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Climate change brings world closer to 'doomsday', say scientists

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https://news.yahoo.com/climate-change-brings-world-closer-doomsday-scientists-165043538.html

Climate change brings world closer to 'doomsday', say scientists

Washington (AFP) - Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday.
"It is now three minutes to midnight," said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as the group moved its symbolic "Doomsday Clock" two minutes forward.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947. It has changed 18 times since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.
The clock has been at five minutes to midnight since 2012 and the last time it was three minutes to midnight was in 1983, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
"Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity," Benedict said.
"And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe."
The climate changes that human are driving "will harm millions of people and will threaten many key ecological systems on which civilization relies," he said.
- Nuclear cuts -
The scientists also called for dramatically reduced spending on nuclear weapons modernization programs, and a renewed focus on disarmament.
Benedict said that the world has about 16,300 nuclear weapons, which she described as "far too many."
While the United States and Russia have far fewer weapons today than they did during the Cold War, the disarmament process has "ground to a halt," said Sharon Squassoni, member, Science and Security Board, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Meanwhile, the United States has invested big money in modernizing its nuclear weapons systems, with some $355 billion planned for the next decade, and Russia is also upgrading its nuclear weapons, Squassoni said.
The United Kingdom has halved its nuclear arsenal stockpile since 2010 but continues to support its nuclear submarine program.
France is also building a next generation air-to-ground nuclear missile, while China is developing a new class of ballistic missile submarines, she said.
India has plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet and Pakistan has started a third plutonium reactor and is developing a new short-range nuclear missile.
"Israel reportedly is also modernizing some of its undeclared nuclear forces and North Korea as we all know continues its nuclear program without any of the restraints previously applied under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty," she told reporters.
She said that any post-nuclear optimism that arose at the end of Cold War "has essentially evaporated."

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BEER-----> It's said we are in a period at the start of the 6th Extiction. The earth will survive again. Don't worry be happy.

BELCH

I'm not a bit concerned or worried about planet Earth surviving, it will no matter what is thrown at it. I just wonder about whether we will.

There's talk that the "Elite" want to kill off 90% of the population so it will be easier to control those that survive. Basically, they want to go from 7 billion to 100 million, and of course those that are left will be scattered. What good is it to be a king when you don't have a kingdom?

Here's a list of just a few sites that discuss this ~

Prisonplanet.com
infowars.com
endof the americandream.com
thecommonsenseshow.com
naturalnews.com
rense.com
Very interesting video ~

**** Enjoyed hearing the video, thanks. I had never heard it before.

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https://news.yahoo.com/warm-ocean-melting-east-antarcticas-largest-glacier-071912713.html

Warm ocean melting East Antarctica's largest glacier

Sydney (AFP) - The largest glacier in East Antarctica, containing ice equivalent to a six-metre (20-foot) rise in global sea levels, is melting due to warm ocean water, Australian scientists said on Monday.
The 120-kilometre (74.4 mile) long Totten Glacier, which is more than 30 kilometres wide, had been thought to be in an area untouched by warmer currents.
But a just-returned voyage to the frozen region found the waters around the glacier were warmer than expected and likely melting the ice from below.
"We knew that the glacier was thinning from the satellite data, and we didn't know why," the voyage's chief scientist Steve Rintoul told AFP.
He said that up until recently the East Antarctica ice sheet had been thought surrounded by cold waters and therefore very stable and unlikely to change much.
But the voyage found that waters around the glacier were some 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than other areas visited on the same trip during the southern hemisphere summer.
"We made it to the front of the glacier and we measured temperatures that were warm enough to drive significant melt," Rintoul said.
"And so the fact that warm water can reach this glacier is a sign that East Antarctica is potentially more vulnerable to changes in the ocean driven by climate change than we used to think."
Previous expeditions had been unable to get close to the glacier due to heavy ice, but Rintoul said the weather had held for the Aurora Australis icebreaker and a team of scientists and technicians from the Australian Antarctic Division and other bodies.
Rintoul said the glacier was not about to melt entirely overnight and cause a six-metre rise in sea levels, but the research was important as scientists try to predict how changes in ocean temperatures will impact on ice sheets.
"This study is a step towards better understanding of exactly which parts of the ice sheets are vulnerable to ocean warming and that is the sort of information that we can then use to improve our predictions of future sea level rises," he said.
"East Antarctica is not as protected from change as we use to think," he said.
The melt rate of glaciers in the fastest-melting part of Antarctica has tripled over the past decade, analysis of the past 21 years showed, according to research published last month.
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