Word: humanity
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...high-level conference on climate change at U.N. headquarters that included Obama and Chinese President Hu Jintao. With less than 70 days remaining before the Copenhagen summit begins, the message was unusually clear: There is no more time to waste. "The world's glaciers are now melting faster than human progress to protect them - and us," Ban told the assembled leaders...
...human population has exploded over the past few thousand years, the delicate ecological balance that kept the Long Summer going has become threatened. The rise of industrialized agriculture has thrown off Earth's natural nitrogen and phosphorus cycles, leading to pollution on land and water, while our fossil-fuel addiction has moved billions of tons of carbon from the land into the atmosphere, heating the climate ever more. (See the top 10 green ideas...
...article in the Sept. 24 issue of Nature says the safe climatic limits in which humanity has blossomed are more vulnerable than ever and that unless we recognize our planetary boundaries and stay within them, we risk total catastrophe. "Human activities have reached a level that could damage the systems that keep Earth in the desirable Holocene state," writes Johan Rockstrom, executive director of the Stockholm Environmental Institute and the author of the article. "The result could be irreversible and, in some cases, abrupt environmental change, leading to a state less conducive to human development." (See TIME's special report...
...paper. Other boundaries involve freshwater overuse, the global agricultural cycle and ozone loss. In each case, he scans the state of science to find ecological limits that we can't violate, lest we risk passing a tipping point that could throw the planet out of whack for human beings. It's based on a theory that ecological change occurs not so much cumulatively, but suddenly, after invisible thresholds have been reached. Stay within the lines, and we might just be all right...
...scientists could help politicians craft global deals on carbon and other shared environmental threats. It's tough for negotiators to hammer out a new climate-change treaty unless they know just how much carbon needs to be cut to keep people safe. Rockstrom's work delineates the limits to human growth - economically, demographically, ecologically - that we transgress at our peril...