Daily Star (Lebanon): Global warming is changing the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in the Middle East and neighboring countries, and concrete measures should be taken immediately to combat the effects of climate change on water resources there, a regional meeting hosted by UNDP in the Swedish capital concluded last Thursday.“The most important strategic resource in the Middle East and neighboring countries is neither oil nor gas, but water. With growing populations and increased water scarcity, less predictable water supplies and deteriorating water quality due to climate change, global warming is felt and experienced everyday by millions,” Paolo Lembo, UNDP director for Iraq and instigator of the initiative, said at a press conference held in Stockholm.
“Climate change has arrived in the Middle East, there is no time to plan and develop strategies for sometime in the future, the time for action is now, not 10 or 15 years ahead,” he added, echoing the consensus among participants at the meeting.
Climate change is felt most strongly in the Middle East region through an ever-increasing stress on already-scarce water resources. Further depletion is expected, causing acute water shortages and affecting households and farming communities alike. Already hit by prolonged shortages of clean water, and often no water at all, this will have especially negative impacts on poor or marginalized communities, particularly women, children, the elderly and other vulnerable groups in these….
The Dead Sea before sunrise, shot by Ester Inbar (user:ST or he:user:ST)., Wikimedia Commons
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Official government measurements show that the world’s temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.
That’s given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.
Proposals to combat global warming are “crazy” and will “destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family’s annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year,” the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. “High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health,” the ads asserted.
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