PALM OIL PLANTATIONS, THE ILLUSION of SUSTAINABILTY….
Environmentalists see the establishment of oil palm plantations as a new threat to the world's largest rainforests and their biodiversity.
The potential for palm oil plantations in the Brazilian Amazon is vast: the Woods Hole Research Center estimates that 2.283 million square kilometers (881,000 sq miles) of forest land in the region is suitable for oil palm, an area far greater in extent than that which could be converted for soy (390,000 sq km) or sugar cane (1.988 million sq km). Woods Hole calculates this area of forest locks up some 42.5 billion tons (gigatons) of carbon in aboveground biomass, or roughly six times 2006 global emissions...
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Until recently, many scientists spoke of climate change mainly as a “threat,” sometime in the future. But it is increasingly clear that we already live in the era of human-induced climate change, with a growing frequency of weather and climate extremes like heat waves, droughts, floods and fires. Today we will try to explain what’s going on with the fact that we experience very little or no rain at all; in certain places in the world such as Russia, the USA, Europe some part of Africa and in Asia.
Future precipitation trends, based on climate model projections for the coming fifth assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that droughts of this length and severity will be commonplace through the end of the century unless human-induced carbon emissions are significantly reduced. Read more [...] 
