CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING

Ethanol and Biofuels: Almost Everything You Need to Know

Stephen 1 Must Read, Africa, Agriculture/Food, Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, developing world, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Food, Forests, Global Issues and Perspectives, global warming, News, Science/Tech, sustainability, water, WILDLIFE , , , , , , , , , ,

“The U.S. has led the fight to stem global hunger, now we are creating hunger,” said Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute.

Series of the latest articles that provide almost everything you need to know about why ethanol and biofuels will not reduce global warming but simply drive up fuel and food costs.

maize - mexicoEthanol Worse Than Gasoline

Only Green Part of Most Biofuels is the Wealth (Subsidies) They Generate

Ethanol: The Great Big Green Fraud

International Enviro Standards Needed for Biofuels

Six Experts On Why Ethanol is a Dumb Idea

Food & Fuel: Can Sorghum Be The New Magic Bullet Biofuel??

Biofuels: Another Good Reason to Hate American Policy

(Cellulosic) Greenest Ethanol Still Unproven

Massive subsidies to oil companies continue – Podcast

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, economics, Energy ,

redeyePodcast from REDEYE RADIO:

Oil companies are some of the most profitable corporations in the world. Yet they receive between 20 and 40 billion dollars a year in subsidies, according to a report produced for the OECD by Earth Track, an independent energy information research organisation in Boston, Massachusetts.

LORRAINE CHISHOLM interviews Stephen Leahy an environmental journalist who documented these facts in a recent article. Listen to podcast

Read article: ‘Bailout’ for Oil Companies $20-40 Billion (and maybe more) every year

Speaking of subsidies, here’s my articles on ethanol and biofuels :

Quotes From Six Experts On Ethanol

Biofuels: Another Good Reason to Hate American Policy

Ethanol: The Great Big Green Fraud

Record $Financing For Biofuels, Not Food


Indigenous Wisdom Against Climate Change

Stephen Alaska, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Indigenous People, sustainability

1993_-_carrie_dannBy Stephen Leahy*

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 28 (Tierramérica**) – While industrialised countries like Canada continue to emit ever-higher levels of greenhouse-effect gases, indigenous peoples around the world are working to survive and adapt to an increasingly dangerous climate.

Over millennia, indigenous peoples have developed a large arsenal of practices that are of potential benefit today for coping with climate change, including some holistic and refreshingly practical ideas.

“Why not give automobiles and planes a day of rest? And then later on, two days of rest. That would cut down on pollution,” suggested Carrie Dann, an elder from the Western Shoshone Nation, whose ancestral lands extend across the western United States.

Dann, winner of the 1993 Right Livelihood Award – known as the Alternative Nobel Prize – for her efforts to protect ancestral lands, made her proposal before the 400 delegates gathered in Anchorage, Alaska, Apr. 20-24 for the Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change.

Dann warned that Mother Nature is getting warmer and the “fever” needed to be cured. “We see many range (grassland) fires in my territory, it is getting so hot,” she said. Continue reading →

Native Peoples Sound Dire Warning On Climate

Stephen Alaska, Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Indigenous People

cracked-earthBy Stephen Leahy*

Drought and hotter weather are making it very difficult to grow the staple crop of maize in most regions of Mexico.

ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 22 (IPS) – Humanity’s hot carbon breath is not just melting the planet’s polar regions, it is disrupting natural systems and livelihoods around the world, indigenous people reported this week at a global meeting on climate change in Anchorage, Alaska.

“We indigenous people are the prow of the ship of humanity in the oncoming waves of climate change,” said Vanessa Marsh of the small Pacific island of Niue.

Indigenous people are here to alert humanity and lead the way in healing Earth, Marsh, a youth delegate, told more than 400 representatives of world’s indigenous peoples here.

Coastal erosion, mud slides, longer droughts and more severe hurricanes are just some of the impacts of climate change affecting the Caribbean region, Chief Charles Williams of the Kalinago people on the island of Dominica told the U.N.-affiliated Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change.

“Most indigenous people live on the margins…their ‘purses’ are not as strong as others when it comes to coping with climate change,” Williams said. Continue reading →

Indigenous Peoples Demand Greater Role in Climate Debate

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Global Issues and Perspectives, Indigenous People, News

native-windmill-art

By Stephen Leahy*


ANCHORAGE, Alaska, Apr 20 (Tierramérica) – While indigenous peoples from around the world are meeting in this Alaskan city to seek a greater role in global climate negotiations, the rapidly warming Arctic is forcing some Inuit villages to be relocated.

“We have centuries of experience in adapting to the climate and our traditional lifestyles have very low carbon footprints,” Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, an indigenous leader from the Philippines and chair of the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, told Tierramérica.

Carbon-based gases are the principal cause of the greenhouse effect, which leads to climate change. The excessive release of these gases, like carbon dioxide and methane, comes from human activities: the combustion of fossil fuels in industry and transportation, and emissions from livestock production and deforestation.

Some 400 indigenous people, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and observers from 80 nations, are gathered in Anchorage, Alaska for the Apr. 20-24 U.N.-affiliated Indigenous Peoples’ Global Summit on Climate Change.

They will discuss and synthesise ways that traditional knowledge can be used to both mitigate and adapt to climate change.

“Indigenous peoples have contributed the least to the global problem of climate change, but will almost certainly bear the greatest brunt of its impact,” said Patricia Cochran, chair of both the Inuit Circumpolar Council and the April Summit. Continue reading →

Earth’s Arctic Freezer Turning Into Hothouse

Stephen arctic, CANADA, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Energy

meltwater-ponds-on-sea-ice-off-coburg-island-nunavut-canada-arctic-warming-has-been-associated-with-a-rapid-decline-in-arctic-summer-sea-ice-extent-image-credit-sandy-briggs1By Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Apr 10 (IPS) – The world is losing its northern freezer as Arctic winter ice is in sharp decline, NASA scientists reported this week. Even with below average winter temperatures, Arctic ice is thinner and covers less area than it did a decade ago.

Arctic sea ice is the cooling mechanism for the global climate system. As it declines and the region warms – already three to five degrees Celsius warmer – then inevitably there are local, regional and hemispheric climate impacts.

“We’ve already lost one third of the summer ice cover since the 1980s. There are already impacts from this,” says Ron Kwok of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena.

“A completely ice-free summer by 2013 is not impossible,” Kwok said in a telephone news conference. “You would have been laughed out the room if you suggested this five years ago.”

The new study shows that the maximum extent of the 2008-2009 winter sea ice cover was the fifth-lowest since researchers began collecting such information 30 years ago. The past six years have produced the six lowest maximums in that record.

More stunning, and indicative of the rapid warming of the region, is the decline in the thick, hard-to-melt multi-year ice, says Walter Meier, research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado. Multiyear ice is ice that is two or more years old and therefore doesn’t melt in the summer.

“Less than 10 percent is multiyear now. It used to be 30 percent in 1981,” Meier said at the news conference.

via ENVIRONMENT: Earth’s Arctic Freezer Turning Into Hothouse.

Global Warming Puts Food Supplies At Risk, New Green Revolution Needed

Stephen Africa, Agriculture/Food, Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, Food, Organic , , ,

cattle-oz-rslBy Stephen Leahy

UXBRIDGE, Canada, Apr 2 (IPS) – Don’t forget about agriculture in the upcoming global negotiations to combat climate change, experts warn. Not only is farming most at risk in an increasingly variable and tempestuous climate, it is also a major emitter of greenhouse gases.

But with the right policies in place, agriculture could both continue to feed the world and play a crucial role in solving the climate problem.

“Agriculture has been missing in the run-up talks to Copenhagen,” says Mark Rosegrant of the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

The nations of the world will meet in Copenhagen this December to hammer out a new climate treaty to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and establish a fund to help poorer countries adapt. The complex process began in 2007 at the Bali talks, continued in Poznan, Poland in 2008 and is ongoing this week in Bonn.

Agriculture accounts for about 15 percent of human emissions of GHGs, IFPRI says, although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change puts it higher at 25 percent. Much of those emissions come from developed countries that rely heavily on fossil fuels and fertilisers and raise far more methane-emitting livestock.

With climate change the world is facing reduced yields of up to 20 percent in maize and rice by the year 2050, Rosegrant told IPS. Much of that yield decline will be in the developing world, mainly because sub-tropical and tropical regions are expected to be hit hardest by significant changes in water availability and warmer temperatures.

Climate change could mean ever-rising food prices and therefore significant investments are needed in agricultural research to help countries cope with the coming changes, he says: “We’re trying to work out what the costs for adaptation in agriculture might be.” Continue reading →

Skin Would Fry in 5 Mins Without Ozone Treaty says NASA – Precautionary Lesson for Climate

Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, News, ozone

ozone-hole-sept-08Disaster avoided.   If the world didn’t agree to cut back on ozone destroying chemicals that produce the annual polar ozone holes dangerous UV radiation would have increased a whopping 650 per cent by the year 2065 a new NASA study has found. By then two thirds of the protective ozone layer would have vanished creating a global ozone hole.

Five minutes of summer sun would burn skin in the mid-latitude regions like New York, London, Toronto. And it would be far worse in other regions.

And because those same chemicals are potent greenhouse gases the Earth would be 4 degrees warmer by then well past the critical tipping tip of 2 degrees scientists say we dare not exceed.

The world would have become a “real horrible place”, said NASA scientists.

I covered this in an IPS article last September  and how world leaders took a precautionary and averted catastrophe:

“In hard economic times, protecting the environment is often seen as a luxury — or ignored completely. But had that attitude prevailed 20 years ago when it came to taking action to protect the ozone layer, skin cancer rates would have soared and climate change would be even more dramatic than it is today. “

Tourism Can Reduce Poverty But Some Places Must Be Off-Limits

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, News, sustainability

img_0330By Stephen Leahy*

QUEBEC CITY, Mar 24 (Tierramérica) – More than ever before, global tourism must play its part in sustainable development and poverty alleviation, stated experts at an international symposium in this Canadian city.

But others wonder if tourism can be truly sustainable when it involves flying thousands of kilometres to reach some “carbon-neutral” eco-lodge in the jungle.

Climate change is a major concern and air transport makes a significant contribution, sustainable tourism expert Costas Christ told more than 500 attendees of the International Symposium on Sustainable Tourism Development, Mar. 16-19.

However, Christ said, it is also important to tell the public that international tourism has played a major role in preserving biodiversity and in conservation in general.

“Without tourism, the Pantanal (in South America), the world’s largest wetland, would have just turned into a major cattle feed-lot for McDonald’s,” said Christ, a former board chair of The International Ecotourism Society.

If it weren’t for tourism, Africa would not have its game parks and nature preserves, and the Coral Triangle (which encompasses the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste) would have been devastated by overfishing, he continued.

“Tourism is not the problem; the challenge is how to do tourism right,” Christ told Tierramérica in an interview. Continue reading →

Acid Oceans and Seas Without Fish – Hot New Doc

Stephen Biodiversity, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, OCEAN ,

seachange-header

Lots of buzz about a hot, new documentary film A Sea Change which is about ocean acidification and its potential to empty the oceans of fish. I haven’t seen the film although I had a chance to at a seafood conference in San Diego last month but couldn’t face a visual version of a topic I’ve written about since 2006.  I have enough trouble sleeping as it is… 

Turns out the filmmakers got the idea to make the film by ‘googling’  “ocean acidification” in Nov 2006 and found very few entries. I guess my 2006 articles were among the first-ever articles published about ocean acidification and how climate change is a major threat to the global oceans. — Stephen

July 5 2006

Ailing Reefs Face New Threat of Acidity
By Stephen Leahy

Climate change is making the world’s oceans more acidic, seriously endangering marine ecosystems, including coral reefs. 

Carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have already made the oceans 30 percent more acidic than they have been in millions of years, according to a new report by leading scientists. And the rate of acidification is accelerating as the oceans absorb more than two billion tonnes of carbon each year from the atmosphere. 

“This is a dramatic change in the world’s oceans, a change that marine organisms have never dealt with before,” said Joan Kleypas, the report’s lead author and a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. 

“The oceans have changed and they are becoming more acidic. There is no debate about this,” Kleypas told IPS. Continue reading →