World-News

"Nothing will benefit human health and increase the chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet." -- Albert Einstein

Informant: NHNE


OMNIVORE MAN
January 1, 2007

Joseph Dillard Writes:

While I am happy to see the rising number of articles on Global Warming at many news sites that are awakening people to the reality of imminent catastrophic change that is upon us, too few articles are making the connection between diet and global warming. Gore doesn't address it in "An Inconvenient Truth." I just read a great call to energy self-sufficiency on Kos and it has nothing on the impact of nutritional decisions on global warming. This is surprising, since the consumption of cows, lambs, chickens, pigs, fish, shrimp, and shellfish is the largest personal contributor to global warming and the one easiest to change, since diet is totally a matter of personal choice.

I think the lack of emphasis on diet has to do with how deeply entrenched eating habits are culturally, socially, and personally, in terms of personal sense of well-being and self-worth. Nevertheless, this is probably going to be the Next Big Awakening. People pretty much are buying the need to change to florescent bulbs and make their next car purchase the most fuel efficient one they can find. They are not yet ready to embrace the idea that they can do without meat and not only do well, but do better than they are doing right now.

Consequently, there needs to be a major educational push addressing this correlation. PETA has some excellent materials to this end to help people envision a happy, healthy vegetarian life:

http://goveg.com/vegetarian101.asp

We are going to witness a revolution in consciousness away from eating animals well before we see man abandon warfare, looking at it in the same way that we presently view those who advocated slavery.

„Klimawandel - dein Brief an Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel vom 11.12.2006“

„Lieber Kollege Bsirske, mit tiefem Bedauern, ja großem Erschrecken haben wir als Gewerkschafts-Mitglieder dein Schreiben (pdf) http://www.soerenjanssen.de/media/2006-12-12-merkel-zuteilungsgesetz-2012.pdf
an Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel zum Thema "Emissionshandel, Zuteilungsgesetz 2008-2012" gelesen. Du forderst die Bundesregierung darin auf, sich den Auflagen der EU-Kommission, den deutschen Allokationsplan nachzubessern, zu widersetzen. Die Argumentation, die du in dem Brief zum Ausdruck bringst, ist nicht nur falsch, sie ist auch gefährlich. Denn einmal lässt du den alten Hut des angeblichen Widerspruchs zwischen Ökonomie und Ökologie wieder aufleben, und zweitens treibst du einen Keil zwischen Gewerkschaften und Umweltbewegung. Aus diesen Gründen halten wir dein Vorgehen für inhaltlich haltlos und strategisch verheerend. Wir fordern dich dringend zu einer Kurskorrektur auf…“ Offener Brief von Gewerkschaftern an den Vorsitzenden der Vereinigten Dienstleistungsgewerkschaft, Frank Bsirske, vom 20. Dezember 2006 (pdf) http://www.soerenjanssen.de/media/Klima-Brief-verdi.pdf


Aus: LabourNet, 2. Januar 2007

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article2116873.ece


Informant: NHNE

By Michael Astor
Associated Press December 29, 2006

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20061230/ap_on_sc/brazil_amazon_warming

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil - Global warming could spell the end of the world's largest remaining tropical rain forest, transforming the Amazon into a grassy savanna before end of the century, researchers said Friday.

Jose Antonio Marengo, a meteorologist with Brazil's National Space Research Institute, said that global warming, if left unchecked, will reduce rainfall and raise temperatures substantially in the ecologically rich region.

"We are working with two scenarios: a worst case and a second, more optimistic one," he said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press.

"The worst case scenario sees temperatures rise by 5 to 8 degrees until
2100, while rainfall will decrease between 15 and 20 percent. This setting will transform the Amazon rain forest into a savanna-like landscape," Marengo said.

That scenario supposes no major steps are taken toward halting global warming and that deforestation continues at its current rate, Marengo said.

The more optimistic scenario supposes governments take more aggressive actions to halt global warming. It would still have temperatures rising in the Amazon region by 3 to 5 degrees Celsius and rainfall dropping by 5 to 15 percent, Marengo said.

"If pollution is controlled and deforestation reduced, the temperature would rise by about 5 degrees Celsius in 2100," said Marengo. "Within this scenario, the rain forest will not come to the point of total collapse."

Marengo's finding were part an 800,000 real ($373,000) study that began two years ago and that will continue until 2010. The study, financed by the World Bank and the British government, seeks to project climatic changes that will effect Brazil over the next 100 years. European governments frequently finance environmental and conservation studies about Brazil's Amazon rain forest.

Sprawling over 1.6 million square miles, the Amazon covers nearly 60 percent of Brazil. Largely unexplored, it contains one-fifth of the world's fresh water and about 30 percent of the world's plant and animal species -- many still undiscovered.

Marengo said he was optimistic that the worst-case scenario could be averted, but he said that would require a major effort by industrialized nations to reduce emissions of so-called greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

He said Brazil should do its part by reducing deforestation and burning in the Amazon region.

Destroying trees through burning contributes to global warming, releasing about 370 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year -- about 5 percent of the world total -- scientists say.

About 20 percent of the rain forest has already been cut down and while the rate of destruction has slowed in recent years, environmentalists say it remains alarmingly high.


Informant: NHNE

RIA Novosti December 28, 2006

http://en.rian.ru/russia/20061228/58020089.html

MOSCOW - This year Russia has registered the highest number of unfavorable and dangerous natural phenomena in the history of meteorological observation, a director of Russia's Hydrometeorology Center said Thursday.

Roman Vilfand said that between January and November, 371 dangerous natural phenomena -- including extreme cold, heat waves, strong winds and driving rains -- were registered throughout Russia.

"The year also ends unusually with the abnormally warm weather in late November and early December, when plants even began to bloom in some areas," Vilfand said.

Earlier, the Federal Service for Hydrometeorology and Environmental Monitoring said extreme deviations in weather patterns were observed before, but over the past decade they have become more and more frequent.

Following near-record low temperatures during last winter's cold spell, which saw the mercury plummet to -31°C (-23.8°F) January 19 -- one degree above the all-time low for Moscow -- European Russia experienced record warm temperatures this month.

But Vilfand said this year's unusually warm start of winter in Russia should not be associated with global warming. Rather, he said, the reason for this year's unusual weather was a strong anticyclone over Greenland, which 'orchestrated' the weather over European Russia.


Informant: NHNE

December 30, 2006 by The Scotsman
(Edinburgh, Scotland)

by Raymond Hainey

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1230-06.htm

ITS collapse was so violent that it was picked up by earthquake monitors
150 miles away - a thundering warning to the world that the Arctic was heating up faster than scientists had imagined.

[foto] his handout photo provided by NASA shows a Modis (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) Image showing the Ayles Ice Shelf collapse, center, in the early afternoon of Aug. 13, 2005. Within days of breaking free, the Ayles Ice Shelf drifted about 30 miles offshore before freezing into the sea ice. A giant ice shelf, covering 41 square miles, had broken off from the Canadian mainland and floated off into the sea.

Yet for 16 months, experts were unaware that the Ayles ice shelf - just one of six remaining in the Canadian Arctic - had drifted off until a scientist began examining old satellite images.

Yesterday, scientists said the dramatic discovery capped a year of new studies, which have revealed that the world is heating up faster than had been thought.

From the slowing Gulf Stream, to the warmest British summer on record, to unusually warm water in the Caribbean, researchers have mapped our rapidly changing climate.

Scientists were yesterday still coming to terms with the im-portance of the Ayles ice shelf collapse.

"This is a dramatic and disturbing event," said Dr Warwick Vincent, an Arctic ice expert at Laval University in Quebec.

"It shows we are losing remarkable features of the Canadian North that have been in place for many thousands of years. We are crossing climate thresholds and these may signal the onset of accelerated change ahead."

Dr Vincent added that he had never seen such a dramatic loss of sea ice, a chunk the size of the Hebridean island of Rum or 11,000 football pitches, in a decade's study of the Arctic.

He said: "It is consistent with climate change. We're not able to connect all the dots, but unusually warm temperatures definitely played a major role."

The Canadian view was backed by Dr Ian Moffatt, a Stirling University climate-change expert, who warned that the Earth appeared to be warming faster than had been thought.

Dr Moffatt called for a massive international effort to develop new, green energy sources before it was too late.

Dr Moffatt said that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) had predicted an increase of one to five deg C over the next 50 to 100 years, but it was beginning to appear that temperature change was at the upper end of the IPCC predictions.

"This ice loss is a serious problem, because it's indicating a bigger breakdown than was predicted," Dr Moffatt said.

But there are solutions, Dr Moffatt stressed: "The key feature is we start looking at alternative energy sources, rather than just talking about it."

Dr Moffatt said the cost of developing cleaner energy could be high, but not as high as once feared. And he warned: "If we don't pay these costs, it will cost us the Earth."

Extensive ice loss could also lead to the extinction of animals such as the polar bear, Dr Moffatt predicted.

And he said that global warming could plunge Scotland into a deep freeze, because huge amounts of fresh water trapped in ice could melt into the Atlantic and kill off the Gulf Stream, which passes past the UK and Ireland and keeps the land temperature up.

Dr Moffatt explained: "If we get a large quantity of ice going into the North Atlantic and it begins to melt, salinity is reduced, it cools the sea and turns off the great ocean currents.

"We could see Edinburgh, which is on the same latitude as Moscow, becoming very cold."

Duncan McLaren, the chief executive of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said the future of the planet looked bleak - but he pointed to rays of hope in
2006.

He said: "This year will go down as the year that the vast majority of people woke up to climate change. People are now seeing the reality of climate change."

THE HEAT IS ON AS ICE MELTS AND ISLANDS VANISH

GLOBAL problems attributed to climate change in 2006 include:

INDIA: Lohachara in the Bay of Bengal, submerged by rising sea levels, was the first inhabited island to be wiped out by global warming.

UK: Britain notched up its highest average temperature since records began in 1659.

EUROPE: The skiing industry in the Alps looks bleak after the warmest successive period for 500 years.

AFRICA: The Sahara desert continues to expand, turning farmland into sand and fuelling civil war in Darfur, Sudan.

US VIRGIN ISLANDS: The Caribbean island group lost nearly half the coral reefs in study sites.

GREENLAND: Glaciers are melting, with a 250 per cent loss of ice.

AUSTRALIA: The bushfire season is starting earlier and burning more fiercely.

Copyright © 2006 The Scotsman


Informant: binstock

Recent Report Blames Loss of Equatorial Ice On Post-'70s Warming

By Charles J. Hanley

Associated Press Sunday,
December 31, 2006; A18

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/29/AR2006122901946.html


Informant: binstock

Taifun in Asien, starke Regenfälle im Süden Afrikas, Hitzewellen in Australien und Nordamerika - die Bilanz für das vergangene Jahr zeigt in vielen Teilen der Welt extreme Wettersituationen.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168738ms26



2006 - Ein Jahr vertaner Chancen für den Umweltschutz

2006 war für den Umwelt- und Verbraucherschutz in Deutschland ein Jahr des Stillstands.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168749ms26



Politische Konflikte 2006

Heidelberger Institut zählt 118 gewaltsame Auseinandersetzungen, davon 35 mit hoher Intensität.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168739ms26



Heute leben 6.589.115.982 Menschen auf der Erde

In der Nacht zum 1. Januar 2007 wird die Weltbevölkerung mit voraussichtlich 6.589.115.982 Menschen einen neuen Höchststand erreichen.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168740ms26

The Toronto Star
December 24, 2006

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/article/164832

The risks of too much city in a crowded world

We are heading for a world of 100-storey office buildings and landscapes of glass and cement that will take humankind to a watershed: the disappearance of the wild

By JEREMY RIFKIN

The coming year marks a great milestone in the human saga, a development similar in magnitude to the agricultural era and the Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, a majority of human beings will be living in vast urban areas, many in megacities and suburban extensions with populations of 10 million or more, according to the United Nations.

We have become "Homo Urbanus." Two hundred years ago, the average person on Earth might meet 200 to 300 people in a lifetime. Today a resident of New York City can live and work among 220,000 people within a 10-minute radius of his home or office in midtown Manhattan.

Only one city in all of history - ancient Rome - boasted a population of more than a million before the 19th century. London became the first modern city with a population over 1 million in 1820.

Today, 414 cities boast populations of a million or more, and there's no end in sight. As long as the human race had to rely on solar flow, the winds and currents and animal and human power to sustain life, the human population remained relatively low to accommodate nature's carrying capacity: the biosphere's ability to recycle waste and replenish resources.

The tipping point was the exhuming of large amounts of stored sun, first in the form of coal deposits, then oil and natural gas. Harnessed by the steam engine and later the internal combustion engine, and converted to electricity and distributed across power lines, fossil fuels allowed humanity to create new technologies that dramatically increased food production and manufactured goods and services.

The unprecedented increase in productivity led to runaway population growth and the urbanization of the world. No one is really sure whether this turning point in human living arrangements ought to be celebrated, lamented or merely acknowledged.

That's because our burgeoning population and urban way of life have been purchased at the expense of vast ecosystems and habitats.

Cultural historian Elias Canetti once remarked that each of us is a king in a field of corpses.

If we were to stop for a moment and reflect on the number of creatures and the amount of Earth's resources and materials we have expropriated and consumed in our lifetime, we would be appalled at the carnage and depletion used to secure our existence. Large populations living in megacities consume massive amounts of the Earth's energy to maintain their infrastructures and daily flow of human activity.

The Sears Tower alone uses more electricity in a single day than the city of Rockford, Ill., with 152,000 people. Even more amazing, our species now consumes nearly 40 per cent of the net primary production on Earth - the amount of solar energy converted to plant organic matter through photosynthesis - even though we make up only one half of 1 per cent of the animal biomass of the planet. This means less for other species to use.

The flip side of urbanization is what we are leaving behind on our way to a world of 100-storey office buildings and high-rise residences and landscapes of glass, cement, artificial light and electronic interconnectivity.

It's no accident that as we celebrate the urbanization of the world, we are quickly approaching another historic watershed: the disappearance of the wild.

Rising population; growing consumption of food, water and building materials; expanding road and rail transport and urban sprawl continue to encroach on the remaining wild, pushing it to extinction. Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today's children, the wild will disappear from the face of the Earth.

The Trans-Amazon Highway, which cuts across the entire expanse of the Amazon rain forest, is hastening the obliteration of the last great wild habitat. Other remaining wild regions, from Borneo to the Congo Basin, are fast diminishing with each passing day, making way for growing human populations in search of living space and resources. It's no wonder that (according to Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson) we are experiencing the greatest wave of mass extinction of animal species in 65 million years. We are losing 50 to 150 species to extinction per day, or between 18,000 and 55,000 species a year.

By 2100, two-thirds of the Earth's remaining species are likely to be extinct. Where does this leave us? Try to imagine 1,000 cities of a million or more just 35 years from now. It boggles the mind and is unsustainable for Earth. I don't want to spoil the party, but perhaps the commemoration of the urbanization of the human race in 2007 might be an opportunity to rethink the way we live. Certainly there is much to applaud about urban life: its rich cultural diversity and social intercourse and its dense commercial activity.

But the question is one of magnitude and scale.

We need to ponder how best to lower our population and develop sustainable urban environments that use energy and resources more efficiently, are less polluting and better designed to foster human-scale living arrangements.

In the great era of urbanization we have increasingly shut off the human race from the rest of the natural world in the belief that we could conquer, colonize and utilize the riches of the planet to ensure our autonomy without dire consequences to us and future generations.

In the next phase of human history, we will need to find a way to reintegrate ourselves into the rest of the living Earth if we are to preserve our own species and conserve the planet for our fellow creatures.

- Jeremy Rifkin is the author of The Age of Access: The New Culture of Hypercapitalism Where All of Life is a Paid-For Experience and president of the Foundation on Economic Trends.


Informant: Scott Munson

By Doug Heiken

December 29, 2006

http://www.registerguard.com/news/2006/12/29/ed.col.heiken.1229.p1.php

Heavy rains this fall and winter have brought the usual problems in the Willamette Valley: backed-up storm drains, leaky roofs and swollen rivers. What wasn't expected was that the Portland Water Bureau would be forced to shut down the Bull Run water supply. Bull Run has supplied Portland with high-quality drinking water since 1895, but this year its water became too dirty to drink.

November's temporary closure was surprising to some, considering that the Bull Run Watershed has long been recognized as one of the nation's cleanest drinking water sources. Indeed, Bull Run has a unique history. The Bull Run Reserve was such a prized commodity that President Theodore Roosevelt signed legislation in 1904 to protect the forest from human entry and all human activities that could degrade it.

Bull Run has been such a reliable source of clean drinking water that it wasn't until the 1996 floods, more than 100 years after Bull Run first began providing water to Portland, that city officials were for the first time forced to temporarily shut down water intakes and turn to an alternate source. Since that first shutdown in 1996, Bull Run has been shut down several more times, including 14 days this November.

What is causing the shutdowns? Is increased rainfall causing more erosion? It turns out we can't blame it entirely on the rain. Rainfall patterns have remained relatively steady over the years. And while Bull Run did receive a couple days of intense rain in early November, monthly rainfall was 8.5 inches below the record set in 1942.

What has changed is not the weather, but Bull Run's forest landscape. Between 1960 and 1990, nearly one-third of the once-pristine Bull Run watershed was clear-cut, leaving behind thousands of stumps and 300 miles of logging roads. These damaging activities, conducted illegally until 1976, reduced Bull Run's capacity to handle the Pacific Northwest rain.

Thanks to an extensive body of science linking the effects of logging and road building to poor water quality, it's fairly easy to pinpoint Bull Run's water quality problems. Scientists know that forest canopy slows the rate at which rain reaches the ground, reducing surface runoff and erosion. Without trees to intercept rainfall and tree roots to stabilize soils, surface erosion and landslides increase, loading streams with sediment. Turbid sediment can cloud entire reservoirs and be stirred up with heavy rains.

Logging roads also pose a significant threat to water quality. Roads literally carved into steep terrain alter the flow of water over and through the earth, increasing its erosive potential. Logging roads, ditches and culverts are often poorly maintained, which only makes the problem worse.

Recognizing these threats, the city of Portland and Oregon's congressional delegation took decisive action in 1996 and 2001 to protect water quality by prohibiting additional logging in the Bull Run Watershed. For this they deserve praise. Restoration efforts are also under way to decommission miles of damaging old logging roads, but it will take time for Bull Run to heal from this damaging legacy.

Bull Run serves as an important lesson for Eugene, which gets its drinking water from the McKenzie River watershed. Like Bull Run, much of the McKenzie watershed is public forest land. And, even though McKenzie water is filtered (unlike Bull Run), it remains important to safeguard water quality. Why? Because health risks and costs increase when filtration operators are forced to treat waters muddied by a logged landscape.

In order to ensure safe, clean drinking water in the future, it is important to act today to protect unspoiled roadless and old-growth forests within the McKenzie watershed. All logging proposals should be carefully scrutinized and damaging projects like the Willamette National Forest's Trapper and Two-Bee timber sales should be halted. Crumbling logging roads should either be fixed or decommissioned.

A century ago, Teddy Roosevelt signed a law to prevent activities such as logging that could threaten Portland's drinking water. With the recent Bull Run shutdowns, we are reminded that protecting our forests is one of the best ways we can ensure clean drinking water for the future. While we can't control the rain, we can and must control damaging activities that worsen its impacts.

Doug Heiken grew up in the Portland area drinking water from Bull Run. He now lives in Eugene and works as the Conservation and Restoration Coordinator for Oregon Wild, formerly the Oregon Natural Resources Council.


GUEST VIEWPOINT

Copyright © 2006 — The Register-Guard, Eugene, Oregon, USA -- Tim Hermach, Native Forest Council, PO Box 2190, Eugene, OR 97402 541.688.2600 541.461.2156, fax, web page: http://www.forestcouncil.org
DEFENDING NATURE -