AAAS News Release: Dwindling Resources of Soil, Water and Air Require New Rescue Plans

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http://news.aaas.org/2009/0215a-cdc-for-planet-earth.shtml

AAAS 2009 Annual Meeting News Blog

Dwindling Resources of Soil, Water and Air Require New Rescue Plans

CHICAGO--When a volcano erupts or flood waters rise, our species sends out emergency teams to save what they can of lives and livelihoods. But there are few rescue plans in place for the "stealth disasters" like climate change that threaten Earth's ecosystems and natural resources, says planetary scientist Susan W. Kieffer.

In her plenary address to the 2009 AAAS Annual Meeting, Kieffer called for the creation of a "CDC for Planet Earth"--an organization that could respond to planetary threats such climate change with the same kind of coordination the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showed during the SARS and bird flu outbreaks of the late 1990s. (http://www.aaas.org/meetings/2009/program/lectures/media/06kieffer.ram">Watch a video of Kieffer's address.)

Ocean acidification, spreading deserts, dry aquifers and degraded soils are stealth disasters, altering the planet in ways that "will undermine our survival and evolution into the civilized global society that we might become," warned Kieffer.

Time is not on our side, she emphasized. The processes that create critical resources such as fossil fuels occurred on a geological time scale, like the thousand-year glacial cycles that scoured the Canadian Shield and deposited rich topsoil in the U.S. Midwest.

But the human species is consuming these resources in "shallow time," depleting in hundreds of years what took millions of years to create. "Humans are a geological-scale force now," despite our tendency to look no further forward than our children and grandchildren, said Kieffer.

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