 o part of the world will be immune to the menace of climate change, and in some places the effects can already be seen. The vast forests of Siberia and Canada are drying up, making them more susceptible to fires and attacks by insect pests. Glaciers are melting all across the world, and snow-mass is shrinking from the Andes to the Alps. Warmer sea temperatures seem to be behind the "coral bleaching" that is seriously damaging reefs throughout the tropics. Scientists are in no doubt that the warming trend is the result of human activity polluting the atmosphere.
And the heat keeps rising. The summer of 1995 was one for the record books. Continuing a trend of summers hotter than any in the past 600 years, heatwaves swept across the northern hemisphere, with severe droughts taking hold in northern Europe. In the USA, the extreme heat killed hundreds of people and shrivelled maize crops. All of this was accompanied by the most severe hurricane season in the North Atlantic for more than 50 years.
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Copyright 1996, The World Wide Fund For Nature