The Australian Consumer Association recently published a list on Computer Energy Costs for various home gadgets such as your computer screen, DVD player, cordless telephone, gaming console, laptop etc.

Interesting with this list is that it shows how much energy these gadgets consume weekly, monthly as well as yearly, even when they are supposed to be off.

According to the study, the Sony PlayStation 3 consumes 33.34 kWh (weekly consumption) when on and playing a game. That is more than a Plasma TV who uses 29.68 kWh when on and playing a DVD.

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There are many environmental problems caused by human but not widely known. One of them is eutrophication. This phenomenon cannot be entirely characterised as water pollution, as it mostly describes the process of too many plants growing in lakes, rivers and sometimes in the sea.

When household and industrial wastes are disposed into the water, they increase the quantity of germs in it. Germs threaten the health of the organisms living in the water, drinking it or feeding on organisms that live in it. Moreover, huge quantities of nitric and phosphoric salts enter the ecosystem. Phytoplankton, the tiniest sea organisms that can photosynthesize and depend highly on those salts, start to grow in population at top speed, consuming oxygen. As a result, zooplankton which feeds on phytoplankton starts to increase in numbers, again consuming oxygen and producing carbon dioxide.

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Today Green Blog has been online for one year. A lot of things have changed and happened since the start last year.

After only a few months online Green Blog changed from only covering green web hosts to become a multi-author environment blog covering all kinds of “green” topics from around the world.

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Top British climate scientist Professor James Lovelock FRS has warned that over 6 billion people will die this century due to unaddressed climate change. Already 16 million people die avoidably in the world each year due to deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease (see: “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950” (G.M. Polya, Melbourne, 2007). It is already clear from declining agricultural production due to drought and massive storm surge disasters in India, Bangladesh, Burma and the US that global warming is already impacting on global avoidable mortality.

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Today activists from Climate Camp stopped a train carrying coal to Britain’s biggest coal-power station. Armed with a banderol with the text “Leave it in the ground” the activists started to shovel down the coal to the ground.

The protestors had food and water with them so they could be “able to remain on board for several days.”

“We are ready to stay here for as long as Gordon Brown and the government keep burning polluting fuel in these power stations,” said one of the protesters before clipping climbing ropes to the train’s wheels and the bridge girders. Although flimsy, the web would risk damage to the train or bridge if any attempt was made to drive off.”

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Nidhi Jamwa from the Centre for Science and Environment India asks in the organisations journal Down to Earth “why green projects in India are hot favourite of international NGOs?”

Nidhi Jamwa focuses on a recently started green Sierra Club initiative in India that will try “to explore other ways of creating a robust dialogue on developing a green economy” and to “network, collaborate and share information”:

“There it goes again. It is always India and China that are the two emerging villains of climate change. The developed world has built their infrastructure and created wealth, based on technologies that are high on carbon emissions. Even now, it refuses to deliver on its promise to bring down carbon emissions. Yet goes about patronising the developing world on the need for green economy.

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The Caribbean monk seal has gone “the way of the dodo” and been officially listed as extinct by the US Government. The Caribbean monk seal is, so far, the only seal species to go extinct due to human causes.

“Humans left the Caribbean monk seal population unsustainable after overhunting them, Unfortunately, this led to their demise and labels the species as the only seal to go extinct from human causes.”

The last time anyone sighted the Caribbean monk seal was in 1952, over 50 years ago, at Seranilla Bank, between Jamaica and the Yucatan Peninsula. In 1967 the USA listed the species as endangered due to human activities.

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An extraordinary admission by the Australian Federal Government has passed unnoticed by the Mainstream media in the “look away” Land of Oz, the Antipodean Land of Flies, Lies and Slies (spin-based untruths), the Murdochracy called Australia.

However from the Green Senator Christine Milne’s blog of the June 4, 2008 entitled “Rudd Treasury not modelling real climate protection scenarios” we read that “Treasury is only modelling global emissions scenarios with a very high risk of triggering runaway climate change, Australian Greens climate change spokesperson, Senator Christine Milne, discovered today in Senate Estimates hearings … On questioning from Senator Milne in today’s [Senate] Estimates hearings, [public servant] Meghan Quinn revealed that her Department [Treasury] is only modelling scenarios leading to global atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at 450 and 550 ppm of carbon dioxide equivalent. Treasury had not been asked to model lower concentrations, Ms Quinn said.”

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Tropical rainforests have the largest biodiversity of all ecosystems on Earth. The soil is rather poor, but it sustains a great variety of plants. It is estimated that 65% of the known plant species are found in rainforests.

During the past three decades, rainforests have been decreasing in size for various reasons, though all of them are connected with human activities. Human populations living near rainforests had the impression that the soil must have been really fertile, as it could sustain such a variety of plants. So, when human started to need more fields for cultivation, they choose rainforests’ earth, and thus they set big fires to get rid of big trees and to obtain space. By the time it was understood that the soil wasn’t suitable for agriculture, many square kilometres of rainforests had already gone.

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Yesterday the 15 year old Swedish wind power station Matilda was demolished. Matilda wasn’t an ordinary wind turbine. She was a record-holder.

Since she was constructed 15 years ago on Gotland she has supplied 15000 homes with electricity. Her wind turbines rotated for 61.469 hours and she produced a total of 61,4 GWh. That is more renewable energy than any other single power plant has ever produced.

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