World-News

The "ecological footprint" has become a powerful indicator of the unsustainability of the current global economy.

Now the Global Footprint Network is promoting another concept that also caries some "punch".... October 9th 2006 is (Ecological) Overshoot Day

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/newsletters/footprint_network_enews_1-9-1.html

Beginning on October 9th and continuing through the end of the year, the world will be living beyond its ecological means. Ecological Footprint accounting shows that, as of October 9th, humanity has already consumed the total amount of new resources nature will produce this year.

"Humanity is living off its ecological credit card and can only do this by liquidating the planet's ecological assets," said Dr. Mathis Wackernagel, Executive Director of Global Footprint Network, "While this can be done for a short while, overshoot ultimately leads to the depletion of resources, such as the forests, oceans and agricultural land upon which our economy depends."


Each year Global Footprint Network calculates humanity's Ecological Footprint, its demand on cropland, pasture, forests and fisheries, and compares it with global biocapacity, the ability of these ecosystems to generate resources and absorb wastes. Ecological Footprint accounting can be used to determine the exact date we, as a global community, begin running our annual ecological deficit. Designated "Overshoot Day," this year demand begins outstripping supply on October 9.

Overshoot has been called 'the biggest issue you've never heard of.' Yet despite its lack of publicity, its causes and effects are as simple as they are significant.

As humanity's consumption of resources increases, Overshoot Day creeps earlier on the calendar. Humanity's first Overshoot Day was December 19, 1987. By 1995 it had jumped back a month to 21 November. Today, with Overshoot Day on October 9, humanity's Ecological Footprint is almost thirty per cent larger than the planet's biocapacity this year. In other words, it now takes more than one year and three months for the Earth to regenerate what we use in a single year.

http://www.footprintnetwork.org/gfn_sub.php?content=footprint_overview
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/ecologicaldebt091006.aspx

Best wishes

-- David Duthie
UNEP-GEF Biosafety Unit Geneva
Email: david.duthie @ unep.ch


Informant: Teresa Binstock

Lester Brown says that US population growth is "the ever expanding denominator that gives each person a shrinking share of the resource pie. It contributes to ... a growing dependence on imported oil, and other conditions that diminish the quality of our daily lives." Brown calls for a US population policy to stabilize our numbers.

http://www.truthout.org/issues_06/100606EA.shtml

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The Common Denominator

By Emily Spence

Governmental and other world leaders are surprisingly silent when it comes to citing overpopulation as an ultimate cause of sweeping planetary destruction. In the same vein, they don't strive to find a workable solution.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article17415.htm

CLIMATE EXPERTS SAY

By Margaret Munro
CanWest News Service

Thursday, October 5, 2006

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=0d7845a5-f776-4323-a49f-72927d83fd42&k=91930

MACKENZIE RIVER DELTA, N.W.T. - The sun is beating down on an icy bluff, sending chunks of ancient permafrost crashing to the ground.

Rivers of mud stream off the exposed permafrost, cracking and dripping in the 20 Celsius late-summer heat. Enormous ice wedges that have grown metres long over the eons protrude from the top of the bluff like giant fangs.

"Is this cool or what?" asks Scott Dallimore of the Geological Survey of Canada as he scrambles out of a helicopter in his hip waders. He heads for the steel grey bluff to take a closer look. But the melted permafrost is like quicksand and stops him in his tracks.

"We first found this exposure two years ago," says Dallimore. The contorted pattern of the exposed permafrost suggests it might be hundreds of thousands of years old.

"It's been frozen like this forever."

But not for long. The bluff, on an island that is one of the anchor sites for the proposed $7-billion Mackenzie Valley pipeline, is melting away at the rate of 10 to 20 metres a year.

So are hundreds of other permafrost ridges and cliffs across Canada's North. Geoscientist Rob Bowen, working with Dallimore to assess gases escaping from the frozen ground, likens permafrost to a "sleeping giant" that could awaken with potentially catastrophic consequences.

One nightmare scenario suggests that as permafrost warms, it might belch out enough methane -- a greenhouse gas -- to trigger runaway global warming. There is some evidence such giant burps have occurred in the past. Permafrost also contains large stores of mercury, a neurotoxin, and massive amounts of soil carbon, which could speed global warming.

But it's the water melting out of the upper layer of permafrost that's of immediate concern to engineers and northern planners. The so-called "active" layer -- the top metres or two of permafrost that melts every summer and then refreezes -- is becoming more active, playing havoc with the region's infrastructure. And vulnerable permafrost cliffs and ridges are melting, sending enormous blocks of the frozen ground sliding and toppling into Arctic seas and rivers.

Permafrost covers close to 20 per cent of the planet and almost half of Canada -- down to a depth of 700 metres in parts of the Western Arctic. There is so much permafrost underground and beneath the Arctic seas that scientists say it's not going to disappear soon.

Gases could be liberated even if the "deep" permafrost warms just a few degrees, Dallimore says. And there is evidence the frozen ground is warming.

Geographer Christopher Burn of Carleton University runs North America's longest running permafrost monitoring experiments on the Mackenzie Delta. "Climate change is happening, there is no question in my mind. I see it on the ground and I see it in the ground," Burn says.

He points to the willow trees, lupines and shrubs that have moved onto his expansive research site, which used to be barren tundra.

But it is the change underground that makes the site so significant. Fifteen metres below ground, the temperature has risen 1.5 degrees to minus 6.5 C since 1970, says Burn, who has a growing collection of thermometers and gauges dangling down drill holes.

"When temperatures are rising 15 metres underground, it's not variation, it's a change," he says.


Informant: NHNE

http://news.independent.co.uk/environment/article1786829.ece


Informant: NHNE

One third of the planet will be desert by the year 2100, say climate experts in the most dire warning yet of the effects of global warming.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/100406G.shtml

European Space Agency
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/1003-04.htm

October 3, 2006

By HENRY FOUNTAIN

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/03/science/03observ.html

Along with rising temperatures, global warming is very likely to cause a shift toward more extreme weather — stronger storms with more rainfall, and longer and more severe droughts. Those changes are likely to have large-scale, obvious effects on farmlands, grasslands and forests and on the creatures that inhabit them.

But many smaller, more subtle effects are likely too. Researchers at the University of Kentucky looked at one: the impact of climate change on the decomposition of leaf litter on the forest floor.

The researchers, Janet R. Lensing and David H. Wise, studied the process of leaf decay in hardwood forests in central Kentucky. The main instigator in leaf decay is fungi, which get nutrients from the organic matter. But fungi don’t exist in a vacuum. They are grazed upon by springtails, primitive insects of the Collembola order. In turn, springtails are the prey of wandering spiders.

The who-eats-whom makes for a complex web, where changes at one level can have cascading effects. Too much or too little grazing by springtails, for example, can reduce fungal activity and slow decay.

Environmental changes can have an impact, too, and that’s what the researchers studied. They set up forest plots and manipulated precipitation to match anticipated future levels, both wet and dry. They didn’t see much change in leaf decomposition under higher-rainfall conditions. But under drought conditions, they found, decay accelerated significantly. Their findings are published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Our hypothesis is that during drought conditions, the fungi are already drought-stressed, and the Collembola are overgrazing them, which slows down decay,” Dr. Lensing said. Under these circumstances, by preying on the springtails, the spiders reduce the pressure on the fungi, thus allowing for more leaf decay. Under wetter conditions the fungi are not so stressed and so easily overgrazed, so spider predation on springtails has less effect.

It’s not that the dryness has a direct influence on populations of spiders, say, or springtails. Instead, Dr. Lensing said, “it affects how the cascading occurs” within the food web. This indirect impact on leaf decay, she added, “shows how complex the effect of altered rainfall can be.”

Survival Diet, for Frogs

Here’s a question that ecologists have wondered about for years: Is there a connection between how widespread a species is — the size of the territory it covers — and its diet?

One idea is that a species with a restricted range should have a specialized diet, in part because there is a less diverse selection of foods available in a smaller area. By the same reasoning, a species with a broad range should have a more varied diet, because there are more menu choices.

Selection might come into play as well. With a species shoehorned into a small space, there is a greater likelihood that any adaptation — to a single food source, for example — will spread through the species. This is less likely in a species with a broader range, where there would always be some mixing among individuals from different environments.

It’s a nice idea. But a new study shows the opposite is true, at least for rainforest frogs from the wet tropics area of northeastern Australia.

Yvette M. Williams of James Cook University and colleagues studied the stomach contents of 11 related frog species with ranges from 2,500 square miles to slightly more than 1 square mile (on a single mountaintop). All of the frogs dined on ants, spiders, beetles and other bugs, but the species with the smallest ranges had the most diverse diets. Those with the largest ranges ate mostly ants. The findings were reported in Biology Letters.

The researchers suggest that another hypothesis might explain this. The smaller the range, the more prone a species is to extinction. A small-range species that depends on one food source, then, risks being wiped out if that food source dries up. But one that is a generalist eater can better survive the vagaries of the food supply.

Silk Stockings, for Spiders

Web-spinning spiders have specialized organs, called spinnerets, that produce silk. They are usually located on the underside of the abdomen.

But scientists have discovered that a species of tarantula also secretes silk through its feet. The spider may use the fibers to help it climb slick surfaces.

Stanislav N. Gorb of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Germany and colleagues made the discovery in zebra tarantulas, found in Costa Rica. The spider, which is about an inch and a half long, produces the silk through tiny nozzles in the base of the feet. The finding was reported in the journal Nature.

Like other spiders, the zebra tarantula also has thousands of tiny hairs on its feet that help it stick to surfaces through molecular attraction. But the researchers found that the foot silk, laid down as tracks, helped the spider walk on vertical surfaces. In experiments on glass, the researchers found that if the spiders slipped, the silk arrested their fall.

It’s not known if other spider species also have this capability. But however widespread it is, the researchers say, it raises new questions about the evolution of silk-making. Foot production of silk may be the ancestral condition, with spinneret production evolving later. Or the two may have evolved independently. Comparison of the genes involved in silk production from the feet and from spinnerets, the researchers say, should provide some clues.

Springtime on Uranus

With their swirling atmospheres, gaseous planets occasionally produce dark spots (Jupiter’s red spot being the most famous example). Spots are rare on Uranus, however, and no definitive images of them have ever been obtained.

Now, though, Lawrence Sromovsky of the University of Wisconsin and other astronomers have used the Hubble Space Telescope to produce clear images of a dark spot in the atmosphere of Uranus.

The spot, about 1,900 miles long and 1,100 miles wide, is in the planet’s northern hemisphere. The researchers say the spot may be new, a result of gradual warming of the northern hemisphere as Uranus moves into “spring” in its 84-year orbit around the Sun. Images are at hubblesite.org/news/2006/47.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company


Informant: binstock

A message from Purple

calling all environmental activists... care2 action. Please read and consider sign the following. Thank you. lol xPurple

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/975797477?z00m=356495

Take a Stand Against Global Climate Change - Pledge Action Today! October 4th is ENERGY STAR Change a Light Day. Become part of this national movement and help reduce the risks of global climate change by pledging to replace at least one standard lightbulb with an energy-efficient, ENERGY STAR qualified lightbulb!*

By signing, you will join over 80 thousand people who have already pledged to reduce global warming by reducing their home energy use!

Why become part of this growing number of people taking steps to save energy and help fight global climate change? Consider the following facts:

* Your home can cause twice as much greenhouse gas emissions as your car.

* Energy-efficient lighting requires 2/3 less energy than standard lighting, generates 70% less heat, and lasts up to 10 times longer.

* Changing to energy-efficient lighting is a simple step we can each take to preserve energy resources, save money and help protect our environment.

Nasa-Studie

30.09.2006

Auf der Erde ist es so warm wie seit 12.000 Jahren nicht mehr.
http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168356ms12



Trotz Klimaschutzabkommen: Weltweit steigende CO2-Emissionen

26.09.2006

Die Kohlendioxidemissionen sind im vergangenen Jahr gegenüber dem Vorjahr weltweit um etwa 2,5 % gestiegen, gegenüber 1990 betrug der Anstieg sogar nahezu 27 %.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168365ms12



Klimawandel erreicht die Chefetagen

26.09.2006

WWF: Klimawandel wird zunehmend als Investitionsrisiko erkannt. http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168364ms12



Zwei Millionen Bürger gegen Braunkohle

25.09.2006

Die großen deutschen Umweltverbände und regionale Bürgerinitiativen mit insgesamt zwei Millionen Mitgliedern haben sich jetzt zu einem Aktionsbündnis „Zukunft statt Braunkohle" zusammengeschlossen.

http://sonnenseite.kjm4.de/ref.php?id=d874168368ms12