Another geo-engineering gimmick: dumping lime into oceans

The following Guardian article talks about another one of those half-cocked geo-engineering fixes: liming the world’s oceans. The guy who promotes the idea is a former management consultant, which immediately raises the question: what makes him qualified to design climate change solutions?
Apart from that minor detail, this band aid, like all the other ones, makes [...]

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Programmed for the Pleistocene Age, our brains don’t grasp the dangers of climate change

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Our political system sometimes produces such skewed results that it’s difficult not to blame bloviating politicians. But maybe the deeper problem lies in our brains.
Evidence is accumulating that the human brain systematically misjudges certain kinds of risks. In effect, evolution has programmed us to be alert for snakes [...]

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Millions face hunger in absence of immediate climate change action

Three days ago, Oxfam released a 60-page briefing paper under the title: “Suffering the Science – Climate change, people, and poverty”. The report reveals that seasons which were once distinct are shifting, destroying harvests and causing widespread hunger – which is just one of many impacts taking their toll on the world’s poorest people.

The [...]

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Mainstream economists replace the role of climate skeptics to ensure inaction on climate change

Reposted from Climate and Capitalism
A new book by economist Frank Ackerman, Can We Afford the Future?: The Economics of a Warming World (Zed, 2009), presents an important and startling thesis:
“As the climate science debate is reaching closure, the climate economics debate is heating up. The controversial issue now is the fear that overly ambitious climate [...]

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350 – An international day of climate action on October 24

Just a reminder – for more information go to the 350 website AND also:

Click here to send an e-mail to your friends about the video using your default e-mail program.

Spread this link around however you can—through instant message, your e-mail signature, etc.: http://www.350.org/video

Share it on Facebook by clicking here, or on [...]

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Environmental insanity: hay grown in Californian desert by irrigation shipped to Japan

Growing hay in the desert is one of the more absurd examples of trillions more for how economic thinking is short-term based, narrow-mindedly focused on making hay of another kind and selfishly preoccupied with serving serving individual material desires rather than community needs, leave alone those of species other than human. The following report by [...]

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Shoppers’ cars to power supermarket checkouts

An interesting post. But the proposed solution of course does not address the problems of unsustainability of supermarket shopping, like the use of cars, transport for goods production and distribution, the makeup of goods sold, etc. But I guess, it’s a small step into a hopefully better world.
By SEAN POULTER Mail Online
Shoppers’ cars will be used [...]

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From Airbus to Afghanistan, Israel, Peru, Antarctica and Clinton/Bush as war criminals …

… and much more – a long list of articles on current political topics by Global Research. I like GR because its critical perspective shines a torchlight onto the otherwise pretty meaningless and superficial news coverage of the mainstream press. The articles listed below were posted between the 2nd and 12th of June 2009.

And if [...]

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Petition to protect Peruvian Amazon Rainforest and its people

Dear friends,

Peru’s government is clashing violently with indigenous groups protesting the rapid devastation of the Amazon rainforest by mining, oil and logging companies. The forest is a global treasure – let’s stand with the protesters and sign the petition to President Garcia to stop the violence and save the Amazon:

The Peruvian government has pushed through [...]

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Peru: Battle Lines Drawn over the Amazon

Published on Wednesday, June 10, 2009 by Rabble
by Ben Powless
The rhetoric was sharp enough to cut down Amazonian hardwoods. Yesterday, Sunday June 7th, after a number of ministers had been paraded out Saturday and the day before, Peru’s el Señor Presidente, Alan Garcia decided to make it personal. After a joint police-military operation aimed at stopping [...]

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The end of the Amazon?

This stuff really makes depressing reading – an article by John Sauven in today’s Guardian:

The Brazilian government is legalising deforestation and western superbrands are benefiting from it. This needs to stop now!
Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, writing in the Guardian in March, offered us these words of hope: “No country has a larger stake [...]

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List of current articles on the global economic and social crisis

The list represents a collection of recent articles by the Global Research Institute:
Sid Shniad, Daniel Estulin, James Petras & Russ Baker on The Global Research News Hour- Host: Stephen Lendman. Program Details, June 1-5 – 2009-06-05
Biopiracy, GM Seeds & Rural India
- by Priya Kumar – 2009-06-02
.

The Economic Crisis in Australia
- by Peter Murray [...]

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Hurricanes will increase in numbers, and worse, in intensity

Hurricanes, in particular in the North Atlantic, will increase in numbers. Just 1°C increase in water temperature would lead to a 31% increase in the gloabal frequency of category 4 an 5 storms according to current scientific understanding – and most likely the temperature will increase more than that 1°C. In actual figures, that means [...]

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Time lapse videos of massive changes on Earth

Wired Science posted some interesting time lapse clips on changes of the Earth’s surface over a number of years (mostly between 1-3 decades). The changes are primarily based on population growth and global warming, which partly are inter-related of course.
The videos are based on NASA satellite images and they show the effects of urbanisation, deforestation, [...]

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Waste management venture generates energy from gasification of municipal waste

A US waste management company has teamed up with a gasification technology upstart to generate energy, according to the CNet Green Tech post below. Gasification is different from incineration used by some waste management facilities: it does not burn municipal waste feedstock but treats it with high temperatures and pressure until it breaks down into [...]

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U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions Plunge in 2008 – helped by the economic disaster

Reposted from WattHead
Driven by record-high gas prices in the first half of the year and the economic crisis that hit in the later half of the year, United States greenhouse gas emissions plunged by the largest amount in decades, according to preliminary data released today by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, which [...]

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China and US held secret climate deal change talks

The Guardian reported that in the last days of the Bush administration secret climate change deal talks took place between the US and China. The US team involved John Holdren, now the White House science adviser, and others who went on to positions in Barack Obama’s administration.  The negotiations produced a memorandum of understanding in [...]

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Vandana Shiva on climate change at the “Third Pole”: the Himalayas

Himalayan glaciers are melting rapidly (Freewebs)
Vandana Shiva’s ZSpace Page /ZSpace
I write from Ladakh, where we are studying the impact of climate change and evolving participatory adaptation and disaster preparedness strategies with local communities.
The melting of snow in the Arctic and Antarctic due to global warming and climate change is reported frequently. However, the melting of [...]

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Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilisation?

The biggest threat to global stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. These are the key concepts of an article in this month’s Scientific American:

Food scarcity and the resulting higher food prices are pushing poor countries into chaos.
Such “failed states” can export disease, terrorism, illicit drugs, weapons and [...]

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Sign petition against Rudd’s climate policy and for more investment in renewable energy

Three days ago Kevin Rudd announced more than a billion dollars in extra handouts for big polluters, on top of the more than $7.4 billion already announced – and that we’ll have to wait until after the next election before the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme begins.
What’s more, the emissions reduction target remains the same – [...]

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