Hallo eco-aware viewers and welcome to Planet Earth: Our Loving Home.
Today in the first of a two-part series, we focus on the devastating
effects of floods on people and our planet. Floods occur when enormous
amounts of water partially or fully inundate land surfaces through such
events as excessively heavy rainfalls, cyclones, tsunamis, storm surges, icesheet and glacier melting, and so on.
Experiencing
a serious flood can be a truly terrifying experience, as conditions are
ever-changing and uncertain. Is it safe to drive through a flooded
street? Can one walk through the high waters and not encounter dangerous
sharp objects or worse, lose footing and be swept away by the swift
currents? Will people be able to survive the time without access to clean water and food?
In
its numerous reports, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) has observed that around the world there have been
widespread increases in heavy rainfall events, even in places where the
total amount of rain received annually has been decreasing.
Prominent
scientists everywhere point to global warming as the reason for this
worrisome phenomenon. Climate change researchers have found that animal
agriculture is overwhelmingly responsible for the warming of our planet.
This harmful activity releases immense quantities of lethal
greenhouse gases and the industry is also the primary cause of the
majority of the world’s deforestation and land degradation.
The
alterations to the planet’s atmosphere and land surfaces from livestock
raising have wreaked havoc on the natural interactions between
ecosystems and the hydrological cycle. Climate models cited in
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports project that
deleterious human actions such as factory farming which elevate the
amount of greenhouse gases in the air will mean a continual upward trend
in the number of violent weather events in many parts of the world,
including those marked by excessively heavy precipitation.
Rising
sea levels caused by climate change worsen the effect of storm surges
and other similar weather extremes in coastal areas by increasing the
chances that an inundation will occur.
|