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Changing Planet Revealed In Atlas
ring writes "The United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep) has released a new atlas 'One Planet Many People: Atlas of our Changing Environment', to mark World Environment Day (WED). It compares and contrasts spectacular satellite images of the past few decades with contemporary ones." From the BBC article: "Among the transformations highlighted in the atlas are the huge growth of greenhouses in southern Spain, the rapid rise of shrimp farming in Asia and Latin America and the emergence of a giant, shadow puppet-shaped peninsula at the mouth of the Yellow River that has built up through transportation of sediment in the waters."
I think common sense is evidence enough. This is happening on a world scale, unless you can point out areas of the planet's surface that have been devoid of human interaction over the last 20-30 years. As far as seasons go, the effects that the study concentrates on tend to be long-term rather than seasonal, so seasonal evidence would be pointless.
Look at the basic facts; we are on a planet with finite resources. World population is growing, and human consumption of resources is growing.
Long term, the math doesn't work out. It's not a case of if we screw up this planet, it's a case of when, and more people equals acceleration towards that point, more space used, more fuels used, more products consumed.
The main problem is that as a planet, we all have to act to make it a sustainable environment. This means actually reducing what we use, not slowing down, or keeping it the same, but actually reducing the amount of resources we use. If one country *cough* decides to ignore this fact, it undermines the point of the exercise.
As far as your comment about hippies who want the developing countries to starve to death; well, they already do starve. But if world poverty was wiped out tomorrow the world over, the developed world would have to change its consumptive habits overnight for the world to sustain itself.
At the end of the day, everything on this planet is not okay, and all of our eggs are in one basket.
To see more photos than the BBC offers, you can either order the book here (and murder another tree), or view some of the images in these PDF reports.