[Benjamin]

Noch'n Video (in Englisch!):
http://video.nationalgeographic.com/...ees-wcvin.html

Two Degrees

• Oceans turn increasingly acidic, wiping out calcareous plankton and further hitting surviving coral reefs – much of the marine food chain endangered.
  Carbon dioxide dissolves in the oceans and makes them more acidic. Even with relatively low emissions, large areas of the southern oceans and parts of the Pacific will within a few decades become toxic to organisms with calcium carbonate shells, for the simple reason that the acidic seawater will dissolve them. Many species of plankton – the basis of the marine food chain and essential for the sustenance of higher creatures, from mackerel to baleen whales – will be wiped out, and the more acidic seawater may be the knockout blow for what remains of the world’s coral reefs. The oceans may become the new deserts as the world’s temperatures reach 2C above today’s.
  
• One summer in every two has heatwaves as strong as the 2003 disaster in Europe, when 30,000 died.
  Two degrees may not sound like much, but it is enough to make every European summer as hot as 2003, when 30,000 people died from heatstroke. That means extreme summers will be much hotter still. As Middle East-style temperatures sweep across Europe, the death toll may reach into the hundreds of thousands.
  
• Drought, fire and searing heat strikes the Mediterranean basin.
  The Mediterranean area can expect six more weeks of heatwave conditions, with wildfire risk also growing. Water worries will be aggravated as the southern Med loses a fifth of its rainfall, and the tourism industry could collapse as people move north outside the zones of extreme heat.
  
• Greenland tips into irreversible melt, accelerating sea-level rise and threatening coastal cities around the world.
  Two degrees is also enough to cause the eventual complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet, which would raise global sea levels by seven metres. Much of the ice-cap disappeared 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were 1-2C higher than now. Because of the sheer size of the ice sheet, no one expects this full seven metres to come before the end of the century, but a top Nasa climate scientist, James Hansen, is warning that the mainstream projections of sea level rise (of 50cm or so by 2100) could be dangerously conservative. As if to underline Hansen’s warning, the rate of ice loss from Greenland has tripled since 2004.
  
• Hundreds of millions live in peril of the rising seas.
  
• Polar bears, walrus and other ice-dependent marine mammals extinct in the Arctic.
  
• Glaciers in Peru disappear, threatening water supplies to Lima.
  This melting will also continue to affect the world’s mountain ranges, and in Peru all the glaciers will disappear from the Andean peaks that currently supply Lima with water.
  
• Declining snowfields also threaten water supplies in California.
  In California, the loss of snowpack from the Sierra Nevada – three-quarters of which could disappear in the two-degree world – will leave cities such as Los Angeles increasingly thirsty during the summer.
  
• A third of species worldwide face extinction as the climate changes – the worst mass extinction since the end of the dinosaurs.
  

Der Absatz ist ein Auszug (von mir leicht redaktionell verändert) aus diesen 2 Quellen betr. der Welt bei einem Temperaturanstieg von 2 Grad über vorindustriellem Niveau:
http://www.marklynas.org/2007/2/3/six-degrees
http://www.marklynas.org/2007/4/23/s...n-the-guardian