Hawaii in Honolulu announced their discovery that the Earth had once been able to self regulate the amount of carbon dioxide using a natural balancing mechanism, but that mankind had produced so much Co2 in the last few hundred years, that the system could no longer cope.The scientists, whose findings are published in the journal Nature Geoscience, reckoned that thousands of years ago, any carbon that had been released into the atmosphere (mainly through volcanic eruptions) would slowly disappear from the air through the weathering and erosion of mountains, which were then swept down into the seas and oceans, leaving the carbon buried under sediments on the Ocean floor.The boffins came to their conclusions after studying an Antarctic ice core and working out that, over a time span of 610,000 years, the world had only seen a 22 ppm rise in Co2 (long term, not including transitions between ice ages), whereas humans have managed to raise levels by 100 ppm in just 200 years.One of the researchers who worked on the University of Hawaii study, Richard Zeebe told BBC news that “we have put the system entirely out of equilibrium".As usual, it’s the world’s poor that will take the brunt of the punishment.
Yeah but when they last it does have time to build up and the hit does be aloooot harder.
