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World Bank “Playing Both Sides of Climate Crisis”

By postMigrator April 12, 2008 April 12, 2008 RT Newswire

Published on Friday, April 11, 2008 by Inter Press Service
World Bank “Playing Both Sides of Climate Crisis”
By Haider Rizvi

NEW YORK – A new study released by an independent policy think tank casts further doubts on the World Bank’s ability to stay neutral in the global politics of climate change.

“It is making money off of causing the climate crisis and then turning around and claiming to solve it,” charged Janet Redman, the study’s lead author and a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies.

In releasing the 79-page report Thursday, Redman described the World Bank’s role in the so-called carbon markets as “dangerously counterproductive” to international efforts to tackle climate change.

Carbon markets refer to commercial aspects of environmental responsibility, in which energy companies can either agree to cut carbon emissions or buy the right to keep polluting.

The Miracle in Madagascar-A Blueprint for Saving Species

By postMigrator April 12, 2008 April 12, 2008 Uncategorized

Published on Friday, April 11, 2008 by The Independent/UK
The Miracle in Madagascar – a Blueprint for Saving Species
By Steve Connor

A study aimed at preventing the continued destruction of wildlife in Madagascar is being heralded as a scientific triumph that could act as a blueprint to save many other species from mass extinction.

Scientists believe they now have a viable road map that could be used anywhere in the world to protect the many thousands of animals and plants living precariously in biodiversity “hotspots”, which are increasingly threatened by human activities. The findings are being seen as vindication for a radical new approach to saving endangered species by treating wildlife as a complex web of interacting animals and plants, rather than the old idea of saving one species at a time.

Madagascar was chosen for the experiment because it has one of the richest varieties of wildlife in the world, with a high proportion of endemic species living nowhere else. It has also experienced massive destruction of its forests, with barely 10 per cent of its original habitat surviving.

Scientists: Warmer Seas, Over-Fishing Spell Disaster for Oceans

By postMigrator April 12, 2008 April 12, 2008 RT Newswire

Published on Friday, April 11, 2008 by Agence France Presse
Scientists: Warmer Seas, Over-Fishing Spell Disaster for Oceans

HANOI – The future food security of millions of people is at risk because over-fishing, climate change and pollution are inflicting massive damage on the world’s oceans, marine scientists warned this week.

The two-thirds of the planet covered by seas provide one fifth of the world’s protein — but 75 percent of fish stocks are now fully exploited or depleted, a Hanoi conference that ended Friday was told.

Warming seas are bleaching corals, feeding algal blooms and changing ocean currents that impact the weather, and rising sea levels could in future threaten coastal areas from Bangladesh to New York, experts said.

“People think the ocean is a place apart,” said Peter Neill, head of the World Ocean Observatory. “In fact it’s the thing that connects us — through trade, transportation, natural systems, weather patterns and everything we depend on for survival.”

Clouds and Pre-Human “Supergreenhouse Periods”

By postMigrator April 11, 2008 April 11, 2008 Uncategorized

EurekAlert! AAAS
10-Apr-2008

Pennsylvania State University

Contact: A’ndrea Elyse Messer
aem1@psu.edu
814-865-9481

Absence of clouds caused pre-human supergreenhouse periods

In a world without human-produced pollution, biological productivity
controls cloud formation and may be the lever that caused
supergreenhouse episodes during the Cetaceous and Eocene, according
to Penn State paleoclimatologists.

“Our motivation was the inability of climate models to reproduce the
climate of the supergreenhouse episodes of the Cetaceous and Eocene
adequately,” said Lee R. Kump, professor of geosciences. “People have
tried increasing carbon dioxide in the models to explain the warming,
but there are limits to the amounts that can be added because the
existing proxies for carbon dioxide do not show such large amounts.”