The world’s ice sheets just got a dire prognosis, and coastlines are going to pay the price

Glaciers in Antarctica on February 7, 2022. A new study suggests even if the world meets its climate targets it may not be enough to save the planet's ice sheets. 

The world’s ice sheets are on course for runaway melting, leading to multiple feet of sea level rise and “catastrophic” migration away from coastlines, even if the world pulls off the miraculous and keeps global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, according to new research.

A group of international scientists set out to establish what a “safe limit” of warming would be for the survival of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets. They pored over studies that took data from satellites, climate models and evidence from the past, from things like ice cores, deep-sea sediments and even octopus DNA.

The human-chimp bond captured in an iconic photo

In 1964, Jane Goodall's husband Hugo van Lawick took a photo of her and an infant chimp reaching out to each other. Decades later, it continues to impact how we view chimpanzees.

When hungry elephants and people clash in a village - human overpopulation and overdevelopment = destruction and loss of habitat which drives species to extinction.

An elephant eyes the Elephant Response Team's vehicle as the team attempt to drive the animal away from the town of Livingstone in Zambia and back toward Mosi-oa-Tunya National Park.

The emergency call comes in just before midnight. In the driver's seat of a battered Toyota Hilux pickup truck, 29-year-old Chamunolwa Jimayi chats briefly with the caller. He hangs up the phone and shouts to his two colleagues in the back to hold on tight, then shoots off at high speed through the city center, careening around the traffic.

Some misguided people, today, who may call themselves "pronatalist", and who look at future predictions of negative population growth (meaning that population will decrease in the future, instead of continuing to increase), and see this as a problem, are wrong or are not thinking clearly. Some of them may believe that African and Arab and Asian populations are in the process of "replacing" or at least are overtaking the Caucasian, European-based ethnicities that have traditionally been the majority of the population in countries like the US, the UK, Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; and they are right - this is indeed happening, as is the Hispanicization of the US population because of such massive immigration. And they are right to be concerned about this. In a century there may be no nations left on Earth where Caucasians of European ancestry are the majority of the population if immigration is not stopped. And this is a problem. There will be African majority countries, Asian majority countries, Arab majority countries, Hispanic majority countries, but there will not be any Caucasian of European ancestry majority countries left if we do not take action now.