Environmental Disaster...and my small world

These I gleaned from here and there:

1. 21st century - 6.6 billion humans on this earth
2. Mid 21st century - expected to reach 9 billion
3. Kyoto Protocol - ratified but generally regarded as failed (America failed to play her part and they forgot to include China and India in it)
4. In the meantime....the population is exploding and lifestyle everywhere has 'improved' (for the people) but not the environment.
   
5. Earth's resources are being stretched to the limit. (what do you expect with its almost 7 billion earthlings clamouring to survive?)
   
6. Bio fuels touted as environmental friendly are actually not that friendly after all...seems only biofuel from sugarcane counts. Swaths of jungles in the Amazon are cleared even as I type this. Gone are our carbon stores???
7. Polar ice caps may be gone in my lifetime. (Dread to imagine the kind impact it would have)

Scary....

Reminded of the flood we went through back in 2005. No rain cos the actual rain was in Thailand but the water just came..up and up in went. Within a day, the water came up to the waist in some of the areas in the housing estate. Some of the kampung houses nearby were almost submerged because they were lower...


As the water receded...the mud that was left behind. The cleaning up began...

Flood with no real rain....


We went without power for almost a week cos the TNB sub-stations had to dry out first. On the second day of the flood...water supply went off cos the pump house had gone under the water...Ironic cos we had so much water around but none, clean!

And the biggest joke was while the rest of the town was dry...ours was one of those few flooded. They had all these huge storm drains built...those drains were quite empty cos when they built it they forgot to build a big enough exit pipe to drain all those water from our housing estate. So we sat like New Orleans...all the water in a bowl, but no where to go. It was only a year later that they dug out the whole thing to replace it with a bigger pipe. Cooling off period so that people don't remember???

Anyway, back on track, what kind of environmental challenges will we be up to? Solutions - I think it's no longer up to just one country. Has to be collective. The world I live in and the world of my parents are no longer the same. We are too interconnected...kinda depressing in a way!