Tehran, Oct 23, IRNA Iranian Vice-President and Head of the Department of Environment Dr. Massoumeh Ebtekar cautioned against the threats posed by heedless actions of human beings to the environment.'The planet Earth is really now in danger by actions of human beings who have had practically destroyed the environment,' Dr. Ebtekar told Al-Ettejah, the English-language TV of Iraq.
She said that present unfavorable conditions of the Earth are the result of human effects, human interventions.
'It is the result of our heedless actions and the result of the excesses that we have taken in terms of consumption, in terms of polluting our resources,' Dr. Ebtekar told Al-Ettejah television in an exclusive interview.
She reiterated that it is the result of destruction that our actions have brought about for our natural resources, for our forests, for our wetlands.
'But one of the most important things is that we have major challenges now: the climate change issue: there is a common understanding that our Earth is warming, it is bringing about very serious changes in terms of climate, extreme weather events, drought and storms, floods,' the Iranian vice-president further stated.
Dr. Ebtekar said that this is bringing about tremendous loss in agriculture, in terms of the economy, basic natural resources.
'But also we have a general loss of diversity. We are losing our species, genetic resources that are due to overfishing, overhunting, illegal trade in wildlife. It is due to loss of natural habitats. Wildlife is being threatened by mining and roads construction,' she stated.
Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time (i.e., decades to millions of years).
Climate change may refer to a change in average weather conditions, or in the time variation of weather around longer-term average conditions (i.e., more or fewer extreme weather events).
Climate change is caused by factors such as biotic processes, variations in solar radiation received by Earth, plate tectonics, and volcanic eruptions. Certain human activities have also been identified as significant causes of recent climate change, often referred to as global warming.
Global warming is the observed century-scale rise in the average temperature of Earth's climate system.
Since 1971, 90% of the increased energy has been stored in the oceans, mostly in the 0 to 700m region.
Despite the oceans' dominant role in energy storage, the term 'global warming' is also used to refer to increases in average temperature of the air and sea at Earth's surface.
Since the early 20th century, the global air and sea surface temperature has increased about 0.8 C (1.4 F), with about two-thirds of the increase occurring since 1980.
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850.
Scientific understanding of the cause of global warming has been increasing. In its fourth assessment (AR4 2007) of the relevant scientific literature, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported that scientists were more than 90% certain that most of global warming was being caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases produced by human activities.
By IRNA
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