Time To Panic Over Climate Change

11/02/2008 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, News

UK-based jurno Gwynne Dyer suggests it is time to panic over climate change and cites plenty of evidence (nearly all of which you can find on this site) including southern Africa losing 30 per cent of its corn crop as climate gets hotter and drier there.

Dyer goes on to say:

The two Democratic candidates for the presidency in the United States promise 80 per cent cuts in emissions by 2050, and John McCain for the Republicans promises 50 per cent cuts by then.

Nobody points out such a leisurely approach condemns the world to a global temperature regime at least three or four degrees Celsius (5.5 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than today.

Nobody points out those are average global temperatures which take into account the relatively cool air over the oceans. Continue reading →

Ethanol Worse Than Gasoline

09/02/200806/05/2009 Stephen Agriculture/Food, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ECOLOGY, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, Forests, News

oil-palm-seedling-in-burned-peat-forest-wetland-international.jpg

By Stephen Leahy
Feb 8 (IPS) – Biofuels are making climate change worse, not better, according to two new studies which found that total greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels are far higher than those from burning gasoline because biofuel production is pushing up food prices and resulting in deforestation and loss of grasslands.

“Emissions from ethanol are 93 percent higher than gasoline,” said David Tilman, an ecologist at the University of Minnesota and co-author of one of the papers published Thursday in the journal Science.

“The bottom line is that using good farmland for biofuels increases greenhouse emissions,” he said.
Continue reading →

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

05/02/200801/04/2009 Stephen Agriculture/Food, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, developing world, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News biofuel, food prices, subsidies

By Stephen Leahy

Feb 4 (IPS) – Biofuels have quickly turned from environmental saviour to just another mega-scale get-rich quick scheme. Countries and regions without their own oil reserves to tap now see their farms, peatlands and forests as potential “oil fields” — shallow but renewable lakes of green oil.

Renewable does not mean sustainable, and in most cases the only green part of biofuel is the wealth they generate.

Not surprisingly, given the record high oil prices, worldwide investment in bioenergy reached 21 billion dollars in 2007, according to the U.N. Environment Programme. The Inter-American Development Bank announced 3 billion dollars for investment in private sector biofuel projects — mainly in Brazil — while the World Bank said it had 10 billion dollars available in 2007.

Meanwhile development assistance for food-producing agriculture had fallen to 3.4 billion dollars in 2004 — with the World Bank’s share less than 1 billion dollars, according to the Bank’s own World Development Report on Agriculture released in October 2007. And most of this financial assistance was spent on subsidising use of chemical fertilisers. Continue reading →

Fidel Castro Endorses “Plan B” To Save Civilization

04/02/2008 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, ENVIRONMENT, News, sustainability

Fidel Castro, yes El Presidente Fidel Castro of Cuba, writes in an Jan 31st article posted in English by the Cuban News Agency about a recent visit with Brazilian President Lula:

“I talked to him, of course, about the climate change, and the little attention paid by a great number of leaders of the industrialized world to this issue.

When I spoke with him on January 15 in the afternoon, I could not make reference to the article that would be published only three days later, written by Stephen Leahy from Toronto. This article announces a new book by Lester Brown called Mobilizing to Save Civilization. “

Castro goes on to quote extensively — with a few translation errors — from my IPS article: How to Halt Collapse of Civilization – new bk.

Who knew that Castro was deeply concerned about climate change? And he aptly summarizes the complete absence of discussion about climate change during the US Presidential primaries. Sure the economy may be in trouble, but there is no economy without a stable climate system.
See also: Plan B 3.0: Mobilising to Save Civilisation

Organic Cure for Brain-damaging Pesticides Found in US Children

04/02/200804/02/2008 Stephen Agriculture/Food, Health, News, Organic, sustainability

Children eating a normal diet have low levels of organophosphates — the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II — according to a recent research says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

But once they switched to eating only organic foods these pesticides disappeared within 36 hours from the kids’ bodies.

Malathion and chlorpyrifos were the principal chemicals Emory University’s School of Public Health study found. Death or serious health problems have been documented in thousands of cases with high-level exposures. But impacts at low levels have been more difficult to determine. Animal studies do show chronic dietary exposure to chlorpyrifos results in neurological impairment i.e. brain and nervous system affects.

The P-I article also details what foods have highest levels pesticides.

I wrote a detailed article about an earlier study by Emory U: Overweight? Hungry? Blame “Hollow Food”

Other related stories about organic foods/agriculture:

Food Additives Make Kids Hyperactive – Organic Better?

Organic Agriculture Reduces Climate Change, Poverty and Hunger

Organic Provides 3X More Food Per Acre in Poor Countries – podcast

Africa, South Asia Face Mega-Famines

01/02/200801/02/2008 Stephen Africa, Agriculture/Food, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, developing world, News

By Stephen Leahy

Feb 1 (IPS) – Climate change will cause major disruptions in the global food system, and adaptation to those changes needs to begin immediately, experts say.

Otherwise one-fifth of the world’s population could starve and millions of others become climate refugees, forced by heat and drought to abandon their lands and hunt for food elsewhere in the coming decades.

To prevent this nightmarish future, researcher David Lobell says the world community should focus its efforts where climate threats are likely to make the greatest impacts.

“We used historical data to determine what food-producing regions of the world were most sensitive to changes in temperature and rainfall,” said Lobell, author of the study published in the journal Science today.

“Impoverished regions of Southern Africa and South Asia will be hit first and hardest by climate change,” Lobell told IPS from his office at Stanford University’s Programme on Food Security and the Environment. Continue reading →

The 2% Climate Solution – WEBCAST WED

30/01/2008 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING

To avoid dangerous levels of climate change the US, Canada and rest of the developed world need to cut roughly 2% of current emission levels of CO2 every year for the next forty years.

It’s not a tough as it sounds.

Find out tonight, Wed Jan 30 and 8 pm EST by listening in to live and free webcast of experts to explain what it would take for the US to make a 2% cut in emissions each year for the next decade.

Continue reading →

Border Wall Condemns America’s Last Jaguars to Extinction

28/01/200808/05/2009 Stephen ECOLOGY, Mexico, News, WILDLIFE

By Stephen Leahy*

In announcing that they are giving up efforts to help the jaguar population recover, U.S. authorities have handed a death sentence to the big cat that was once plentiful along the border with Mexico.

Jan 28 (Tierramérica).- Jaguars have no place in the United States, although a handful still roam the Southwest. Environmentalists suspect the real reason U.S. officials will let the jaguar become extinct is the “security” wall being built along the Mexican border.

Ecologists have long warned that the border wall — actually a series of walls — will have big impacts on wildlife and the region’s fragile and unique ecology.

“There is no question that jaguars (Panthera onca) in the U.S. and northern Mexico would be significantly affected by the wall,” says Joe Cook, expert in mammal biology at the University of New Mexico.

“As best we can tell, the few remaining U.S. jaguars are part of a larger population based in Northern Mexico,” Cook told Tierramérica.

Continue reading →

Biofuels: Another Good Reason to Hate American Policy

25/01/200806/05/2009 Stephen Agriculture/Food, CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, developing world, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News, sustainability

By Stephen Leahy

Jan 25 (IPS) – U.S. biofuels production is driving up food prices around the world, giving billions of poor people a very good reason to hate U.S. policy, say environmentalists.

“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, an environmental think tank in Washington.

The booming U.S. ethanol industry is diverting enormous amounts food into fuel: 81 million tonnes of grain in 2007 and 114 million tonnes this year, equaling 28 percent of the entire U.S. grain harvest, Brown told IPS.

Previous eras of high grain prices were mainly the result of bad weather, but these price hikes are the result of government policy, he said.”Grain prices are at record or near-record highs and they will go higher,” he said. “We might be the first society in history to use public tax dollars to drive up its own food prices.” Continue reading →

Carbon Taxes Coming; Corpos Get Ready for Low-Carbon Diet

24/01/200825/01/2008 Stephen CLIMATE CHANGE/GLOBAL WARMING, economics, Energy, ENVIRONMENT, News

By Stephen Leahy

Jan 21 (IPS) – With a tax on carbon emissions appearing to be inevitable, some of the world’s largest corporations will be asking their suppliers to report on their carbon emissions as part of future reduction efforts.

“Investors are demanding that companies know what their carbon emissions are and consumers want companies to be green,” said Paul Dickinson, CEO of the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), an independent not-for-profit organisation in Britain that is coordinating the effort.

“A global price for carbon is coming and we are helping companies to prepare to operate in a carbon-constrained world,” Dickinson told IPS. Continue reading →