Category: RT Newswire

Environmental Groups Sue Bush Administration to Force Polar Bear Protection
Faced With Overwhelming Scientific Evidence, Government Continues Delay on Endangered Species Act Listing Due to Global Warming
 
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – March 10 – Today the Center for Biological Diversity, Greenpeace, and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) sued the Bush administration for missing its legal deadline for issuing a final decision on whether to list the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act due to global warming.
“The Bush administration seems intent on slamming shut the narrow window of opportunity we have to save polar bears,” said Kassie Siegel, climate program director at the Center for Biological Diversity and lead author of the 2005 petition seeking the Endangered Species Act listing. “We simply will not sit back and passively allow the administration to condemn polar bears to extinction.”

Polar bears live only in the Arctic and are totally dependent on the sea ice for all of their essential needs. The rapid warming of the Arctic and melting of the sea ice pose an overwhelming threat to the polar bear, which could become the first mammal to lose 100 percent of its habitat to global warming.

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“…  already … engendering a new type of refugee,
the “environmental migrant”.

“The document points out that last year the UN’s
appeals for emergency humanitarian aid were all,
bar one, connected to climate change.”
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The Guardian/UK
March 10, 2008

EU Told To Prepare for Flood of Climate Change Migrants

Global warming threatens to severely destabilise
the planet, rendering a fifth of its population
homeless, top officials say

by Ian Traynor

In its half-century history, the EU has absorbed
wave upon wave of immigrants. There were the
millions of political migrants fleeing
Russian-imposed communism to western Europe
throughout the cold war, the post-colonial and
“guest worker” migrants who poured into western
Europe in the boom years of the 1950s and 60s,
the hundreds of thousands who escaped the Balkan
wars of the 90s and the millions of economic
migrants of the past decade seeking a better life.

Now, according to the EU’s two senior foreign
policy officials, Europe needs to brace itself
for a new wave of migration with a very different
cause – global warming. The ravages already being
inflicted on parts of the developing world by
climate change are engendering a new type of
refugee, the “environmental migrant”.

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The Christian Science Monitor Online
March 04, 2008
http://www.csmonitor.com/2008/0304/p13s02-bogn.html

Climate change’s most deadly threat: drought

Anthropologist Brian Fagan uses Earth’s distant
past to predict the crises that may lie in its
future.

By Todd Wilkinson

Spring is on its way back to northern latitudes.
In many locales, it will arrive earlier than
“normal,” yielding, ostensibly, a longer growing
season, a hotter summer, balmier autumn, and
future winters will lack their ferocious
post-Pleistocene bites.

While vineyards are being planned for northern
England, millions of residents around desiccated
Atlanta are praying for enough rain to flow
through their taps.

Brian Fagan believes climate is not merely a
backdrop to the ongoing drama of human
civilization, but an important stage upon which
world events turn.

As it turns out, the anecdotal evidence of
climate change in this, the 21st century, shares
much in common with a historical antecedent, the
Medieval Warm Period, circa AD 800 to 1200, that
radically shaped societies across the globe.

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Public release date: 3-Mar-2008
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute

Contact: Beth King
kingb@si.edu
703-487-3774, ext.8216

Smithsonian announces Global Forest Carbon Research Initiative

Forests contain nearly 40 percent of the world’s
carbon-more than the atmosphere contains-but too
little is known about forest carbon dynamics to
predict whether anthropogenic global change will
increase or decrease forest carbon pools. Helene
Muller-Landau, staff scientist at the Smithsonian
Tropical Research Institute, announced a major
global research effort to quantify forest carbon
pools and fluxes. She announced the new effort at
the Climate Change in the Americas Symposium,
held Feb. 25-29 at the institute’s headquarters
in Panama.

Researchers from more than 70 institutions
working in a network of 25 forest study sites
currently monitor more than 3 million trees
representing approximately 8,200 species-10
percent of the world’s total tree fauna. This
Global Forest Observatory, which is coordinated
by the Center for Tropical Forest Science at
STRI, was originally set up to understand
biodiversity but has become an ideal tool for
determining the on-the-ground effects of global
change.

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