Almost all of human activities are connected with the environmental destruction. Food consumption is one of the most major factors and surprisingly, it mostly affects the sea and marine life.

Fish is proved to be a healthy meal which provides humans with considerable needed substances and nutritions. This,along with many other reasons,have led to the mass consumption of most kinds of marine life worldwide. Even species we don’t consume are in danger, mainly due to the methods used to fish the others. Bottom trawling is the recent most destructive way of catching fish. All fish not wanted are thrown dead back into the sea. Not to mention the complete destruction of coral reefs and sea bed.

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The famous climate change campaigner Al Gore and the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have been jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The chairman of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, Ole Danbolt Mjoes, said they had been chosen “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”.

This is a strong and important political statement against the naysayers and deniers that is very much needed.

The spokeswoman Carola Traverso Saibante from IPCC said “we [they] would have been happy even if he [Al Gore] had received it alone because it is a recognition of the importance of this issue.”

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Tim Flannery, a well known and respected climate change scientist, has released information about the coming IPCC-report. According to Tim Flannery, this is important so read carefully, the amount of greenhouse gas emissions in our atmosphere already now is up in 455 ppm (parts per million). This is a number that the scientist thought we wouldn’t reach until year 2017.

“We thought we’d be at that threshold within about a decade,” Flannery told Australian television late on Monday.

“We thought we had that much time. But the new data indicates that in about mid-2005 we crossed that threshold,” he said.

“What the report establishes is that the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere is already above the threshold that could potentially cause dangerous climate change.”

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In the times we live, it’s almost impossible not be aware of the environmental problems that the earth is facing. The number of species that become extinct every day is so big that some will be extinct before we even discover them.

Recently some leading scientists said that the global warming consequences are very unlikely to be avoided; this means that even if we stopped CO2 emissions today we would almost certainly suffer the consequences of global warming anyway. And this is only our fault; we are the ones that deserve to be punished. Now it’s time to change our lifestyle, change the way we think. It’s very easy to help the planet, just start doing little things like recycling, change your normal light bulbs to energy saving bulbs, start using public transports when ever you can, use a bike or just walk instead of using a car.

The Earth is our home and we won’t live else where.

Today, 6th October, have we as humans consumed as many resources as our earth can produce under a whole year. If we, according to WWF, continue in the same speed as we do today we will need another earth in less than 40 years.

The so called “Overshoot Day” when our earth’s renewable resources are depleted takes place today. That means that during the rest of this year we will need to live on the remaining “capital” as our “interest” (that’s bank language) has come to a dead end.

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Here’s some fun Friday reading for everyone interested in Sonys recycling program (and of course I firmly believe you want to read about recycling on a Friday evening..). The interview “victim” is Rick Clancy, the senior Vice President of Corporate Communications at Sony Electronics Inc.

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Lenovo recently released the ThinkCentre A61e, a brand new green computer. The ThinkCentre A61e uses few hazardous materials, consumes little power and is easy to recycle. Because of that it has received the desirable EPEAT Gold status.

Peter Schrady with the really long title of vice president and general manager, Emerging Products Business Unit says that “the importance of maximizing energy efficiency and being environmentally conscious is touching all aspects of our daily lives, from the light bulbs we use to light our homes to the hybrid cars we drive to the green technology we rely on to run our businesses.”

Un-customized it uses an AMD Sempron LE 1150 processor, 512MB ATI Radeon X1200, 512MB Memory, 80GB hard drive and costs $399. Not too shabby. Sure the computer is ugly (or shall we say retro?) but it’s still one of the more high performing green computers out there.

According to Lenovo using the energy-efficient AMD Athlon X2 dual core and AMD Sempron single core processors can help save up to 50 percent in energy costs annually.

Another good thing is that Lenovo ranks high in the Green Electronics Guide from Greenpeace. They are currently on the 4th place being beaten only by Dell (on third place).

Press Release: Lenovo Raises Energy-Efficiency Bar with Its Smallest, Quietest Desktop PC

During the last decades, the byproducts of humanity’s activities have altered most of the earth’s characteristics. As a concequence, many sources that used to exist in large quantities now face depletion.

Two of the most famous of such sources are oxygen and water.To begin with oxygen, it is highly connected with forests and their mass deforestration. Whenever a law tries to protect them, fires are set up. Concequently, we have the greenhouse effect, which is the increase of gasses such as carbon dioxide at the earth’s atmosphere, reducing the oxygen and increasing temperature. Water is a huge problem too, heading to a great worsening. Fresh water is highly polluted and wasted for no good reason on daily basis. Therefore, it becomes less and less every day.

So we need to take measures. Everybody can contribute to tackle both problems. Besides the usual tips like careful use of water, it’s vital that all houses, especially at the city centre, have lots of plants,in the gardens, at balconies, on terraces. In this way much of the emissions of carbon dioxide are taken away by the plants to produce oxygen. But having plants means bigger consumption of water, which we also want to save, so what do we do?

Fortunately there are plants that need little water.Those usually have small and narrow leaves,and don’t produce much oxygen( for example cactuses). So the trick is to have plants that have as wide leaves as possible, in combination with needing little water. Such plants are different from country to country, so we have to visit a good flowershop and get informed of which ones to choose.

The German web host Strato has stated that it will be completely carbon-free in January 2008. The impressive thing is that they will go the whole way with real renewable green energy and not just purchasing green tags (RECs).

Does it sound like a mission impossible or a PR-coup to you? It’s not. Strato has already proven that they mean serious by having reduced its energy usage with 30 % per customer in the past 18 months.

In an interview with The Register the CEO of Strat, Damien Schmidt, said that “while people may be more aware of reducing their individual carbon footprint, it was also important for tech firms to “look behind the screen” and consider the sizable, carbon-munching emissions spat out by IT equipment.”

Green Blog is happy to see that more and more web host companies are taking their responsibility by going green and wish Strato the best of luck.

http://www.strato.de