POZNAN, Poland (Reuters) - Thousands of climate protesters, some dressed as polar bears, devils or penguins, demanded on Saturday swifter action from the United Nations to combat global warming.
Outside U.N.-led talks in Poland aimed at pushing 187 countries toward stiffer targets to fight global warming, some 1,000 demonstrators said governments were risking the planet's future by delaying action to squabble over who was to blame.
There will be two bills, with one seeking to authorize a $150 billion grant program for technologies that promote energy efficiency or harness the wind and sun. The second is a scaled- back version of a climate bill she attempted to pass in the Senate last summer, the California Democrat told reporters at a news conference today in Washington.
Boxer’s effort to get a so-called cap-and-trade bill for carbon-dioxide emissions through the Senate failed last year when it fell short of the votes necessary to cut off debate. Obama’s plan announced during his campaign would use revenue from emissions credits bought by greenhouse gas-emitting companies to pay for the $150 billion in technology development.
IF THE ADVANCE publicity is anything to go by, Not Evil Just Wrong will do for Al Gore what Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 did for George W Bush.
"This is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don't want you to see," declares the website for the latest 1work by film-makers Ann McElhinney and Phelim McAleer.Our impact on Earth's climate might be even more profound than we realise. Before we started pumping massive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet was on the brink of entering a semi-permanent ice age, two researchers have proposed.
Had we not radically altered the atmosphere, say Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh, UK, and William Hyde of the University of Toronto in Canada, the current cycle of ice ages and interglacials would have given way in the not-too-distant future to an ice age lasting millions of years.
FRESNO, Calif. (AP) - Lowering air pollution in Southern California and the San Joaquin Valley would save more lives annually than ending all motor vehicle fatalities in the two regions, according to a new study.
The study, which examined the costs of air pollution in two areas with the worst levels in the country, also said meeting federal ozone and fine particulate standards could save $28 billion annually in health care costs, school absences, missed work and lost income potential from premature deaths.
The price tag amounts to $1,600 annually per person in the San Joaquin Valley and $1,250 in the South Coast Air Basin.
BEIJING (AP) - Thick brown clouds of soot, particles and chemicals stretching from the Persian Gulf to Asia threatens health and food supplies in the world, the U.N. reported Thursday, citing what it called the newest threat to the global environment.
The regional haze, known as atmospheric brown clouds, contributes to glacial melting, reduces sunlight, and helps create extreme weather conditions that impact agricultural production, according to the report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.
The huge plumes have darkened 13 megacities in Asia_ including Beijing, Shanghai, Bangkok, Cairo, Mumbai and New Delhi—sharply "dimming" the amount of light by as much as 25 percent in some places.
THE inspiring and transformative choice by the American people to elect Barack Obama as our 44th president lays the foundation for another fateful choice that he — and we — must make this January to begin an emergency rescue of human civilization from the imminent and rapidly growing threat posed by the climate crisis.
The world authority on the climate crisis, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, now says that the evidence is “unequivocal.” To those who are still tempted to dismiss the increasingly urgent alarms from scientists around the world, ignore the melting of the north polar ice cap and all of the other apocalyptic warnings from the planet itself, and who roll their eyes at the very mention of this existential threat to the future of the human species, please wake up. Our children and grandchildren need you to hear and recognize the truth of our situation, before it is too late.The one-time presidential contender turned environmental champion told Web 2.0 Summit goers in San Francisco Friday that technology has provided tools to save the planet while creating jobs and stimulating the crippled economy.
"The young people who have been inspired by Barack Obama's campaign and the movement that powered Barack Obama's campaign want a purpose," Gore said.
"One of the reasons we were all thrilled Tuesday night is it was pretty obvious this was a collectively intelligent decision."
Just as some people lose their appetites in warm weather, mushrooms and other fungi that feast on dead vegetation in the soil in dry northern areas like Alaska and Siberia eat less and produce less climate-warming carbon dioxide when the temperature climbs, researchers reported on Monday.
"The temperature is reducing their ability to eat the carbon in the soil," said Steven Allison of the University of California, Irvine. "These are fungi that live up in Alaska, which is typically a pretty cold place, so they may not be adapted to deal with these higher temperatures.
The dry mushrooms' ability to decrease carbon emissions might offset 10 percent of the entire amount of carbon dioxide released by human activities, Allison said.
Because the fungi in the dry northern areas are off their feed, they process less of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, leaving more of it locked in the soil and less of it in the atmosphere, Allison and his colleagues wrote in the journal Global Change Biology.
NEW YORK (Reuters) - A rock found mostly in Oman can be harnessed to soak up the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide at a rate that could help slow global warming, scientists say.
When carbon dioxide comes in contact with the rock, peridotite, the gas is converted into solid minerals such as calcite.
Snow fell as the House of Commons debated Global Warming yesterday - the first October fall in the metropolis since 1922. The Mother of Parliaments was discussing the Mother of All Bills for the last time, in a marathon six hour session.
In order to combat a projected two degree centigrade rise in global temperature, the Climate Change Bill pledges the UK to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. The bill was receiving a third reading, which means both the last chance for both democratic scrutiny and consent.
Recently the American media has begun to notice the odd incongruity of saturation media coverage here which insists that global warming is both man-made and urgent, and a British public which increasingly doubts either to be true. 60 per cent of the British population now doubt the influence of humans on climate change, and more people than not think Global Warming won't be as bad "as people say".
Click HERE for full story
The growing movement to fight global warming includes entertainers and evangelical ministers, scientists and suburban moms. Even both presidential candidates have called for fewer emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gasses that contribute to climate change.
What it doesn't have a lot of is African-Americans. So environmental activists and like-minded politicians are intensifying outreach to blacks by framing their cause as a new frontier in civil rights.
"Engaging the community will require the churches," Cartwright said. "A lot of what happens in the African-American community starts in our churches."
Scores of conservative evangelical leaders have become convinced that protecting the environment is a religious and moral issue, widely referred to as "creation care." But Cartwright said she expects black churches to frame the issue in terms of environmental justice: the poor and minorities are disproportionately affected by climate change.
Blow to image of ‘green’ reusable nappy
Marie Woolf, Whitehall Editor
A government report that found old-fashioned reusable nappies damage the environment more than disposables has been hushed up because ministers are embarrassed by its findings.
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has instructed civil servants not to publicise the conclusions of the £50,000 nappy research project and to adopt a “defensive” stance towards its conclusions.
The report found that using washable nappies, hailed by councils throughout Britain as a key way of saving the planet, have a higher carbon footprint than their disposable equivalents unless parents adopt an extreme approach to laundering them.
To reduce the impact of cloth nappies on climate change parents would have to hang wet nappies out to dry all year round, keep them for years for use on younger children, and make sure the water in their washing machines does not exceed 60C.
The conclusions will upset proponents of real nappies who have claimed they can help save the planet.
Restricted Whitehall documents, seen by The Sunday Times, show that the government is so concerned by the “negative laundry options” outlined in the report, it has told its media managers not to give its conclusions any publicity.
The report found that while disposable nappies used over 2½ years would have a global warming , impact of 550kg of CO2 reusable nappies produced 570kg of CO2 on average. But if parents used tumble dryers and washed the reusable nappies at 90C, the impact could spiral to . 993kg of CO2 A Defra spokesman said the government was shelving plans for future research on nappies.
My aim was to try to live for a month without buying anything new made from plastic or wrapped in plastic. I was able to keep and use the plastic I already owned but if anything ran out I would have to buy a plastic-free replacement.
Plastics are hugely useful and versatile and the goal of the experiment was not to demonise the material itself.The movement of wind-turbine blades creates a vortex of lower air pressure around the blade tips similar to the vortex at the tip of aeroplane wings. Others have suggested that this could be lethal to bats, but until now no-one had carried out necropsies to verify the theory.
Shabecoff’s new book, "Poisoned Profits: How Corporate America Is Poisoning Our Children With Toxic Chemicals," claims to "reveal the frightening and expanding dimension of children’s chronic illnesses in the U.S. and link this epidemic to industrial toxins."
In attacking virtually every sort of industrial chemical, Shabecoff implies that almost all childhood illnesses, failed pregnancies and birth defects are attributable to the "42 billion pounds of chemicals per day" either made in or imported into the U.S.
Contrary to Shabecoff’s claim of deteriorating public health, life expectancy, the most objective standard for measuring health, is the highest it has ever been across all race, age and gender groups, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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The city’s shimmering skyline may wear the label of the world’s energy capital, but deep in Houston’s Dumpsters lies a less glamorous superlative: It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.
Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. Moreover, 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city.
"The technology of the drilling industry may have improved, but offshore drilling is a dirty business and it still leads to oil spills due to failed equipment, aberrant weather or human error on a frequent basis," Feinstein said.
Last year, the industry spilled 2,256 barrels of oil, fuels and chemicals, and during the first half of this year, offshore operators are on a similar course, having spilled 1,114 barrels in five incidents.Global warming “means that if we don’t fix the climate, everything will be destroyed and we won’t be able to survive,” two students wrote. Others found their global warming lessons similarly frightening (all transcriptions are as the students wrote and sent them, uncorrected):
The next time you feel a sharp, cramping pain in your lower abdomen, spare a thought for your personal carbon footprint.
That's the message from Dallas scientists who predict that as the planet warms during the coming century people will sweat more, not drink enough water to compensate, and therefore develop more kidney stonesA team of scientists from Purdue University has identified the top 20 carbon-dioxide producing counties in the country, and because of Houston's large industrial base we're no. 1.
I'm not guessing this is something the Greater Houston Partnership will promote, but it does bolster our standing as the Energy Capital of the World in this heyday for fossil fuels.
As the graphic below demonstrates, Houston is followed by Los Angeles, Chicago, Cleveland and Detroit.
| Purdue |
According to Purdue assistant professor Ken Gurney, who used the Vulcan carbon dioxide inventory project:
Vulcan, which is named for the Roman god of fire, quantifies all of the CO2 that results from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and gasoline. It also tracks the hourly outputs at the level of factories, power plants, roadways, neighborhoods and commercial districts.
"It's interesting that the top county, Harris, Texas, is on the list because of industrial emissions, but the second highest CO2 emitting county, Los Angels, California, is on the list because of automobile emissions," Gurney says. "So it's not just cars, and it's not just factories, that are emitting the carbon dioxide, but a combination of different things."
The majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans - and many others believe scientists are exaggerating the problem, according to an exclusive poll for The Observer.
The results have shocked campaigners who hoped that doubts would have been silenced by a report last year by more than 2,500 scientists for the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which found a 90 per cent chance that humans were the main cause of climate change and warned that drastic action was needed to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
Full Story HERE
James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.
Hansen will use the symbolically charged 20th anniversary of his groundbreaking speech to the US Congress - in which he was among the first to sound the alarm over the reality of global warming - to argue that radical steps need to be taken immediately if the "perfect storm" of irreversible climate change is not to become inevitable.
Speaking before Congress again, he will accuse the chief executive officers of companies such as ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy of being fully aware of the disinformation about climate change they are spreading.
In an interview with the Guardian he said: "When you are in that kind of position, as the CEO of one the primary players who have been putting out misinformation even via organisations that affect what gets into school textbooks, then I think that's a crime."
Rep. Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), member of the House Appropriations Committee and one of the most-ardent opponents of off-shore drilling
"We (the government) should own the refineries. Then we can control how much gets out into the market."
Refinery expansions in the U.S. focused on processing crude from Canadian oil sands show an entrenched reliance on fossil fuels even as concerns grow about the effects of oil sands production, an environmental group said Wednesday.
Such multibillion-dollar investments illustrate a long-term shift in refining toward so-called heavy oil, which requires more energy-intensive production and prompts worries about emissions and waste runoff, the report's authors said.
Houston Chronicle: Report decries oil sands waste
OK, if oil sands are so bad, let us drill in Alaska and off the coasts of Florida and California!
The cool thing is that oil sands processing is leading to the first new grassroots refineries in America in 30+ years. One company announced yesterday a $10 billion refinery in South Dakota to process oil sands crude.
Houston Chronicle: S.D. voters OK plan for first new U.S. refinery in 30 years
John Hoffmeister from Shell Oil: I can guarantee to the American people because of the inaction of the United States Congress ever increasing prices unless the demand comes down and the five dollars will look like a very low price in the years to come if we are prohibited from finding new reserves and new opportunities to increase supplies.The oil executives answered: "We've seen this movie before. It's called Hugo Chavez in Venezuela."
Rep. Maxine Waters: And, guess what this liberal will be all about? This liberal will be about socializing... uh, will be about, basically taking over and the government running all of your companies.
The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service estimates that the polar bear population is currently at 20,000 to 25,000 bears, up from as low as 5,000-10,000 bears in the 1950s and 1960s. A 2002 U.S. Geological Survey of wildlife in the Arctic Refuge Coastal Plain noted that the polar bear populations “may now be near historic highs.” The alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. And the methodology of these computer models is being challenged by many scientists and forecasting experts. (LINK)
