With instant global news available more so in the last ten years, we are more aware of the environmental changes happening around the world and the effects it is having on the Earth. Although the Earth has always had natural disasters, we are now in grave danger of tipping the balance to the point of no return. Never before in our lifetime has humankind destroyed the one thing that has kept us alive, the great Rainforests of the Earth.

The real killer to the environment is carbon dioxide. Those of you not aware of the process and believe me, not many people are, carbon dioxide that is emitted into the air from sources such as transport, machinery and industrial pollution and an increasing population and with such a build up of chemical emissions, they need to go somewhere.

Due to drilling for oil and precious stones and the increasing supply for timber, the rainforests are being destroyed at an alarming rate. Now the trees do a miraculous job for us, they suck up the carbon dioxide and release oxygen which in turn cleans the air for us to breath. With all these factors, we are in fact creating a huge greenhouse effect and it does not stop there.

With trees being felled each day, whether in one region or another, this has a major impact globally. As the forests are deluged with over a metre of rainfall a year, this is evaporated into the atmosphere and cools the Earth. As each tree falls, this process is interrupted and the Earth's global temperature goes up another percentage of a degree. This has an adverse affect on the polar ice caps which begin to melt more rapidly.

With the Earth heating up and the ice caps melting, sea levels are rising and cities being flooded, possibly disappearing over night. There is also another danger within the seas of the Earth.

The ocean 'conveyor belt' transfers warm, less salty water from the Pacific to the Atlantic as a shallow current and returns cold, more salty, water from the Atlantic to the Pacific as a deep current. (Source: Hothouse Earth - The Greenhouse Effect & Gaia by John Gribbin, 1990)

The conveyor belt is in danger as with the Poles melting, more and more fresh water is being released into the system and when the system switches off, Europe will freeze in an Ice Age! There is already evidence of this happening now. Scientists have studied the cod fish which lives in salty water. They found that where the fish once thrived, they now do not and investigations have revealed that this is due to fresh water in the once salty water, hence the cod fish cannot survive. We have all the evidence in front of us, yet we still choose to close our eyes to the biggest problem we will ever know on Earth.

Recently the World's richest nations gathered at the G8 summit to discuss emissions and although there are steps being made in the right direction to cut emissions, not enough is being done. The rainforests are still being destroyed and we need to act NOW. The governments of the World are not doing enough to secure the planets survival, we are always finding a cure instead of prevention but this has to change. We as the people of this Earth all have a voice and we need to use it to come together to save the great forests, they save our lives and without them we have no hope at all.