Category: RT Newswire

USE ME! Essentially, this is a catch all for everything. This is probably the ONLY category where things that are not directly related to Rising Tide affiliates/allies should go. For example if a coal company goes out of business (and we didn’t directly cause it) it should probably only go here.

“Poison Ice” and Global Warming

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——– Original Message ——–
Subject: Salon: “Poison ice” and global warming
Date: Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:17:57 -0700
From: Fred Heutte <phred@SUNLIGHTDATA.COM>
Reply-To: Fred Heutte <phred@SUNLIGHTDATA.COM>
To: OREGON-LEADERS@LISTS.SIERRACLUB.ORG

My friend Elizabeth Grossman, a very talented and wide-ranging
writer (her books include “High Tech Trash,” about e-waste;
“The Undamming of America” and a Sierra Club Travel Guide,
“Adventuring Along the Lewis & Clark Trail”) has now turned her
attention to the Arctic and has a good piece below published
by Salon today . . .

This is the result of research she’s doing for a book on
bioaccumulative chemicals generally but the Arctic plays a big
role in it.
fh

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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/04/30/arctic_pollutants/

Poison ice

By Elizabeth Grossman

April 30, 2008 | ARCTIC OCEAN — Over 300 miles north of the Arctic
Circle, in the polar dark of a December morning, University of
Manitoba Ph.D. student Jesse Carrie is out on the frozen Beaufort
Sea, collecting ice samples to measure for mercury and pesticides.
Lowered by crane from the deck of the icebreaking research vessel
the CCGS Amundsen, and accompanied by a rifle bearer who keeps
watch for polar bears, Carrie extracts ice cores and vials of
frigid water. Carrie is part of a $40 million International Polar
Year scientific expedition, the first ever to spend the winter
moving through sea ice north of the Arctic Circle. The expedition’s
labor-intensive work is essential to understanding the impacts of
global warming.

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Killing Asian Forests for Food and Fuel

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EXCHANGE MORNING POST : Business, Economics, Education, Entrepreneurs,
Environment, Science and Technology

April 29, 2008
http://www.exchangemagazine.com/morningpost/2008/week18/Tuesday/042809.html

Asia’s Rainforests Vanishing As Timber, Food Demand Surge: Experts.

“Asia’s rainforests are being rapidly destroyed,
a trend accelerated by surging timber demand in
booming China and India, and record food, energy
and commodity prices, forest experts warn.

The loss of these biodiversity hot spots, much of
it driven by the illegal timber trade and the
growth of oil palm, biofuel and rubber
plantations, is worsening global warming, species
loss and poverty, they said…at the Asia-Pacific
Forestry Week conference in Hanoi. …

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Nevada Public Lands Threatened by Massive Fossil-Fuel Drilling Operations

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
April 28, 2008
1:10 PM

 CONTACT: Center for Biological Diversity
Rob Mrowka, Center for Biological Diversity, (702) 249-5821
 
 
Federal Proposal to Open 1.7 Million Acres of Nevada Public Land to Oil and Gas Development Would Worsen Global Climate Change and Imperil Species
 
LAS VEGAS, NEVADA – April 28 – Today the Center for Biological Diversity submitted comments urging the federal Bureau of Land Management to scrap its proposal to open 1.7 million acres of public lands in Lander and Nye counties to oil and gas development because the drilling would exacerbate global climate change and further threaten imperiled species.

At the heart of the Center’s complaint is the Bureau’s failure to analyze or even acknowledge the environmental impacts from the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the development and consumption of oil and gas produced from the area, despite the National Environmental Policy Act’s mandate to fully disclose the environmental impacts from federal actions.

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Warming Shifting Crop Zones Northward

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Warming shifts gardeners’ maps
By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY

Every gardener is familiar with the multicolor U.S. map of climate zones
on the back of seed packets. It’s the Department of Agriculture’s
indicator of whether a flower, bush or tree will survive the winters in
a given region.

It’s also 18 years old. A growing number of meteorologists and
horticulturists say that because of the warming climate, the 1990 map
doesn’t reflect a trend that home gardeners have noticed for more than a
decade: a gradual shift northward of growing zones for many plants.

The map doesn’t show, for example, that the Southern magnolia, once
limited largely to growing zones ranging from Florida to Virginia, now
can thrive as far north as Pennsylvania. Or that kiwis, long hardy only
as far north as Oklahoma, now might give fruit in St. Louis.

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