Subscribe by RSS Subscribe by e-mail
Green Blog - The Environment Blog

Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

July 3rd, 2008

EU told to prepare itself for millions of climate change refugees

By Simon | No Responses

Refugee children waiting with their family for a food distribution

Refugee children waiting with their family for a food distribution. Photo by Nicolas Rost.

Two senior foreign policy officials from the European Union says in a new report that the EU should “brace itself” for a new and much larger wave of migration, caused by the effects of climate change. According to their report climate change “threatens to severely destabilise the planet” and will make a fifth of the worlds population homeless.

Javier Solana and Benita Ferrero-Waldner, the EU’s chief foreign policy coordinator and the European commissioner for external relations, says that within a decade “there will be millions of environmental migrants, with climate change as one of the major drivers of this phenomenon,” and that “Europe must expect substantially increased migratory pressure.”

(more…)

June 27th, 2008

White House refuses to open EPA emails on global warming

By Simon | 1 Response

The White House has apparently refused to open an email from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with a proposed rule that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions from new vehicles. And what is more surprising (!?) is that they managed to get it their way in the end.

I am not even surprised anymore. That’s why I will let John Stewart do the explaining:

(more…)

June 25th, 2008

Dr James Hansen says we should prosecute climate change liars

By Simon | No Responses

Dr James HansenDr James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York and one of the worlds most prominent climate scientist, says in an article on the WorldWatch Institute website that climate change liars “should be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature.”

“Instead of moving heavily into renewable energies, fossil fuel companies choose to spread doubt about global warming, just as tobacco companies discredited the link between smoking and cancer. Methods are sophisticated, including funding to help shape school textbook discussions of global warming.”

(more…)

June 24th, 2008

“Remember this number for the rest of your life.”

By Simon | 3 Responses

The world is starting to realise that the goal of 450 ppm as a reasonable level to balance and stabilize the CO2 in our atmosphere is based on wrong and outdated science and won’t be enough to stop man-made climate change.

More and more scientific reports show that the older science has been too “soft” in their climate change calculations. For example, we can already now see a never ending and rapid melting of the Arctic ice, something that “would happen in 20-30 years” according to the older science reports. Scientific reports earlier projected that the Arctic would become ice-free by year 2050. But newly released reports suggest it could happen as early as 2013.

(more…)

June 18th, 2008

Two polar bears are killed on Iceland just weeks after USA lists them as a “threatened” species

By Simon | 5 Responses

Iceland has killed two polar bears since the U.S. Department of Interior formally listed the polar bear as a “threatened” species a few weeks ago.

The first polar bear, named Björn Björnesson, came to Iceland in the beginning of June this year. The polar bear was shot as soon as he was spotted for fears he would get into the nearest village. According to the hunters, killing the polar bear was the only solution as it would take to long to get the anaesthetic that was on the other side of the island.

The polar bear had probably travelled the 29 miles (47 kilometres) from Greenland on a flake of ice and swim the last miles to Iceland.

(more…)

June 14th, 2008

Pollutants from coal-based electricity generation kill 170,000 people annually

By Dr Gideon Polya | 2 Responses

Pollutants from coal-based electricity generation kill 170,000 people annually

The image shows the old Cahokia Power Plant in Sauget, IL which has been decommissioned for 31 years. Photo: Jay Dugger

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.

(more…)

June 11th, 2008

“We would like the rest of the world to follow you”

By Simon | No Responses

Nidhi Jamwa from the Centre for Science and Environment India asks in the organisations journal Down to Earthwhy 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.

(more…)

June 10th, 2008

The Caribbean monk seal is now extinct due to human causes

By Simon | 1 Response

The Caribbean monk

Photo from “The Fisheries and Fisheries Industries of the United States”, by George Brown Goode (1887).

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.

(more…)