Environment

BBC - Parts of northern and central India are sweltering under a severe heatwave, with a provisional record temperature of 52.3C (126.1F) registered in Delhi. If verified, it would be the highest ever recorded in India.More than 37 cities in the country recorded temperatures over 45C this week.

Thom Hartmann - We humans have exceeded the capacity of this planet that we rose up and conquered, and it’s beginning to bite us back.When Thomas Jefferson authored the Declaration of Independence, there were only a billion people on Earth. We hit our second billion the year Franklin D. Roosevelt was inaugurated president. John Kennedy’s inauguration was the same year we hit three billion. But our fourth billion came the year Jimmy Carter was elected. And Earth’s fifth billion humans could be counted the year Reagan left office.Since then, the explosion of human biomass has continued unabated: Today we stand at 8 billion people, all of us competing with every other life-form on Earth for the planet’s resources.

As I point out in my book The Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight, in the process of all this population growth we have consumed virtually all of the world’s wild spaces. We’ve harvested the oceans, razed the forests, and are burning thousands of acres of the planet’s jungles every hour.In my lifetime, more than 80% of all the wild animals on Earth have vanished; today over a million species are on the verge of extinction. Just since 1970, North America has lost about a third of all our birds. Scientists have declared an insect apocalypse: As that “bottom of our food chain” vanishes, and it’s pollinators with it, it threatens the entire web of life on this planet.