Google News Greece: endangered monk seal killed with a harpoon
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On the Greek island of Alonissos, a monk seal named Kostis was killed by a harpoon shot. locals and environmentalists broke out in revolt. The island, in the Aegean Sea, is one of the most important marine reserves in Europe, but there are areas where fishing is allowed for amateur fishermen.
According to the media, a mobilization is underway to try to find the person responsible for the death of the animal. Greek organization MOm, on Facebook wrote: "Unfortunately, once again it has been shown that human wickedness and stupidity have no limits!
We have been informed that the young monk seal Kostis, who in recent months had become the mascot of Alonissos, is was deliberately killed. The seal was killed at point blank range with a spear gun. This news was greeted with great sorrow, not only by the members of the NGO, who cared for Kostis for several months, but also by all residents and visitors of Alonissos." The seal was found in 2018 by residents of the island of Folegandros, very weakened following the passage of a hurricane.
Global warming is destroying Arctic summer sea ice
Global warming refers to an increase in the average temperatures of the Earth's surface not attributable to natural causes and found since the beginning of the twentieth century.
According to the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) of 2007, the average temperature of the earth's surface increased by 0.7 ± 0.2 ° C during the 20th century. Data from the historical thermal series in possession of scientists indicate that warming is not uniform across the globe: it is greater on land than in the oceans.
Furthermore, due to the greater distribution of emerged lands and relative anthropization, it is more accentuated in the northern hemisphere than in the southern one and higher in northern latitudes rather than in medium and low latitudes, the Arctic areas of Siberia and Canada are in strong warming, on the other hand the area of ​​Antarctica is cooling.
Rising temperatures are causing major ice losses and rising sea levels. Impacts on rainfall structures and intensity are also visible, resulting in changes in the location and size of subtropical deserts. The global darkening, caused by the increase in the concentration of aerosols in the atmosphere, detected between the 1960s and 1980s, blocking the sun's rays, would at least partially mitigate the effects of global warming.
A new alarm is launched by the study published in Nature communications, entitled: Global warming due to loss of large ice masses and Arctic summer sea ice. In the article we can read how "several large-scale cryosphere elements such as the Arctic summer sea ice, the mountain glaciers, the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheet have changed substantially during the last century due to anthropogenic global warming.
of their possible future disintegration on global mean temperature (GMT) and climate feedbacks have not yet been comprehensively evaluated. Here, we quantify this response using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity.
Overall, we find a median additional global warming of 0.43 ° C (interquartile range: 0.39-0.46 ° C) at a CO2 concentration of 400 ppm. Most of this response (55%) is caused by albedo changes, but lapse rate together with water vapor (30%) and cloud feedbacks (15%) also contribute significantly.
While a decay of the ice sheets would occur on centennial to millennial time scales, the Arctic might become ice-free during summer within the 21st century. Our findings imply an additional incre ase of the GMT on intermediate to long time scales. "