Science vs Politics at the Edge of the North Pole
By Stephen Leahy
NY-ÅLESUND, Svalbard, Norway, Jun 14 (IPS)
Spectacular views of mountains and glaciers here in the world’s most northerly permanent human settlement contrasted with business and political leaders’ pessimism and concern about the enormous gap between the action on climate that science deems necessary and what politics considers realistic.
“We must push beyond the politically feasible,” said Tora Aasland, Norway’s minister of research and higher education.
“Here we are at the edge of the North Pole where climate change is easier to see…How do we communicate the urgency of our situation?” Aasland asked several dozen attendees at a recent high-level symposium in Ny-Ålesund, on the western coast of Spitsbergen Island about 1,200 kilometers from the North Pole.
She emphasised that we already know what to do and how to do it, including reducing fossil fuel energy use, improving energy efficiency, and investing in new technologies like carbon capture and storage.
Taking action on climate is imperative and an ambitious international agreement is urgently needed based on what scientists say is required to stabilise the climate system, participants concluded in a final statement. However, the current series of international climate negotiations in Bonn, Germany have bogged down and are on the edge of collapse, several participants noted. Read the rest of this entry »
“I Hope We Are Civilised When Climate Disaster Hits”
Stephen Leahy interviews Gaia Founder JAMES LOVELOCK*
TORONTO, Jun 5 (Tierramérica)
“When the first great climate disaster strikes, I hope we will all pull together just as if our nation were being invaded,” says British scientist James Lovelock in this exclusive Tierramérica interview.
As the world marks International Environment Day Friday, Lovelock argues that as the climate warms and the carbon content of the atmosphere soars, humanity is facing a far grimmer future that will be upon us sooner than any of the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC).
A chemist, physician and biophysicist, Lovelock is one of the world’s foremost environmental scientists and founder of the Gaia Hypothesis, which describes the planet as a living organism, a complex system in which the components of the biosphere and atmosphere interact to regulate and sustain life.
Although his ideas often feed controversy, Lovelock has wide-ranging scientific credentials. As an inventor, he holds more than 50 patents, including the first devices for detecting the presence of ozone-depleting CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) and pesticide residues in the environment. Read the rest of this entry »
Alien Species Cause Extinctions, Increase Poverty, Erode Ecosystems
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 21 (IPS) - Continent-hopping alien species are worsening poverty and threaten the agriculture, forestry, fisheries and natural systems that underpin millions of livelihoods in developing countries, warn biodiversity experts.
“The livelihoods for 90 percent of people in Africa directly rely on natural resources such as marine coastal biodiversity,” said Ahmed Djoghlaf, executive secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).
“Around the world more than 1.6 billion people depend directly on forests for their survival,” he told IPS from Montreal.
Biodiversity is not just fuzzy animals and pretty birds. It is the diversity of life on Earth that comprises ecosystems which in turn provide vital ecosystem services including food, fibre, clean water and air.
“Biodiversity is poor countries’ most precious asset,” Djoghlaf stressed. Read the rest of this entry »
Extraordinary Abundance of Life in Oceans Past
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 26 (IPS) - Imagine large pods of mighty blue whales and orcas darkening the waters off Cornwall, England, while closer to shore blue sharks and thresher sharks chase herds of harbour porpoise and dolphins.
Pure fantasy? No, in fact that extraordinary abundance of marine life off the English coast was the norm for oceans around the world not so long ago, researchers have now documented.
And then humans began to mine the seas of anything worth eating.
“The impact of fishing over the centuries is far larger than anyone thought,” said Poul Holm, a professor at Trinity College in Dublin and global chair of the History of Marine Animals Population (HMAP) project which part of the 10-year Census of Marine Life.
While many valuable species have been fished out in recent years, that has been happening for hundreds of years around the world based on nine years of research by hundreds of experts.
“In looking back 500 to 2,000 years ago, you get a real sense of the impacts of fishing and the cascading effects on marine ecosystems, some of which may be beyond recovery,” Holm told IPS. Read the rest of this entry »
Scientists Build a Macroscope of Life on Earth
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 2 (IPS) - Imagine looking at a Google Maps-like satellite image of the Amazon forest and with a mouse click find out what lives in that bit of forest – what tree and plant species are there, what animals, birds and insects.
You could even look at the DNA of the microbes that live on those insects in this amazing, futuristic online “macroscope of life” on planet Earth.
The information about these Amazonian species, their habitats and even their DNA already exists in most cases. But it is scattered like dry leaves all over the world in dusty museum basements, science labs, libraries and hundreds of electronic databases.
This week, scientists are launching a 10-year global effort to gather and compile the world’s vast storehouse of knowledge about biodiversity into a single online, interactive information system for life on Earth that will take its place alongside the world meteorology data network that pools information to predict the weather. Read the rest of this entry »
New Way to Give Public Money to Oil/Gas/Coal Companies: Economic Stimulus Packages
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 29 (IPS) -
Despite the economic slow down, growing numbers of world leaders are calling for urgent action on climate change while many governments used their economic stimulus packages to increase subsidies to the fossil fuel industry.
Consider Europe, with the strongest public commitment to reduce carbon emissions that are causing climate change.
In the past five years, 8 billion U.S. dollars of public money went to Europe’s fossil fuel companies mainly to the natural gas sector. And in May the European Parliament approved an additional 3.35 billion dollars in subsides as part of Europe’s 225 billion dollars economic recovery plan, according to a new research report by Friends of the Earth Europe.
“We Europeans are supposedly leading the world on the path to a new green economy but we’re putting billions of euros into fossil fuel sector that’s taking us in the opposite direction,” Darek Urbaniak of Friends of the Earth Europe.
For complete article see: CLIMATE CHANGE: More Subsidies for Fossil Fuels in Recovery Plans.
Previous article on US taxpayer subsidies to fossil fuel industry (Sept 08) ‘Bailout’ for Oil Companies $20-40 Billion (and maybe more) every year
Snow Cover Turning to Lakes in the Himalayas
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 7 (IPS) – As climate change takes hold, even the mighty Himalayas and Hindu Kush mountain ranges are now losing their snow and ice.
These are the world’s greatest repositories of snow and ice outside of the polar regions, and yet they may melt away in just 20 to 30 years, leaving more than a billion people desperately short of water, experts concluded in San Diego this week.
“There’s been a super-rapid decline in the glaciers of the region,” said Charles Kennel, senior strategist at the University of California San Diego Sustainability Solutions Institute and former director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.
Kennel told IPS that nearly all of the 20,000 glaciers in the Himalaya-Hindu Kush mountain ranges are in retreat and the meltwater from some has created enormous lakes held back by rockslides that will inevitably burst, endangering anyone living in the valleys below. The World Wildlife Fund calculates there are 2,000 glacial lakes forming in Nepal and around 20 are in danger of bursting. Several have already flooded valleys in the past two decades in Nepal and Tibet.
“We are trying to make it known that the Himalayas are to the issue of the world’s water supply problem what the Amazon rain forest is to the issue of deforestation,” he said in reference to the “Ice, Snow, and Water” workshop convened at UC San Diego this week that included scientists from India, Nepal, Singapore and China. Read the rest of this entry »
Deep CO2 Cuts May Be Last Hope for Acid Oceans
(Report from the World Oceans Conference in Indonesia)
By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, May 15 (IPS) –
Ocean acidification offers the clearest evidence of dangers of climate change.
And yet the indisputable fact that burning fossil fuels is slowly turning the oceans into an acid bath has been largely ignored by industrialised countries and their climate treaty negotiators, concluded delegates from 76 countries at the World Oceans Conference in Manado, Indonesia.
Oceans and coastal areas must be on the agenda at the crucial climate talks in Copenhagen in December, they wrote in a declaration. “We must come to the rescue of the oceans,” declared Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono at the opening of high-level government talks on Thursday in the northern city of Manado.
It is fair to say most international climate negotiators aren’t aware of the impacts of climate change on the oceans, said Carl Gustaf Lundin, head of the IUCN’s Global Marine Programme.
“Very few people understand that carbon emissions are making the oceans acidic,” Lundin told IPS.
Bring Back Glass – Ban BPA (bisphenol A) Plastic Containers Now
(This is an important subject but I don’t have time to write a full article on this so here’s my quick take on two new studies — Steve)
77 lucky Harvard student volunteers experienced a nearly 70 percent increase in urinary levels of bisphenol A (BPA), a plastics component and synthetic estrogen linked to cancer, after drinking cold beverages from baby bottles for ONE WEEK. — Research by Harvard University and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) published May 13.
The bottles were made of made of polycarbonate, a common hard plastic often used to make reusable bottles/containers among other things. BPA is used to make most polycarbonate and evidently leaches into the water or whatever is in the container.
Another study published May 12 shows that very small amounts of BPA affects the growth of tadpoles: “Bisphenol A stifles thyroid hormone and slows frog development” — this is an easy to read summary from Environmental Health News.
Bottom Line : “The study confirms past research showing BPA interferes with thyroid hormone (Goto et al. 2006, Iwamuro et al. 2006). It is also consistent with studies that show BPA slows and alters development.”
What you can do:
1. Use Glass or Steel Containers – all liquids taste much better in these
2. Insist that plastic containers for water-pop-soda are banned in your workplace, community, district.
3. Lobby for bottle return deposit systems — These are still in place in much of the world and they work fine.
Other research on this:
Plastic Bottles Leach Estrogen – ‘Healthy’ Mineral Water Contaminated by Plastic
Alaska
Email post test:
Here I am well up the Eagle River near Anchorage Alaska. Could hardly believe it was April!
Stephen Leahy
International Environmental Journalist
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