What happens when you give up sovreignty: These provisions will be deemed illegal before the WTO if challenged

"Buy American" provision in House climate bill

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A new "Buy American" provision in a massive climate change bill working its way through Congress is a worrisome sign of increased U.S. protection, a business official said on Friday.

The provision offers financial aid to automakers building plug-in electric cars. But it stipulates those cars must be "developed and produced in the United States."

"All of us are trying to do everything we can to help the automakers here. But provisions like this smell of Buy America," said Christopher Wenk, senior director of international policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

The language could violate U.S. obligations under the World Trade Organization, he said, risking possible retaliation from U.S. trading partners.

The Canadian government is already worried about the impact of a "Buy American" provision in the U.S.economic stimulus package passed by Congress in February. It says public works projects should use iron, steel and other goods made in the United States.

Ottawa says that as a result, Canadian companies are being discriminated against by U.S. state and municipal governments on some water and sewage treatment projects funded by the bill.

Two other bills that have passed the House of Representatives this year, to improve water quality and build "greener" schools, also included "Buy American" mandates.

The provision offering aid to automakers building electric cars in the United States was attached to a bill requiring reductions of industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, which passed the House Energy and Commerce Committee in May.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants the bill to pass the full House in June or July. Its fate is uncertain in the Senate.

Adam Benson, spokesman for one of the lawmakers who inserted the provision, Representative John Dingellof Michigan, said it was written to comply with trade laws and wasn't specific to the "Big Three" U.S. automakers, General Motors Corp,, Ford Motor and Chrysler LLC.

But, Wenk pointed out the wording called for the cars to be developed and built in the United States, which he said was likely to preclude a foreign company if its research and development took place abroad.

Original article posted here.

Not a global warming scientist, but am open to the possibility that we are being scammed and scared a bit.

Stubborn glaciers fail to retreat, awkward polar bears continue to multiply

By Christopher Booker

Second only to the melting of the Arctic ice and those "drowning" polar bears, there is no scare with which the global warmists, led by Al Gore, more like to chill our blood than the fast-vanishing glaciers of the Himalayas, which help to provide water for a sixth of mankind. Recently one newspaper published large pictures to illustrate the alarming retreat in the past 40 years of the Rongbuk glacier below Everest. Indian meteorologists, it was reported, were warning that, thanks to global warming, all the Himalayan glaciers could have disappeared by 2035.

Read more from Christopher Booker
Yet two days earlier a report by the UN Environment Program had claimed that the cause of the melting glaciers was not global warming but the local warming effect of a vast "atmospheric brown cloud" hanging over that region, made up of soot particles from Asia's dramatically increased burning of fossil fuels and deforestation.

Furthermore a British study published two years ago by the American Meteorological Society found that glaciers are only shrinking in the eastern Himalayas. Further west, in the Hindu Kush and the Karakoram, glaciers are "thickening and expanding".

Meanwhile, all last week, ITV News was running a series of wearisomely familiar scare stories on the disappearing Arctic ice and those "doomed" polar bears - without telling its viewers that satellite images now show ice cover above its 30-year average, or that polar bear numbers are at record level. But then "polar bears not drowning after all - as snow falls over large parts of Britain" doesn't really make a story.

Original article posted here.

Killing the base of the food chain

Oceans On The Precipice Of Mass Extinctions And Rise Of Slime

During a recent research expedition to Kiritimati, or Christmas Island, Jeremy Jackson and other researchers documented a coral reef overtaken by algae, featuring murky waters and few fish. The researchers say pollution, overfishing, warming waters or some combination of the three are to blame. Photo credit: Jennifer E. Smith

by Staff Writers
San Diego CA (SPX) Aug 15, 2008
Human activities are cumulatively driving the health of the world's oceans down a rapid spiral, and only prompt and wholesale changes will slow or perhaps ultimately reverse the catastrophic problems they are facing.

Such is the prognosis of Jeremy Jackson, a professor of oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, in a bold new assessment of the oceans and their ecological health.

Publishing his study in the online early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), Jackson believes that human impacts are laying the groundwork for mass extinctions in the oceans on par with vast ecological upheavals of the past.

He cites the synergistic effects of habitat destruction, overfishing, ocean warming, increased acidification and massive nutrient runoff as culprits in a grand transformation of once complex ocean ecosystems. Areas that had featured intricate marine food webs with large animals are being converted into simplistic ecosystems dominated by microbes, toxic algal blooms, jellyfish and disease.

Jackson, director of the Scripps Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation, has tagged the ongoing transformation as "the rise of slime." The new paper, "Ecological extinction and evolution in the brave new ocean," is a result of Jackson's presentation last December at a biodiversity and extinction colloquium convened by the National Academy of Sciences.

"The purpose of the talk and the paper is to make clear just how dire the situation is and how rapidly things are getting worse," said Jackson.

"It's a lot like the issue of climate change that we had ignored for so long. If anything, the situation in the oceans could be worse because we are so close to the precipice in many ways."

In the assessment, Jackson reviews and synthesizes a range of research studies on marine ecosystem health, and in particular key studies conducted since a seminal 2001 study he led analyzing the impacts of historical overfishing.

The new study includes overfishing, but expands to include threats from areas such as nutrient runoff that lead to so-called "dead zones" of low oxygen. He also incorporates increases in ocean warming and acidification resulting from greenhouse gas emissions.

Jackson describes the potently destructive effects when forces combine to degrade ocean health. For example, climate change can exacerbate stresses on the marine environment already brought by overfishing and pollution.

"All of the different kinds of data and methods of analysis point in the same direction of drastic and increasingly rapid degradation of marine ecosystems," Jackson writes in the paper.

Jackson furthers his analysis by constructing a chart of marine ecosystems and their "endangered" status.

Coral reefs, Jackson's primary area of research, are "critically endangered" and among the most threatened ecosystems; also critically endangered are estuaries and coastal seas, threatened by overfishing and runoff; continental shelves are "endangered" due to, among other things, losses of fishes and sharks; and the open ocean ecosystem is listed as "threatened" mainly through losses at the hands of overfishing.

"Just as we say that leatherback turtles are critically endangered, I looked at entire ecosystems as if they were a species," said Jackson. "The reality is that if we want to have coral reefs in the future, we're going to have to behave that way and recognize the magnitude of the response that's necessary to achieve it."

To stop the degradation of the oceans, Jackson identifies overexploitation, pollution and climate change as the three main "drivers" that must be addressed.

"The challenges of bringing these threats under control are enormously complex and will require fundamental changes in fisheries, agricultural practices and the ways we obtain energy for everything we do," he writes.

"So it's not a happy picture and the only way to deal with it is in segments; the only way to keep one's sanity and try to achieve real success is to carve out sectors of the problem that can be addressed in effective terms and get on it as quickly as possible."

The research described in the paper was supported by the William E. and Mary B. Ritter Chair of Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

Original article posted here.

Israeli authorities predicting earthquake in Lebanon. Looks like Washington warmongering neo Cons are warming up HAARP

Israel authorities warn hospitals to prepare for earthquake

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A strong earthquake could soon rock Lebanon and parts of Israel, authorities said on Monday, urging health officials in northern Israel to make preparations for such an event.

"The probability of an earthquake of a magnitude of up to six on the Richter scale, originating in Lebanon and being felt in Israel has increased," the health ministry said in a letter sent to medical officials in northern Israel.

Since February, abnormal seismic activity has been noted in southern Lebanon, which had suffered some 500 minor earthquakes in a three-month period, health ministry director-general Avi Yisraeli said in the letter.

"In May, the tremors have become more intense and were felt in northern Israel," he said adding that "should an earthquake of such magnitude hit northern Israel, it may cause substantial infrastructural damage in the area.

"All medical facilities and organisations must do everything they can to enhance the level of readiness," Yisraeli said in the letter published by the ministry on Monday.

Similar concern was issued by Lebanon's national scientific research centre.

The secretary general of the centre, Moueen Hamz, told AFP in Beirut that 800 tremors ranging in magnitude from 2.3-5.1 degrees on the Richter scale had shaken the south Lebanon regions of Tyre and Nabatiyeh since February 12.

"The tremors increased significantly in May and June," he said, urging the Lebanese authorities to take "serious prevention measures."

Experts in Lebanon expect a quake of between five and six degrees on the Richter scale to strike, like the tremor that shook Lebanon in 1956 killing 136 people and destroying 6,000 houses, Hamze said.

Some seismologists in Israel say that quakes have historically rocked the region every eight decades, and the last one was nearly 81 years ago.

About 300 people were killed in Jerusalem and nearby Jericho by the July 11, 1927 temblor.

A similar quake measuring seven on the Richter scale and with an epicentre in the Hula Valley, today in northern Israel, devastated the town of Safed and killed some 4,000 people in 1837.

Original article posted here.

My country went to the Middle East, and all I got was this glowing sand . . .

Army Shipping Contaminated Kuwait Sand to Idaho Landfill

By Jill Kuraitis, 4-30-08

The U.S. Army is shipping 6,700 tons of contaminated sand to Idaho from Kuwait. It will arrive at American Ecology in Grandview, Idaho, sometime in May.

Grandview, population 470, is 42 miles south of Boise in Owyhee County.

The sand is from Camp Doha in Kuwait, a former Army warehouse complex used by Army Forces Central Command. The sand absorbed depleted uranium when some spent ammunition was caught in a fire (addition May 1:during the first Gulf War.)

It’s also contaminated with hazardous levels of lead, according to the two military guys who told me the story, whose branch and names won’t be used for obvious reasons. However, it’s no secret, since the story had already been written by Erik Olson in the Longview, Washington Daily News.

Chad Hyslop, spokesperson for American Ecology, did not return New West’s phone calls, but he told Olson that all the sand will be at the disposal site in Grandview sometime in May.

It will take 76 rail cars to run half the sand to Idaho, and then a second trip will be required for the rest. 152 of the smallest size rail cars would build a four-story structure about the size of half a football field.

Andrea Shipley, the executive director of the Snake River Alliance, an Idaho-based grassroots group with a mission to watchdog the energy industry and energy-related government departments, doesn’t like the idea of the sand coming to Idaho. She told New West that “this is a major concern. Depleted uranium is both a toxic heavy metal and a radioactive substance creating health risks that may be far more varied than is recognized in federal regulations today. Safe and responsible clean-up is critical to safeguard the health of Idahoans and our environment.”

The lead contamination, which the Army discovered before the ship carrying the sand to the Port of Longview arrived there, was nearly four times higher than the EPA standard for designating it “hazardous.”

According to the Centers for Disease Control, even very low levels of exposure to lead in children can cause learning disabilities, and may increase the risk of Alzheimer’s disease, strokes or heart attacks. Lead is also associated with impaired visual and motor function, growth abnormality, neurological and organ damage, hearing loss, hypertension and reproductive complications.

Whether or not humans might be exposed to the contaminated sand, either during transport, unloading, or processing at American Ecology’s Grandview landfill is not clear. No Army official returned calls. Follow-ups to this story will be posted.

Addition May 1: The full post about depleted uranium on Wikipedia can be found here, but here are two relevant paragraphs.

Depleted uranium (DU) is uranium primarily composed of the isotope uranium-238 (U-238). Natural uranium is about 99.27 percent U-238, 0.72 percent U-235, and 0.0055 percent U-234. Because U-235 is used for fission in nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons, natural uranium is enriched in U-235 by separating the isotopes by mass. The byproduct of enrichment, called depleted uranium or DU, contains less than one third as much U-235 and U-234 as natural uranium, making it less radioactive due to the longer 4.5 billion year half-life of U-238. The external radiation dose from DU is about 60 percent of that from the same mass of natural uranium.

Depleted uranium munitions are controversial because of numerous unanswered questions about the long-term health effects. DU is less toxic than other heavy metals such as arsenic and mercury, and is only very weakly radioactive because of its long half life. While any radiation exposure has risks, no conclusive epidemiological data have correlated DU exposure to specific human health effects such as cancer. However, the UK government has attributed birth defect claims from a 1991 Gulf War combat veteran to DU poisoning, and studies using cultured cells and laboratory rodents continue to suggest the possibility of leukemogenic, genetic, reproductive, and neurological effects from chronic exposure. Until such issues are resolved with further research, the use of DU by the military will continue to be controversial.

Updates to this story will continue to be posted.

Update May 1: NewWest blogger Irwin Horowitz of 6degrees - named because of his six college degrees including a B.S. From MIT in physics, an M.S. In astronomy and another M.S. In electrical engineering, has a strong interest in nuclear issues and follows them regularly. He told New West that the primary issue with the sand from Kuwait is the heavy-metal toxicity more than the U-238, and the radiation, in the form of alpha particles, doesn’t penetrate skin. Lead, said Horowitz, gets into the soft tissues of the body. “Depleted uranium could enter the body from ingesting it, breathing it in, or through surface skin cuts, so you’d almost have to play in the sand.”

More calls to American Ecology have not been returned.

Original article posted here.

Our rapidly changing world

North Pole could be ice-free this summer, scientists say

By Alan Duke

(CNN) -- The North Pole may be briefly ice-free by September as global warming melts away Arctic sea ice, according to scientists from the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.

Scientists say it's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole.

"We kind of have an informal betting pool going around in our center and that betting pool is 'does the North Pole melt out this summer?' and it may well," said the center's senior research scientist, Mark Serreze.

It's a 50-50 bet that the thin Arctic sea ice, which was frozen in autumn, will completely melt away at the geographic North Pole, Serreze said.

The ice retreated to a record level in September when the Northwest Passage, the sea route through the Arctic Ocean, opened briefly for the first time in recorded history.

"What we've seen through the past few decades is the Arctic sea ice cover is becoming thinner and thinner as the system warms up," Serreze said.

Specific weather patterns will determine whether the North Pole's ice cover melts completely this summer, he said.

"Last year, we had sort of a perfect weather pattern to get rid of ice to open up that Northwest Passage," Serreze said. "This year, a different pattern can set up. so maybe we'll preserve some ice there. We're in a wait-and-see mode right now. We'll see what happens."

The brief lack of ice at the top of the globe will not bring any immediate consequences, he said.

"From the viewpoint of the science, the North Pole is just another point in the globe, but it does have this symbolic meaning," Serreze said. "There's supposed to be ice at the North Pole. The fact that we may not have any by the end of this summer could be quite a symbolic change."

Serreze said it's "just another indicator of the disappearing Arctic sea ice cover" but that it is happening so soon is "just astounding to me."

"Five years ago, to think that we'd even be talking about the possibility of the North Pole melting out in the summer, I would have never thought it," he said.

The melting, however, has been long seen as inevitable, he said.

"If you talked to me or other scientists just a few years ago, we were saying that we might lose all or most of the summer sea ice cover by anywhere from 2050 to 2100," Serreze said. "Then, recently, we kind of revised those estimates, maybe as early as 2030. Now, there's people out there saying it might be even before that. So, things are happening pretty quick up there."

Serreze said those who suggest that the Arctic meltdown is just part of a historic cycle are wrong.

"It's not cyclical at this point. I think we understand the physics behind this pretty well," he said. "We've known for at least 30 years, from our earliest climate models, that it's the Arctic where we'd see the first signs of global warming.

"It's a situation where we hate to say we told you so, but we told you so," he said.

Serreze said the Arctic sea ice will not be the same for decades.

"If we had a few cold years in a row, we could put sort of a temporary damper on it, but I think at this point going to an ice-free Arctic Ocean is inevitable," he said. "I don't think we can stop that now."

Reduced greenhouse gas emissions could "cool things down a bit," he said.

"It would recover fairly quickly, but it's just not going to happen for a while," he said. "I think we're committed at this point."

There are some positive aspects to the ice melting, he said. Ships could use the Northwest Passage to save time and energy by no longer having to travel through the Panama Canal or around Cape Horn.

"There's also, or course, oil at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean," he said. "Now, the irony of that is kind of clear, but the fact that we are opening up the Arctic Ocean does make it more accessible."

The U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center Web site, NSIDC.org, publishes a near-real-time image of the Arctic sea ice cover.

Original article posted here.

Just in case you care that our world is melting . . .

Arctic sea ice melt 'even faster'

By Richard Black

A widespread Arctic melt would have major impacts on wildlife

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.

But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

Scientists on the project say much of the ice is so thin as to melt easily, and the Arctic seas may be ice-free in summer within five to 10 years.

I think we're going to beat last year's record, though I'd love to be wrong Julienne Stroeve

"We had a bit more ice in the winter, although we were still way below the long-term average," said Julienne Stroeve from NSIDC in Boulder, Colorado.

"So we had a partial recovery. But the real issue is that most of the pack ice has become really thin, and if we have a regular summer now, it can just melt away," she told BBC News.

In March, Nasa reported that the area covered by sea ice was slightly larger than in 2007, but much of it consisted of thin floes that had formed during the previous winter. These are much less robust than thicker, less saline floes that have already survived for several years.

After a colder winter, ice has been melting even faster than last year

A few years ago, scientists were predicting that Arctic waters would be ice-free in summers by about 2080.

Then computer models started projecting earlier dates, around 2030 to 2050.

Then came the 2007 summer that saw Arctic sea ice shrink to the smallest extent ever recorded, down to 4.2 million sq km from 7.8 million sq km in 1980.

By the end of last year, one research group was forecasting ice-free summers by 2013.

"I think we're going to beat last year's record melt, though I'd love to be wrong," said Dr Stroeve.

"If we do, then I don't think 2013 is far off any more. If what we think is going to happen does happen, then it'll be within a decade anyway."

Rising tide

Countries surrounding the Arctic are eyeing the economic opportunities that melting ice might bring.

Canada and Russia are exploring sovereignty claims over tracts of Arctic seafloor, while just this week US President George Bush has urged more oil exploration in US waters - which could point the way to exploitation of reserves off the Alaskan coast.

But from a climate point of view, the melt could bring global impacts accelerating the rate of warming and of sea level rise.

"This is a positive feedback process," commented Dr Ian Willis, from the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge.

"Sea ice has a higher albedo (reflectivity) than ocean water; so as the ice melts, the water absorbs more of the Sun's energy and warms up more, and that in turn warms the atmosphere more - including the atmosphere over the Greenland ice sheet."

Greenland is already losing ice to the oceans, contributing to the gradual rise in sea levels. The ice cap holds enough water to lift sea levels globally by about seven metres (22ft) if it all melted.

Natural climatic cycles such as the Arctic Oscillation play a role in year-to-year variations in ice cover. But Julienne Stroeve believes the sea ice is now so thin that there is little chance of the melting trend turning round.

"If the ice were as thick as it was in the 1970s, last year's conditions would have brought a dip in cover, but nothing exceptional.

"But now it's so thin that you would have to have an exceptional sequence of cold winters and cold summers in order for it to rebuild."

Original article posted here.

The Moron speaks

The environmental rape of Africa

Nature laid waste: The destruction of Africa

The massive scale of environmental devastation across the continent has been fully revealed for the first time in an atlas compiled by UN geographers. Michael McCarthy reports

Independent Graphics

More on ENMOD (environmental modification)

Modifying the Weather for Military Warfare

Rarely acknowledged in the debate on global climate change, the world’s weather can now be modified as part of a new generation of sophisticated electromagnetic weapons. Both the US and Russia have developed capabilities to manipulate the climate for military use.

Environmental modification techniques have been applied by the US military for more than half a century. US mathematician John von Neumann, in liaison with the US Department of Defense, started his research on weather modification in the late 1940s at the height of the Cold War and foresaw ‘forms of climatic warfare as yet unimagined’.

During the Vietnam war, cloud-seeding techniques were used, starting in 1967 under Project Popeye, the objective of which was to prolong the monsoon season and block enemy supply routes along the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

The US military has developed advanced capabilities that enable it selectively to alter weather patterns. The technology, which is being perfected under the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP), is an appendage of the Strategic Defense Initiative – ‘Star Wars’. From a military standpoint, HAARP is a weapon of mass destruction, operating from the outer atmosphere and capable of destabilising agricultural and ecological systems around the world.

Weather-modification, according to the US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report, ‘offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary’, capabilities, it says, extend to the triggering of floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes: ‘Weather modification will become a part of domestic and international security and could be done unilaterally… It could have offensive and defensive applications and even be used for deterrence purposes. The ability to generate precipitation, fog and storms on earth or to modify space weather… and the production of artificial weather all are a part of an integrated set of [military] technologies.’

In 1977, an international Convention was ratified by the UN General Assembly which banned ‘military or other hostile use of environmental modification techniques having widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.’ It defined ‘environmental modification techniques’ as ‘any technique for changing – through the deliberate manipulation of natural processes – the dynamics, composition or structure of the earth, including its biota, lithosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, or of outer space.’

While the substance of the 1977 Convention was reasserted in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio, debate on weather modification for military use has become a scientific taboo. Military analysts are mute on the subject. Meteorologists are not investigating the matter and environmentalists are focused on greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol. Neither is the possibility of climatic or environmental manipulations as part of a military and intelligence agenda, while tacitly acknowledged, part of the broader debate on climate change under UN auspices.

The HAARP Programme

Established in 1992, HAARP, based in Gokona, Alaska, is an array of high-powered antennas that transmit, through high-frequency radio waves, massive amounts of energy into the ionosphere (the upper layer of the atmosphere). Their construction was funded by the US Air Force, the US Navy and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Operated jointly by the Air Force Research Laboratory and the Office of Naval Research, HAARP constitutes a system of powerful antennas capable of creating ‘controlled local modifications of the ionosphere’. According to its official website, www.haarp.alaska.edu, HAARP will be used ‘to induce a small, localized change in ionospheric temperature so physical reactions can be studied by other instruments located either at or close to the HAARP site’.

But Rosalie Bertell, president of the International Institute of Concern for Public Health, says HAARP operates as ‘a gigantic heater that can cause major disruptions in the ionosphere, creating not just holes, but long incisions in the protective layer that keeps deadly radiation from bombarding the planet’. Physicist Dr Bernard Eastlund called it ‘the largest ionospheric heater ever built’.

HAARP is presented by the US Air Force as a research programme, but military documents confirm its main objective is to ‘induce ionospheric modifications’ with a view to altering weather patterns and disrupting communications and radar. According to a report by the Russian State Duma: ‘The US plans to carry out large-scale experiments under the HAARP programme [and] create weapons capable of breaking radio communication lines and equipment installed on spaceships and rockets, provoke serious accidents in electricity networks and in oil and gas pipelines, and have a negative impact on the mental health of entire regions.’

An analysis of statements emanating from the US Air Force points to the unthinkable: the covert manipulation of weather patterns, communications and electric power systems as a weapon of global warfare, enabling the US to disrupt and dominate entire regions.

Weather manipulation is the pre-emptive weapon par excellence. It can be directed against enemy countries or ‘friendly nations’ without their knowledge, used to destabilise economies, ecosystems and agriculture. It can also trigger havoc in financial and commodity markets. The disruption in agriculture creates a greater dependency on food aid and imported grain staples from the US and other Western countries.

HAARP was developed as part of an Anglo-American partnership between Raytheon Corporation, which owns the HAARP patents, and British Aerospace Systems (BAES). The HAARP project is one among several collaborative ventures in advanced weapons systems between the two defence giants.

The HAARP project was initiated in 1992 by Advanced Power Technologies, Inc. (APTI), a subsidiary of Atlantic Richfield Corporation (ARCO). APTI (including the HAARP patents) was sold by ARCO to E-Systems Inc, in 1994.

E-Systems, on contract to the CIA and US Department of Defense, outfitted the ‘Doomsday Plan’, which ‘allows the President to manage a nuclear war’. Subsequently acquired by Raytheon Corporation, it is among the largest intelligence contractors in the World.

BAES was involved in the development of the advanced stage of the HAARP antenna array under a 2004 contract with the Office of Naval Research. The installation of 132 highfrequency transmitters was entrusted by BAES to its US subsidiary, BAE Systems Inc. The project, according to a July report in Defense News, was undertaken by BAES’s Electronic Warfare division. In September it received DARPA’s top award for technical achievement for the design, construction and activation of the HAARP array of antennas.

The HAARP system is fully operational and in many regards dwarfs existing conventional and strategic weapons systems. While there is no firm evidence of its use for military purposes, Air Force documents suggest HAARP is an integral part of the militarisation of space. One would expect the antennas already to have been subjected to routine testing.

Under the UNFCCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has a mandate ‘to assess scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of climate change’. This mandate includes environmental warfare. ‘Geo-engineering’ is acknowledged, but the underlying military applications are neither the object of policy analysis or scientific research in the thousands of pages of IPCC reports and supporting documents, based on the expertise and input of some 2,500 scientists, policymakers and environmentalists.

Original article posted here.

Not an optimistic message

I give up, says Brazilian minister who fought to save the rainforest

By Daniel Howden,

Brazil has been accused of turning its back on its duty to protect the Amazon after the resignation of its award-winning Environment Minister fuelled fresh fears over the fate of the forest. The departure of Marina Silva, who admitted she was losing the battle to get green voices heard amidst the rush for economic development, has been greeted with dismay by conservationists.

"She was the environment's guardian angel," said Frank Guggenheim, executive director for Greenpeace in Brazil. "Now Brazil's environment is orphaned."

In a letter to President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Ms Silva said that her efforts to protect the rainforest acknowledged as the "lungs of the planet" were being thwarted by powerful business lobbies. "Your Excellency was a witness to the growing resistance found by our team in important sectors of the government and society," she wrote.

The decision by Ms Silva to walk away five years on from her triumphant unveiling as a minister in President Lula's first term has underlined just how far the former trade union hero's administration has drifted from the promises made in its green heyday.

"Her resignation is a disaster for the Lula administration," said Jose Maria Cardoso da Silva, of Conservation International. "If the government had any global credibility in environmental issues, it was because of minister Marina."

The Latin American giant's supposed progress on environmental protection has unravelled in the past year as revelations of record levels of deforestation, violent land disputes and runaway forest fires have followed in quick succession. The worldwide boom in agricultural commodities has created an unparalleled thirst for land and energy in Brazil, and the result has been a potentially catastrophic land grab into the world's largest remaining rainforest. The Amazon basin is home to one in 10 of the world's mammals and 15 per cent of its land-based plant species. It holds more than half of the world's fresh water and its vast forests act as the largest carbon sink on the planet, providing a vital check on the greenhouse effect.

Since President Lula won a second term Ms Silva found herself a lone voice in a government acutely aware that its own political future depended on the vast agribusiness interests she was trying to rein in. The final breakdown in her relationship with the President came after he gave the green light to massive road and dam-building projects in the Amazon basin, and a plan she drafted for the sustainable management of the region was taken from her and handed to a business-friendly fellow minister.

Marcelo Furtado, the campaign director for Greenpeace Brazil, said the resignation was "disastrous" and blamed it on the government's Amazon policy and pressure to ease environmental regulations on factories.

"Although Lula has adopted the environmental talk, the practice is development at whatever cost," he said. Next week, the Amazonian city of Alta Mira will host the largest ever gathering of indigenous leaders in a bid to stop a massive hydroelectric dam being built on the Xingu river, a tributary of the Amazon. Although the government claims no decision has been made on the Bel Monte project it's believed to have already committed itself to the construction despite experts warning of potentially dire environmental consequences.

The resignation brings a sad close to Ms Silva's relationship with President Lula, whose personal story closely mirrors her own remarkable journey as the daughter of an impoverished rubber tapper who rose to be a government minister and internationally recognised environmental champion. Ms Silva spent her childhood drawing rubber sap from trees and hunting and fishing to help support her large family in the Amazonian state of Acre. It was only heavy metal poisoning from polluted water and the contraction of tropical diseases that brought her to the city as an illiterate 16-year-old. Working as a maid, she taught herself to read and put herself through university, emerging as a vocal figure in the rubber tappers' union and a close ally to Chico Mendes, the movement's inspirational leader whose brutal murder would cause an international outcry.

Together the pair led a campaign to halt the disastrous deforestation and rampant eviction of forest-dwelling communities to make way for the logging and ranching that still threaten the Amazon.

The tappers' idea of creating sustainable reserves where forest people can make a livelihood from extractive industries has become a global model for managing forests and Acre now has a two-million-hectare reserve.

Health problems Ms Silva inherited from her youth have led to long periods in hospital but in 1994 she became the first rubber tapper elected to Brazil's senate. The winner of inter-national awards, including the Goldman prize, she has also provided credibility on environmental issues for her former boss.

Roberto Smeraldi, head of Friends of the Earth Brazil, said her greatest legacy may be her decision to walk away. "The emperor is naked now: Lula no longer has a smokescreen to show a policy and implement the opposite of it. He will have a problem, since Marina was perfect for him: she accepted anything he imposed and at the same time acted as a green seal for the Brazilian government."

Andrew Mitchell, a leading forests expert and director of the Global Canopy Programme, said: "The Amazon provides the vital rainfall on which Brazil's crops and hydropower depend, as well as regulating the global climate for the rest of us; losing all that is too big a price to pay."

Enemies of the Amazon rainforest

RANCHING

The explosion of cattle ranching exactly mirrors the dramatic increase in deforestation. The world's leading beef exporter has ignored the link and pumped more money into slaughter houses with the help of the World Bank.

MINING

The soaring price of gold and minerals has revived old mines and spurred the creation of hundreds of new ones. Major mining projects not only require large clearings in the forest, they also leave a toxic legacy of pollution.

DAMS AND ROADS

Every study shows that more roads bring more people and destroy more forest. But the cycle continues. There is noevidence that massive hydroelectric dams deliver benefits to communities or cheap electricity.

SOYA

The worldwide boom in agricultural commodities has bitten enormous chunks out of the rainforest. Vast soy plantations supply the demand for livestock feed and bio-fuels, and make a fortune for agribusiness giants.

Original article posted here.

Whatever is exactly causing it, there is definitely a problem

Huge study documents changes from climate warming

Enlarge Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change A series of four photos from 1940, 1982, 1996 and 2005 shows the dramatic retreat of the Chacaltaya glacier in Bolivia. WARMING WORLD By Doyle Rice, USA TODAY A landmark new climate study released today reports that global warming is already changing the life cycles of thousands of animals and plants — as well as hundreds of physical systems — worldwide. It documents rapid glacier melts in North America, South America and Europe; trees and plants sprouting leaves much earlier in the spring in Europe, Asia and North America; permafrost melting in Asia; and changes in bird migration patterns across Europe, North America and Australia, all in response to rising global temperatures. While previous studies have looked at single phenomena or smaller areas, this is a new analysis on a continental scale looking at data that had not been previously assembled together in one spot, says lead author Cynthia Rosenzweig, a scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. By analyzing data from each of the Earth's seven continents and the oceans, the study paints a clear picture of a world that's been undergoing rapid transformation in just the past few decades due to climate change. "Humans are influencing climate through increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and the warming world is causing impacts on physical and biological systems attributable at the global scale," Rosenzweig says. "These are things that are happening now, not projections of future changes." The study appears in this week's British scientific journal Nature. Rosenzweig and her colleagues compiled data on about 28,800 plant and animal systems and 829 physical systems, all of which showed documented changes over the past few decades. The study found that 95% of the observed physical changes, and 90% of the biological changes, are consistent with what would be expected from warming temperatures. Some of the physical changes include: •Melting glaciers on all continents, specifically in Alaska, Peru, and the Alps. •Earlier break-up and thinning of river and lake ice in Mongolia. •Declining mountain snowpack in western North America. •Earlier spring runoff in North America. Some of the observed effects on living things include: •Movements of species to higher latitudes and altitudes throughout the Northern Hemisphere. •Population of emperor penguins has declined by 50% on Antarctic Peninsula. •Rapid advance of spring arrival of long-distance migratory birds in Europe. "It was a real challenge to separate the influence of human-caused temperature increases from natural climate variations or other confounding factors, such as land-use changes or pollution," says study co-author David Karoly, a climate scientist at the University of Melbourne in Victoria, Australia. However, scientists reported in the study that "these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone." Rosenzweig says that the 1970 — 2004 time period was selected because it coincides with the rapid recent warming of the planet. During that time, the Earth's temperature rose by about 0.6 degrees F. She points out that a global temperature rise of 3 to 7 degrees by 2100 — as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 — only "heightens the concern of what's happening now." The data show that changes are most notable in North America, Asia and Europe — mainly because many more studies have been done there, says Rosenzweig. On the other continents, including South America, Australia and Africa, documentation of changes in physical and biological systems is sparse, although there is strong evidence there of human-influenced warming itself. The study builds upon the consensus of the IPCC, which in 2007 declared manmade climate warming "likely" to have discernible effects on biological and physical systems. Original article posted here. Original article posted here.

Another voice in the global warming debate. weazl thinks that this issue is complex enough and filled with enough propaganda to keep ears open.

Worth reading: Internal Combustion

Nuclear holocaust for environmental health? First, Chernobyl's Zone of Alienation, now Bikini

Coral flourishing at Bikini Atoll atomic test site

By Rob Taylor

CANBERRA (Reuters) - Coral is again flourishing in the crater left by the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated by the United States, 54 years after the blast on Bikini Atoll, marine scientists said on Tuesday.

A team of research divers visited Bravo crater, ground zero for the test of a thermonuclear weapon in the remote Marshall Islands on March 1, 1954, and found large numbers of fish and coral growing, although some species appeared locally extinct. "I didn't know what to expect, some kind of moonscape perhaps. But it was incredible," Zoe Richards, from Australia's James Cook University, told Reuters about the team's trip to the atoll in the south Pacific.

"We saw communities not too far from any coral reef, with plenty of fish, corals and action going on, some really striking individual colonies," she said.

The 15 megatonne hydrogen bomb was 1,000 times more powerful than the blast which destroyed Hiroshima, vaporizing islands with temperatures hitting 99,000 Fahrenheit, and shaking islands even up to 124 miles away.

The resulting 4 mile-wide fireball left a crater 1 mile across and 80 yards deep, while the mushroom cloud rose 62 miles over the South Pacific and radioactive fallout reached Australia and Japan.

Richards, from the Australian government-backed Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, said the research team from Germany, Italy, Hawaii, Australia and the Marshall Islands found corals up to 9 yards high and some with 12 inch-thick trunks.

"It was fascinating. I've never seen corals growing like trees outside of the Marshall Islands," Richards said.

While above-water areas remained contaminated and unfit for human habitation, healthy sub-sea species probably traveled on strong winds and currents from nearby Rongelap Atoll, which was not bombed in a series of 23 tests between 1946-58.

"It is absolutely pristine for another tragic reason. It received fallout and was evacuated of people, so now underwater it's really healthy and prevailing winds have probably been seeding Bikini Atoll's recovery," Richards said.

Compared with a study made before the atomic tests, the team established that 42 species were missing compared to the early 1950s, with at least 28 of those locally extinct.

The team was asked by Marshall Islands authorities to investigate Bikini for the first time since the tests, in part to see if a small diving industry could safely be expanded.

The waters around Bikini are littered with wrecks of old , decommissioned ships sunk during the atomic tests, including the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga and the former Japanese flagship HIJMS Nagato, from which Admiral Yamoto gave the order to attack Pearl Harbour.

Richards said the ability of Bikini's corals to bounce back from "a single huge destructive event" was proof of their resilience, although that did not mean the threat to corals from climate change had been overestimated.

"Climate change is an ongoing struggle to survive with coral, with no reprieve in sight," she said. "After the atomic blasts they had 50 years undisturbed to recover."

Original article posted here.

With humans gone, live thrives

Chernobyl: No People But A Thriving Ecosystem
By Rusty Rockets

When the Chernobyl nuclear reactor melted down in 1986, scores of people died, many more became ill with acute radiation sickness, and 135,000 people were evacuated. The blast spread more than 200 times the radioactivity of the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The prognosis for Chernobyl and its environs – succinctly dubbed by the Soviets as the "Zone of Alienation" – was grim. But surprisingly, Chernobyl’s surrounding flora and fauna have flourished remarkably. In Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl (October 2005, Joseph Henry Press), author Mary Mycio vividly describes an extraordinary – and at times unearthly – new ecosystem that is flourishing in this no-man’s land, where radiation levels are too intense for people to live.

In 1986, people were already overwrought as a result of the tense and relentless brinkmanship presented on the nightly news in an era when two superpowers existed. As Martin Amis wrote: “Of course, the mid-to-late Eighties was one of the warmer phases of the Cold War: the time of the Reagan build-up, or spend-up; ‘the evil empire’; Star Wars (‘the force was with us’). Gorbachev had yet to show his hand, and it was hereabouts that Reagan accused the Russian language of having no word for détente.” The threat of nuclear war always seemed imminent and our anxiousness was further heightened by the unsettling predictions of what would occur should a nuclear exchange eventuate.

Popular culture ensured that apocalyptic wasteland scenarios were welded in the public psyche. So when Chernobyl melted down, it was no surprise that the world’s media painted a grim picture. As a reflection of that time, Mycio recalls how a friend called her up and exclaimed: "A nuclear bomb exploded in Ukraine!" Chernobyl may not have been the nuclear apocalypse that we were all waiting for, but it may as well have been. We were all obviously prepared for the worst.

As Mycio says, the very word “Chernobyl” has become a synonym for “horrific disaster,” conjuring the frightful radioactive deserts that form the landscapes of Atomic Age science fiction and resonate deeply in modern imaginations haunted by the specter of nuclear war. Mary Mycio’s first assumptions prior to visiting the Zone were probably not too dissimilar from anybody else asked to speculate on the disaster. “Whenever I thought about the irradiated lands 50 miles north of Kiev, it was like contemplating a black hole. All I could picture was a dead zone, like a giant parking lot paved with asphalt or a barren desert of dust and ash where nothing could grow and nothing living could survive without protective gear. Only gloomy shades of black and gray colored my mental images,” writes Mycio.

But Wormwood Forest tells an astonishing tale that while tragic, is in many respects uplifting. The book’s important and remarkable observations come at a high price, but the Chernobyl disaster clearly demonstrates what happens to the environment when humans are not present. “Though Chernobyl is widely considered the worst environmental disaster in history, the Zone’s evacuation has – paradoxically – allowed nature to flourish. Nature barely notices radiation – at least the type and levels of radiation Chernobyl released. Human activities are far more damaging. In a way, we are the environmental disaster,” says Mycio. Ten years after the disaster, Mycio discovered a wilderness teeming with large animals, even more than before the nuclear disaster, with many of them members of rare and endangered species. Like the forests, fields and swamps of this burgeoning wilderness, everything is radioactive, and will be for the next 400,000 years. Packed into the muscles and bones of every animal inhabitant is Cesium-137 and strontium-90 respectively. But, quite astonishingly, they are thriving. Chernobyl’s flourishing new ecosystem is: “one of the first examples of how, in the absence of human intervention, nature in the Zone could recover its balance – even in the face of radioactive: “ghost towns and villages [that] stand in tragic testimony to the devastating effects of technology gone awry,” adds Mycio.

Mycio, originally from Long Island, earned a bachelor’s degree in biology from Hunter College and a law degree from New York University in 1984. While working toward her degree, Mycio also spent a number of years in the East Village of New York, at the heart of the East Coast Ukrainian community, promoting Ukrainian affairs and issues. While working as a freelance journalist, Mycio felt she needed to write a book that dealt specifically with a Ukrainian theme. Mycio recently told The Ukrainian Weekly that after the Chernobyl disaster occurred, she became fixated on collecting as much information on the disaster as she possibly could in the hope of writing a book that exposed the criminal negligence of the Soviet government. However, the book was to become something even more fascinating and useful than a railing against the machinations of the Soviet government. “What I tried to do was weave personal travels with lyrical explanations of the natural history and science of Chernobyl. It’s the story of my travels in a radioactive wilderness.”

As it happens, Mycio’s book release coincides with a 600 page Chernobyl Forum Report that was released in early September. The Forum is made up of 8 United Nations agencies, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), World Health Organization (WHO), United Nations Development Program (UNDP), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN-OCHA), United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR), and the World Bank, as well as the governments of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine. The report states that a total of up to four thousand people could eventually die of radiation exposure from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. This figure represents a massive departure from the original predictions made that suggested anywhere up to hundreds-of-thousands of fatalities. As of mid-2005 fewer than 50 deaths had been directly attributed to radiation from the disaster, almost all being highly exposed rescue workers, many who died within months of the accident but others who died as late as 2004, the report says. The report also notes that while 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer, mainly in children and adolescents at the time of the accident, have resulted from the accident's contamination, the survival rate among such cancer victims, judging from experience in Belarus, has been almost 99 percent.

According to The Ukrainian Weekly, the Chernobyl Forum report has drawn much criticism from groups in the Ukraine. Alexander Kuzma, executive director of the Children of Chernobyl Relief and Development Fund, says the casualty figures are “dubious, at best.” Mycio can understand the frustration felt by such individuals, who she claims have had their concerns marginalized for years. Mycio told The Ukrainian Weekly that while there was nothing wrong with the environmental report, the predicted health effects are somewhat more controversial. “They based their prediction of future cancer on the people they studied, but they didn’t study all the people who were affected,” she pointed out. Mycio claims that there are about 1 million considered “highly affected” by Chernobyl, but the Chernobyl Forum only examined 600,000 of them, while ignoring 400,000. “They’re making conclusions based on a limited, incomplete population,” Mycio said. She also adds that the report states that there have been no increases in solid cancer tumors as a result of Chernobyl, yet there haven’t been any epidemiological studies of these tumors. “That’s logically incorrect,” states Mycio. “Since there are no epidemiological studies on the changes in the rate of solid tumors, it’s impossible to make any conclusions.” Despite these concerns, however, Mycio believes that to some extent the Chernobyl case in regard to fatalities has been exaggerated.

The Chernobyl disaster also intersects with a number of other present day worries, such as our dependence on fossil fuels in spite of many scientists claiming that the Earth’s once bountiful reserves have entered their twilight years. Not to mention the effects of global warming that will continue to linger as a legacy of our longer than necessary dalliance with fossil fuels. Having spent a considerable amount of time researching and writing on the effects of the Chernobyl disaster, Mycio’s thinking on these important issues has been transformed in fundamental ways. “For the record, I have gone from adamant opponent of nuclear energy to ambivalent supporter – at least for giving a window of time for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels while pursuing research on alternative energy sources,” says Mycio. She explains that: “Initially, the disaster made me oppose nuclear energy. In 1986 that was a painless position to hold, because the price of American dependence on foreign oil had not yet become two Iraq wars, the second of which still has undetermined costs and consequences. Nor had I yet moved to Ukraine, whose complete dependence on Russian fossil fuels seriously compromised the young state’s political independence. It was also before I could feel the real evidence of global warming on my own skin.”

Many people may find it unbelievable that Chernobyl’s story can go from worst-ever-environmental-disaster-in-history, to flourishing eco wilderness, twenty odd years later. Mycio states emphatically that she has never been approached by anyone looking to influence her assessment of the Chernobyl situation. An apologist she is not. The book is as much about the resilience and tenacity of a woman eager to get at the truth of something close to her heart, as it is about the resilience of nature itself in the face of what we assume to be insurmountable odds. As Mycio says: “The extraordinary and unexpected fate of the evacuated ‘Zone of Alienation’ around Chernobyl provides only a part of the answer. I hope that the rest will form in the mind of the reader after joining me on my journeys through the fascinating, beautiful – and radioactive – Wormwood Forest.”

Further reading:

Mary Mycio’s Wormwood Forest homepage: http://chernobyl.in.ua/en/chapter_1/1
UN Chernobyl Forum Report (12 MB!): http://www.iaea.org/NewsCenter/Focus/Chernobyl/pdfs/05-28601_Chernobyl.pdf

Original article posted here.

The World According to Monsanto - A documentary that Americans won't ever see.

Hmm, ya think it might have something to do with the massive spraying of metals across the country (and the world)?

Study: High toxin levels in nat'l parks

BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Pesticides, heavy metals and other airborne contaminants are raining down on national parks across the West and Alaska, turning up at sometimes dangerously high levels in lakes, plants and fish, according to a newly released report.

A sweeping, six-year federal study released Tuesday found evidence of 70 contaminants in 20 national parks and monuments — from Denali in Alaska and Glacier in Montana, to Big Bend in Texas and Yosemite in California. In some cases, the contaminants are causing male fish to develop female organs, including to a co-author of the study.

The findings revealed that some of the Earth's most pristine wilderness is still within reach of the toxic byproducts of the industrial age.

"Contaminants are everywhere," said Michael Kent, a fish researcher with Oregon State University who co-authored the study. "You can't get more remote than these northern parts of Alaska and the high Rockies," he said.

The substances detected ranged from mercury produced by power plants and industrial chemicals such as PCBs to the banned insecticides dieldrin and DDT. Those can cause health problems in humans including nervous system damage, dampened immune system responses and lowered reproductive success.

Contaminants that accumulated in fish exceeded human consumption thresholds at the eight parks that researchers focussed on most: Sequoia and Kings Canyon, Mount Rainier, Olympic, Glacier, Rocky Mountain, Gates of the Arctic and Denali national parks and Alaska's Noatak National Preserve.

Also, mercury levels at the eight parks and DDT levels at Glacier and Sequoia and Kings Canyon exceeded health thresholds for fish-eating wildlife. Kent said he found airborne contaminants are causing male fish to develop female organs in some parks.

Much of the contamination is thought to have come from overseas — traveling global air currents from Europe and Asia.

But researchers said they were surprised to find substantial contamination from the local use of legal pesticides, particularly in agricultural areas around Glacier, Rocky Mountain and Sequoia and Kings Canyon parks.

University of Washington atmospheric researcher Daniel Jaffe said scientists previously thought banning substances like DDT and dieldrin would lessen the persistence of chemicals in the environment.

"We replaced them with pesticides with much shorter lifetimes in the environment," Jaffe said. "But in places like the Central Valley of California, we are applying many, many tons of these every year. ... We now know they can move substantial distances."

A parks advocacy group called the federal report "a wake-up call" that should mobilize Congress to take a tougher stance on air pollution.

"We can take steps to reduce mercury emissions from power plants, steps to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming," said Will Hammerquist with the National Parks Conservation Association.

The $6 million study is known as the Western Airborne Contaminants Assessment Project. It is the most comprehensive to date on the distribution and concentration of contaminants outside developed areas, according to the project's scientific director, Dixon Landers with the Environmental Protection Agency.

Contrary to the conventional wisdom that remoteness means less pollution, Landers said many of the parks — particularly those at higher elevations and in colder climates — actually are at higher risk.

Mercury from power plants in China, for example, is borne across the Pacific in clouds that rise up when they hit West Coast mountains. That causes the mercury to drop out of the clouds attached to rain droplets or snowflakes, he said.

Release of the study, which was coordinated by the National Park Service, came after a delay of several months. A Park Service spokeswoman, Colleen Flanagan, said the delay was caused by the time needed to analyze the vast volumes of data collected, from 2002 to 2007.

The study also included researchers from the U.S. Geological Survey and the U.S. Forest Service.

Original article posted here.

The result of the perfect storm of bad Bushmonkey policies across the board: global food shortage

Our global future with global warming and a changing world