"GREEN FUTURE" ACTIVISM

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Comment by M. Prabhakar Rao on March 16, 2011 at 9:34pm

There are "n" of ways to clean a polluted water body, however, the only way to ensuring the cleanliness of any water body - after cleaning - on this Earth is to stop using it as a drain for municipal sewage, industrial effluents, washing of cloths, cattle, etc. and also stop using it as a public toilet.

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on October 7, 2010 at 6:08pm

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of numerous books, including When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. His latest book is The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet’s Surprising Future. In earlier articles for Yale Environment 360, Pearce has written about global climate talks in the wake of Copenhagen and the fallout from the “Climategate” incident.



As climate science advances, forecasts about the extent of future warming and its effects are likely to become less — not more — precise. That may make it more difficult to convince the public of the reality of climate change, but it hardly diminishes the urgency of taking action.
by fred pearce

I think I can predict right now the headlines that will follow publication of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), due in 2013. “Climate scientists back off predicting rate of warming: ‘The more we know the less we can be sure of,’ says UN panel.”

That is almost bound to be the drift if two-time IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth and others are right about what is happening to the new generation of climate models. And with public trust in climate science on the slide after the various scandals of the past year over e-mails and a mistaken forecast of Himalayan ice loss, it hardly seems likely scientists will be treated kindly.

It may not matter much who is in charge at the IPCC by then: Whether or not current chairman Rajendra Pachauri keeps his job, the reception will be rough. And if climate negotiators have still failed to do a deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which lapses at the end of 2012, the fallout will not be pretty, either diplomatically or climatically.

Clearly, concerns about how climate scientists handle complex issues of scientific uncertainty are set to escalate. They were highlighted in a report about IPCC procedures published in late August in response to growing criticism about IPCC errors. The report highlighted distortions and
The latest climate modeling runs are trying to deal with a range of factors not dealt with in the past.
exaggerations in IPCC reports, many of which involved not correctly representing uncertainty about specific predictions.

But efforts to rectify the problems in the next IPCC climate-science assessment (AR5) are likely to further shake public confidence in the reliability of IPCC climate forecasts.

Last January, Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., published a little-noticed commentary in Nature online. Headlined “More Knowledge, Less Certainty,” it warned that “the uncertainty in AR5’s predictions and projections will be much greater than in previous IPCC reports.” He added that “this could present a major problem for public understanding of climate change.” He can say that again.

This plays out most obviously in the critical estimate of how much warming is likely between 1990, the baseline year for most IPCC work, and 2100. The current AR4 report says it will be between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius (3 to 7 degrees F). But the betting is now that the range offered next time will be wider, especially at the top end.

The public has a simple view about scientific uncertainty. It can accept that science doesn’t have all the answers, and that scientists try to encapsulate those uncertainties with devices like error bars and estimates of statistical significance. What even the wisest heads will have trouble with, though, is the notion that greater understanding results in wider errors bars than before.

Trenberth explained in his Nature commentary why a widening is all but certain. “While our knowledge of certain factors [responsible for climate change] does increase,” he wrote, “so does our understanding of factors we previously did not account for or even recognize.” The trouble is this sounds dangerously like what Donald Rumsfeld, in the midst of the chaos of the Iraq War, famously called “unknown unknowns.” I would guess that the IPCC will have even less luck than he did in explaining what it means by this.

The latest climate modeling runs are trying to come to grips with a range of factors ignored or only sketchily dealt with in the past. The most troubling is the role of clouds. Clouds have always been recognized as a ticking timebomb in climate models, because nobody can work out whether warming will change them in a way that amplifies or moderates warming — still less how much. And their influence could be very large. “Clouds remain one of the largest uncertainties in the climate system’s response to temperature changes,” says Bruce Wielicki, a scientist at NASA’s Langley Research Center who is investigating the impact of clouds on the Earth’s energy budget.

An added problem in understanding clouds is the role of aerosols from industrial smogs, which dramatically influence the radiation properties of clouds. “Aerosols are a mess,” says Thomas Charlock, a senior scientist at
Despite much handwringing, the IPCC has never worked out how to make sense of uncertainty.
the Langley Research Center and co-investigator in a NASA project known as Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES). “We don’t know how much is out there. We just can’t estimate their influence with calculations alone.”

Trenberth noted in Nature, “Because different groups are using relatively new techniques for incorporating aerosol effects into the models, the spread of results will probably be much larger than before.”

A second problem for forecasting is the potential for warming to either enhance or destabilize existing natural sinks of carbon dioxide and methane in soils, forests, permafrost, and beneath the ocean. Again these could slow warming through negative feedbacks or — more likely, according to recent assessments — speed up warming, perhaps rather suddenly as the planetary system crosses critical thresholds.

The next models will be working hard to take these factors into better account. Whether they go as far as some preliminary runs published in 2005, which suggested potential warming of 10 degrees C (18 degrees F) or more is not clear. Of course, uncertainty is to be expected, given the range of potential feedbacks that have to be taken into account. But it is going to be hard to explain why, when you put more and better information into climate models, they do not home in on a more precise answer.

Yet it will be more honest, says Leonard Smith, a mathematician and statistician at the University of Oxford, England, who warns about the “naive realism” of past climate modeling. In the past, he says, models have been “over-interpreted and misinterpreted. We need to drop the pretense that they are nearly perfect. They are getting better. But as we change our predictions, how do we maintain the credibility of the science?”

The only logical conclusion for a confused and increasingly wary public may be that if the error bars were wrong before, they cannot be trusted now. If they do not in some way encapsulate the “unknowns,” what purpose do they have?

Despite much handwringing, the IPCC has never worked out how to make sense of uncertainty. Take the progress of those errors bars in assessing warming between 1990 and 2100.

The panel’s first assessment, published back in 1990, predicted a warming of 3 degrees C by 2100, with no error bars. The second assessment, in 1995, suggested a warming of between 1 and 3.5 degrees C. The third, in 2001, widened the bars to project a warming of 1.4 to 5.8 degrees C. The fourth assessment in 2007 contracted them again, from 1.8 to 4.0 degrees C. I don’t think the public will be so understanding if they are widened again, but that now seems likely.

Trenberth is nobody’s idea of someone anxious to rock the IPCC boat. He is an IPCC insider, having been lead author on key chapters in both 2001 and 2007, and recently appointed as a review editor for AR5. Back in 2005 he made waves by directly linking Hurricane Katrina to global warming. But in the past couple of years he has taken a growing interest in highlighting uncertainties in the climate science.

Late last year, bloggers investigating the “climategate” emails highlighted a message he sent to colleagues in which he said it was a “travesty” that
Trenberth questioned if the IPCC wouldn’t be better off getting out of the prediction business.
scientists could not explain cool years like 2008. His point, made earlier in the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Stability, was that “it is not a sufficient explanation to say that a cool year is due to natural variability.” Such explanations, he said, “do not provide the physical mechanisms involved.” He wanted scientists to do better.

In his Nature commentary, Trenberth wondered aloud whether the IPCC wouldn’t be better off getting out of the prediction business. “Performing cutting edge science in public could easily lead to misinterpretation,” he wrote. But the lesson of climategate is that efforts to keep such discussion away from the public have a habit of backfiring spectacularly.

All scientific assessments have to grapple with how to present uncertainties. Inevitably they make compromises between the desire to convey complexity and the need to impart clear and understandable messages to a wider public. But the IPCC is caught on a particular dilemma because its founding purpose, in the late 1980s, was to reach consensus on climate science and report back to the world in a form that would allow momentous decisions to be taken. So the IPCC has always been under pressure to try to find consensus even where none exists. And critics argue that that has sometimes compromised its assessments of uncertainty.

The last assessment was replete with terms like “extremely likely” and “high confidence.” Critics charged that they often lacked credibility. And last August’s blue-chip review of the IPCC’s performance, by the InterAcademy Council, seemed to side with the critics.

The council’s chairman, Harold Shapiro of Princeton, said existing IPCC guidelines on presenting uncertainty “have not been consistently followed.” In particular, its analysis of the likely impacts of climate change “contains many statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence.” The predictions were not plucked from the air. But the charge against the IPCC is that its authors did not
We need to get used to greater uncertainty in imagining exactly how climate change will play out.
always correctly portray the uncertainty surrounding the predictions or present alternative scenarios.

The most notorious failure was the claim that the Himalayan glaciers could all have melted by 2035. This was an egregious error resulting from cut-and-pasting a non-peer reviewed claim from a report by a non-governmental organization. So was a claim that 55 percent of the Netherlands lies below sea level. But other errors were failures to articulate uncertainties. The study highlighted a claim that even a mild loss of rainfall over the Amazon could destroy 40 percent of the rainforest, though only one modeling study has predicted this.

Another headline claim in the report, in a chapter on Africa, was that “projected reductions in [crop] yield in some countries could be as much as 50 percent by 2020.” The only source was an 11-page paper by a Moroccan named Ali Agoumi that covered only three of Africa’s 53 countries (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria) and had not gone through peer review. It simply asserted that “studies on the future of vital agriculture in the region have shown... deficient yields from rain-based agriculture of up to 50 percent during the 2000-2020 period.” No studies were named. And even Agoumi did not claim the changes were necessarily caused by climate change. In fact, harvests in North Africa already differ by 50 percent or more from one year to the next, depending on rainfall. In other words, Agoumi’s paper said nothing at all about how climate change might or might not change farm yields across Africa. None of this was conveyed by the report.

In general, the InterAcademy Council’s report noted a tendency to “emphasise the negative impacts of climate change,” many of which were “not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not
Clouds and Climate:
A Key Mystery for Researchers

As climate scientists wrestle with the complexities of how the planet will react to rising greenhouse-gas levels, no variable is more difficult to decipher than the impact of clouds. But thanks to new satellite data and other technologies, clues are emerging that may help solve the puzzle.
READ MOREexpressed clearly.” Efforts to eliminate these failings will necessarily widen the error bars on a range of predictions in the next assessment.

We are all — authors and readers of IPCC reports alike — going to have to get used to greater caution in IPCC reports and greater uncertainty in imagining exactly how climate change will play out. This is probably healthy. It is certainly more honest. But it in no way undermines the case that we are already observing ample evidence that the world is on the threshold of profound and potentially catastrophic warming. And it in no way undermines the urgent need to do something to halt the forces behind the warming.

Some argue that scientific uncertainty should make us refrain from action to slow climate change. The more rational response, given the scale of what we could face, is the precise opposite.

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on October 1, 2010 at 12:38am

Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution (washingtonpost.com)

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on October 1, 2010 at 12:32am

https://secure.wilderness.org.au/cyberactivist/cyberactions/10_10_w...

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on September 29, 2010 at 12:33am

By David Fogarty
SINGAPORE | Wed Sep 29, 2010 2:55am EDT
(Reuters) - More than a third of mammal species considered extinct or missing have been rediscovered, a study says, and a lot of effort is wasted in trying to find species that have no chance of being found again.

Species face an accelerated rate of extinction because of pollution, climate change, habitat loss and hunting and that this rate of loss is putting ecosystems and economies at ever greater risk, according to the United Nations.

Researchers at the University of Queensland in Australia said a greater understanding of patterns of extinction could channel more resources to finding and protecting species listed as missing before it's too late.

"In the past people have been very happy to see individual species found again but they haven't looked at the bigger picture and realized that it's not random," university research fellow Diana Fisher, lead author of the study, told Reuters.

Fisher and her colleague Simon Blomberg studied data on rediscovery rates of missing mammals to see if extinction from different causes is equally detectable. They also wanted to see which factors affected the probability of rediscovery.

They found that species affected by habitat loss were much more likely to be misclassified as extinct or to remain missing than those affected by introduced predators and diseases.

"It is most likely that the highest rates of rediscovery will come from searching for species that have gone missing during the twentieth century and have relatively large ranges threatened by habitat loss," they say in the report in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B journal.

The United Nations hosts a major meeting in Japan next month at which countries are expected to agree on a series of 2020 targets to combat the extinctions of plants and animals key to providing clean air and water, medicines and crops.

"Conservation resources are wasted searching for species that have no chance of rediscovery, while most missing species receive no attention," the authors say, pointing to efforts to try to find the Tasmanian tiger.

The last known living Tasmanian tiger, marsupial hunter the size of a dog, died in 1936 in a zoo.

Fisher told Reuters efforts to find missing species have led to success stories of animals and plants being rediscovered and the creation of protection programmes.

But the rediscoveries barely make a dent in the rate of species loss overall, Fisher said by telephone.

"The number of additions every year outweighs the number of that have been rediscovered. There's still an accelerating rate of extinctions every year of mammals."

(Editing by Nopporn Wong-Anan)

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on September 29, 2010 at 12:06am

GM maize 'has polluted rivers across the United States'
By Steve Connor, Science Editor
An insecticide used in genetically modified (GM) crops grown extensively in the United States and other parts of the world has leached into the water of the surrounding environment.

The insecticide is the product of a bacterial gene inserted into GM maize and other cereal crops to protect them against insects such as the European corn borer beetle. Scientists have detected the insecticide in a significant number of streams draining the great corn belt of the American mid-West.

The researchers detected the bacterial protein in the plant detritus that was washed off the corn fields into streams up to 500 metres away. They are not yet able to determine how significant this is in terms of the risk to either human health or the wider environment.

"Our research adds to the growing body of evidence that corn crop byproducts can be dispersed throughout a stream network, and that the compounds associated with genetically modified crops, such as insecticidal proteins, can enter nearby water bodies," said Emma Rosi-Marshall of the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York.

GM crops are widely cultivated except in Britain and other parts of Europe. In 2009, more than 85 per cent of American corn crops were genetically modified to either repel pests or to be tolerant to herbicides used to kill weeds in a cultivated field.

The GM maize, or corn as it is called in the US, has a gene from the bacterium Bacillus thuriengensis (Bt) inserted into it to repel the corn borer beetle. The Bt gene produces a protein called Cry1Ab which has insectidical properties.

The study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, analysed 217 streams in Indiana. The scientists found 86 per cent of the sites contained corn leaves, husks, stalks or cereal cobs in their channels and 13 per cent contained detectable levels of the insectidical Cry1Ab proteins.

"The tight linkage between corn fields and streams warrants further research into how corn byproducts, including Cry1Ab insecticidal proteins, potentially impact non-target ecosystems, such as streams and wetlands," Dr Rosi-Marshall said.

All of the stream sites with detectable insecticidal proteins were located within 500 metres of a corn field. The ramifications are vast just in Iowa, Illinois, and Indiana, where about 90 per cent of the streams and rivers – some 159,000 miles of waterways – are also located within 500 metres of corn fields.

After corn crops are harvested, a common agricultural practice is to leave discarded plant material on the fields. This "no-till" form of agriculture minimises soil erosion, but it then also sets the stage for corn byproducts to enter nearby stream channels.

Comment by Kishore Butani on September 28, 2010 at 9:45pm

Are the feed-in-tariffs about to be introduced in the UK an extortionate, useless waste of our money? Interesting posting....
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2010/03/01/a-great-green-rip-off

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on September 28, 2010 at 8:09pm

Benny Zable Tomorrow Wednesday 29th September
http://www.beyondnuclear.org/radioactive-waste/ I will be dropping off 2
letters at the Australian Consulate in support of the harassed remote
Yuemundu community chosen to be an International Radioactive waste
site. These
... Aboriginal desperates, are being sacrificed and traded off for
needed infrastructure The safest and best thing is to localize
radioactive
waste from were it is located to become a shrine to remind the many
generations to follow what this Radioactive waste is in a deep ecology
focused respectful manner Joanna Macy guardianship way

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on September 28, 2010 at 8:01pm

Bus conductor gets US eco award! --- A bus conductor from Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, Mr. Marimuthu Yoganathan ---- an eco activist, was honored with 'Unsung Hero' award by US based footwear major Timberland for his outstanding work in planting 50,000 saplings across Coimbatore city, besides creating awareness of protecting the environmen...t among the students.

Yoganathan has so far received 14 awards, including the 'Eco Warrior' award given away by Vice-President of India, Shri. Mohammed Hamid Ansari, in 2008 and the Earth Matters Foundation award from Mike Pandey in the same year. Recently, the Tamil Nadu government conferred on him the title ‘Suttru Suzhal Seyal Veerar’ (Eco Warrior).

http://bit.ly/aEoqUH http://bit.ly/dCGlQfSee More

Comment by Sauman Das Gupta on September 27, 2010 at 9:44pm

NaturalNews) As the FDA stands poised to approve genetically modified (GM) salmon safe for public consumption, the next logical question concerns how GM salmon would be labeled. Would the fish come with a large red warning that says, "Genetically modified salmon"?

As it turns out, no. In fact, the FDA has already gone on the record stating it will not require any special labeling of genetically modified salmon. You, the consumer, just have to take a wild guess because you're not allowed to know what you're really eating.

The biotech industry takes this absurdity one step further by claiming that labeling GM foods would just "confuse" consumers. David Edwards, the director of animal biotechnology at the Biotechnology Industry Organization, explained it in this way: "Extra labeling only confuses the consumer," he says. "It differentiates products that are not different."

Except that they are different. If they were really no different, then AquAdvantage company wouldn't be growing them. The whole point of genetically modified salmon is that they are modified with extra growth hormone genes to make them grow more quickly. I don't know where David Edwards is getting his information, but in the rest of the world, when something is different, that means it's different.

If it's no different, then why are so many GM salmon processes patented? If it's no different, there would be nothing to patent. The entire purpose of a patent is to make a legal claim that "we invented something different" and we own the monopoly rights to it.

The GM salmon industry can't have it both ways, you see. They can't claim it's so unique that their technologies and animals should be proprietary or patented, yet when it comes to food labeling, they claim there are no differences. It's either different or it isn't, and in the case of GM salmon, only an outright liar would look you in the eye and claim GM salmon is identical to regular farmed salmon or wild-caught salmon.


FDA insists on keeping people in the dark
The FDA, for its sad part in this saga, claims that it would be against the law to require the honest labeling of GM foods. This agency claims that since GM salmon is identical to regular salmon (it's "no different" once again, they say), they can't require it to be labeled any differently.

Except, of course, it is different. The genetic code of GM salmon is provably different, and since that genetic code is imprinted in every cell of the fish flesh, consumers are buying genetically modified fish with a different genetic code whose sole purpose was to alter the biochemistry of that fish so that it would grow larger more quickly. Thus, the physical expression of GM salmon is, by definition, different from the physical expression of regular salmon.

When you eat genetically modified salmon, you are eating something that's different from regular (natural) salmon.


Word game trickery
What the FDA and biotech industries are doing with the GM salmon issue is playing word games, trying to confuse consumers with sleight-of-mouth language intentionally designed to mislead and misinform. They've already decided they want to approve GM salmon and they don't want it to be accurately labeled. In essence, they want to trick consumers into buying GM salmon by making them think it's natural salmon.

The trouble with this FDA hucksterism is that the people aren't as stupid as the FDA thinks, and they aren't going to be fooled by this genetically engineered salmon. That's because the minute the FDA approves this Frankenfish, NaturalNews.com and a long list of other websites are going to alert the whole world to the simple truths of the matter:

Truth #1) Genetically engineered salmon is different from regular salmon.

Truth #2) The FDA is going out of its way to make sure GM salmon isn't accurately labeled.

This is a Frankenfood cover-up, pure and simple, and the public is going to be outraged that the FDA would introduce a genetically engineered fish into the food supply without even requiring it to be accurately labeled!


Watch NaturalNews for more breaking coverage of this issue
We'll be watching this issue very closely, waiting for the FDA's final decision. If the FDA decides to yet again betray the American public over this issue, we won't be at all surprised. But we will be vigilant, and we will ask for your help to spread the word and take action to demand that genetically modified salmon be accurately labeled so that consumers know what they're actually buying.

Gee, you would think the FDA might be interested in food labeling honesty. But of course, the more you learn about the FDA, the more you realize every decision the agency makes is a political decision that betrays the rights and safety of the American people.

I don't know about you, but I don't want to eat genetically modified salmon. And I don't want the FDA shoving this down my throat by making me try to guess which salmon is real versus artificially engineered. This Frankenfood shell game must end!

Watch for more news updates on this issue from NaturalNews.com.

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