 |
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 13 July 2010 Many people believe that the electricity crisis will pale into insignificance relative to the water shortage that will hit the country – and particularly the Western Cape – in the coming years and decades.
Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 08 June 2010 The world is set to fail to make deep enough cuts in greenhouse gases in the next decade to tackle global warming, the U.N.’s top climate official said on Monday in a bleak assessment of the prospects for a U.N. deal.  Desertification in Africa Despite his gloomy short-term outlook, Yvo de Boer, who will step down on July 1 after about four years in the job, expressed confidence governments would eventually enact sufficiently tough goals, such as an emissions cut by rich nations of 80 percent by 2050. “I don’t see the process delivering adequate mitigation targets in the next decade,” de Boer told a news conference midway through two weeks of talks in Bonn among senior government negotiators from about 185 nations. “Over the longer term we will get this issue under control,” de Boer, head of the U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, added in a webcast news briefing. Targets for cutting greenhouse gas emissions are referred to as “mitigation”. The U.N. panel of climate scientists has suggested that industrialised nations would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25-40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020 to put the world on track to avoid dangerous global warming. Continue reading World to fail in greenhouse gas cuts Posted by: Saving Water SA (Cape Town, South Africa) - partnered with Water Rhapsody conservation systems – 07 June 2010 Weather-related catastrophes brought about by climate change are increasing, the top UN humanitarian official said Sunday as he warned of the possibility of “mega-disasters”.
“When it comes to meteorological disasters, weather-related disasters, then there is a trend upwards connected with climate change,” Holmes, who is in Australia for high-level talks on humanitarian aid, told AFP. “The trend is there in terms of floods, and cyclones, and droughts.” Holmes, who is the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, said it had been a tough year due to January’s devastating earthquake in Haiti, which killed more than 250,000 people. He said while earthquakes, such as the 7.0-magnitude quake which levelled the Haitian capital Port-au-Prince, were random, weather-related natural disasters were increasing in number and scale. “It’s partly the very obvious things like the number of cyclones and the intensity of the cyclones, and the amount of flooding,” he said. “But is also in slightly more invisible ways — in Africa with drought spreading, desertification spreading.” Holmes said officials were particularly concerned about places where a combination of factors — such as large populations, or likelihood of earthquake, or susceptibility to rising sea levels — made them more vulnerable. “One of things we worry about is mega cities could produce, at some point, a mega disaster,” he said. Continue reading Climate change could trigger ‘mega-disasters’ |
 Water Tanks
Jojo and Martin Nel Water Tanks |
|
Copyright © 2012 savingwater.co.za - All Rights Reserved |
||
