By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON, April 22 (Reuters) – Google went green and so did dozens of comic strips while President George W. Bush planted a tree on Tuesday to mark Earth Day, an environmental event that has become increasingly political and corporate.

Thirty-eight years after Earth Day began as a series of grass-roots “teach-ins” about environmental conservation and pollution, April 22 has become an occasion to focus attention on human-generated climate change and the policies around it — a topic not on the public mind in 1970.

The method for getting the message across has certainly evolved. Google.com’s online search site featured a lush logo with letters made of moss-covered boulders, a tree sprouting from the “L” and a waterfall flowing beneath it. Clicking on the image led to a list of Earth Day-related sites.

The comics pages in many U.S. newspapers featured strips with environmental themes. “Zippy The Pinhead” was typical: the short-sighted residents of Dingburg save the Earth by packing dirt into suitcases and keeping them in a storage locker.

Bush was in New Orleans for the so-called “Three Amigos” summit with leaders from Canada and Mexico, where the U.S. president planted an oak tree in Lafayette Square — a symbolic replanting of the some 250,000 trees stripped away from the city by 2005 hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

PLAN TO RAISE FUEL EFFICIENCY

The Bush administration, which has weathered criticism for its stand on environmental issues, offered a plan on Tuesday to boost fuel economy for cars and trucks to cut U.S. dependence on foreign oil and curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The plan would require the U.S. and international fleet to average 32 miles per gallon (13.6 km per litre) by 2015. The energy bill Bush signed in December requires that autos average 35 miles per gallon (14.9 km per litre) by 2020, a 40 percent increase over the current standard.

On the presidential campaign trail, Democrats Sen. Barack Obama and Sen Hillary Clinton and Republican Sen. John McCain offered statements urging a focused U.S. environmental and energy policy.

“Our leaders in Washington have to put what’s right for our planet ahead of what’s good for their friends in the energy industry,” Obama, an Illinois senator, said in a statement on the day of the presidential primary in Pennsylvania, where he is in a tight race with Clinton of New York.

“I will end the Bush administration’s assault on environmental protections and standards,” Clinton said. “…It will be a new day.”

“We must have the courage to realistically confront the specter of climate change,” McCain said in his statement. “This is one of the greatest challenges confronting the next president.”

by: Environmental Leader  on StopGlobalWarming.org   10 April 2008

Marriott International has signed an agreement with the state of Amazonas to help protect 1.4 million acres of endangered rainforest. It’s one of the first partnerships between government and the private sector to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation.

The company is also taking new steps to reduce the company’s water, waste and energy consumption, green its supply chain, build greener hotels, and engage employees and guests to take action.

Marriott has committed $2 million to fund an environmental management plan administered by the newly created Amazonas Sustainable Foundation. By year end, Marriott says it will introduce an offset program for guest which will let them contribute to this rainforest fund.

To reduce and offset its global environmental footprint, which it has calculated at 2.9 million metric tons of CO2 emissions annually-or .030 metric tons (65.5 pounds) per available room -Marriott has developed a five-point strategy in collaboration with Conservation International which includes reducing fuel and water consumption by 25 percent per available room over the next 10 years, installing solar power at up to 40 hotels by 2017, and expanding existing “reduce, reuse, recycle” programs.

Marriott will also push its top 40 vendors to supply price-neutral greener products across 12 categories of its $10 billion supply chain. Some of the first products to be rolled out are annual purchases of 47 million BIC Ecolutions pens designed for Marriott, made from pre-consumer recycled plastic; more than 1 million gallons of low VOC paint; and 1 million “room-ready” towels by Standard Textile.

The company will also work with hotel development partners to site, design and construct new hotels according to green standards by updating Marriott design guidelines in line with LEED standards by the end of 2009.

Writer/Director Chris Paine’s documentary feature film Who Killed the Electric Car? investigates the events leading to the quiet destruction of thousands of new, radically efficient electric vehicles. Through interviews and narrative, the film paints a picture of an industrial culture whose aversion to change and reliance on oil may be deeper then its ability to embrace ready solutions.

Who Killed the Electric Car? and Chris Paine were nominated by the Writer’s Guild for Best Documentary of 2006. The film also received nominations from The Broadcast Critics Awards and The Environmental Media Awards for Best Documentary of 2006. Check out the site for the benefits of electric car and their resurgence.

http://www.whokilledtheelectriccar.com/

Article in Mercopress.com

Lake Cachet 2 next to a glacier in the south of Chile, which last week swelled and then suddenly emptied is gradually recovering according to Chilean authorities from the Natural Waters System Office, DGA.
Apparently the water bored an 8.5 kilometer tunnel through the glacier and finally emptied into the Baker River causing a mini “tsunami” along its course. Fortunately no one was injured.

Chilean glacier scientist Gino Casassa said the melting of the Colonia glacier, which he blamed on rising world temperatures, filled the Cachet Lake and increased pressure on the ice sheet which then escaped through the tunnel.

“The remarkable thing is that the mass of water moved against the current of the river” said Casassa who described the situation as “a real river tsunami”.

“This is a phenomenon that occurs periodically during the summer season, caused by the melting of large masses of ice that swell some lakes,” he said. “The basic cause is global warming.”

According to the latest reports the five kilometers diameter lake in the Aisen Region is being refilled with water from nearby glaciers and the Cachet 1 Lake in the same basin.

However the process is slow since the lake is eighty meters below its normal level said Fabian Espinosa head of DGA.

In three days Lake Cachet 2 lost 200 billion liters of water because of the melting of the Colonia glacier said Espinosa who said that all the data, films and pictures of the phenomena will be analyzed with the Glacier and Snow Department “so we can have an idea as to how long it will take to recover”.

“This is a natural phenomenon, really impressive but we know something similar happened four decades ago according to our records. This time it was boosted by climate warming”, said Espinosa.

Last Monday the Baker River had a flow of 3.570 cubic meters per second at the peak of the torrential spill.

But at weekend where the Baker and Colonia rivers meet the flow was back to a normal 816 cubic meters per second and the water temperature was again at 8 degrees from 4 degrees at the moment of the fluvial “tsunami”.

Espinosa said that temperatures were unusually high during last summer.

Last year a similar phenomenon was recorded at the Tempano Lake in Bernardo O’Higgins National Park when it abruptly disappeared. It has since recovered just some of its former volume.

Published in Terra daily

Paris (AFP) March 23, 2008
Sharply reducing the amount of black carbon — commonly known as soot — in the atmosphere could help slow global warming and buy precious time in the long-term fight against climate change, according to a study released Sunday.
Curbing soot emissions could also be a life saver, said the study, published Sunday in the British journal Nature.

Each year, more than 400,000 deaths among women and children in India alone, and 1.6 million worldwide, are attributed to smoke inhalation during indoor cooking using biofuels such as wood or dung, one of the primary sources of black carbon, according to the World Health Organisation.

Reviewing dozens of recent scientific studies, two researchers in the United States calculated that black carbon is the second largest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, a byproduct of burning fossil fuels.

In addition, the eight million metric tonnes of soot released into the atmosphere every year have created a number of “hot spots” around the world, contributing significantly to rising temperatures.

The plains of south Asia along the Ganges River and continental east Asia are both such hotspots, in part because up to 35 percent of global black carbon output comes from China and India.

Emissions in China alone doubled between 2000 and 2006, according to the study, published in 2006.

Fine black soot settling on snow and ice — and thus trapping more of the Sun’s radiative force — have also accelerated the melting of glaciers in the Himalayas and ice cover in the Arctic, two regions that have been hit especially hard by climate change in recent decades.

“A major focus on decreasing black carbon emissions offers an opportunity to mitigate the effects of global warming trends in the short term,” the authors conclude.

While the presence of black carbon, sometimes in the form of great plumes several kilometres high called atmospheric brown clouds, has been known to scientists for some time, their impact on warming has been hard to assess.

Direct measurement requires multiple aircraft flying over the same domain at different altitudes for an extensive period at the same time.

Significantly cutting back on black carbon emissions is not only possible, but would yield rapid benefits, say the authors, Veerabhadran Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute in San Diego, California, and Greg Carmichael of the University of Iowa.

Forty percent of soot comes from the same sources as greenhouses gases, notably the burning of coal and oil, and will only be reduced as quickly or slowly as economies become less carbon intensive.

But the remaining 60 percent of black carbon in the atmosphere comes from the more easily altered practices of burning biofuels and forests, the authors say.

Also, cutting back soot output would have an almost immediate effect.

Unlike carbon dioxide, which lingers in the atmosphere for 100 years after it is released, black carbon has an atmospheric life cycle of approximately one week.

“Providing alternative energy-efficient and smoke-free cookers, and introducing transferring technology for reducing soot emissions from coal combustion in small industries could have major impacts” on reducing soot’s role in global warming, they conclude.

Such measures would result in a 70-80 percent reduction in heating caused by black carbon in south Asia, and a 20-40 percent cut in China, according to the study.

The authors caution, however, that soot reduction can only help delay unprecedented climate change, which is due primarily to CO2 emissions.

Article published in Reuters -Africa
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent

OSLO, April 7 (Reuters Life!) – A slowdown of deforestation from the Amazon to the Congo basin could generate billions of dollars every year for developing nations as part of a U.N. scheme to fight climate change, a study showed on Monday.

Burning of forests by farmers clearing land accounts for 20 percent of world greenhouse gas emissions. A 190-nation U.N. climate conference agreed in Bali, Indonesia, in December to work on ways to reward countries for slowing deforestation.

“Even with quite conservative assumptions, you can generate substantial amounts of money and emissions reductions,” said Johannes Ebeling of EcoSecurities in Oxford, England, of a study with Mai Yasue at the University of British Columbia in Canada.

They said a 10 percent decline in the rate of tropical forest loss could generate annual carbon finance for developing nations of between 1.5 billion and 9.1 billion euros ($2.4 to $14.30 billion) assuming carbon prices of 5 to 30 euros a tonne.

Such curbs would represent about 300 million tonnes of avoided carbon dioxide emissions a year — about the amount of heat-trapping gases, mainly from burning fossil fuels, emitted by Turkey, or half the total of France.

The United Nations wants reduced emissions from deforestation to be part of a new long-term climate treaty beyond 2012 to help avert more droughts, heatwaves, outbreaks of disease and rising seas.

Ebeling told Reuters that any credits for avoided deforestation would have to be matched by tough restrictions elsewhere, for instance forcing coal-fired power plants or cement factories to pay for right to emit carbon dioxide.

BRAZIL

The study, published in the British journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, said there were big challenges in designing a fair system.

So far, most focus in the U.N. debate had been on rewarding countries with high deforestation rates — such as Brazil and Ecuador — for slowing the losses.

But nations such as Guyana or Suriname, which have maintained high forest cover, or others like Costa Rica and Chile, which have slowed or reversed deforestation, would gain little.

There were also problems such as judging the rate of deforestation or creating controls to ensure that protecting one forest does not lead to logging or clearance of another.

And some poor countries that could benefit — such as Liberia or Myanmar — may simply lack controls needed to regulate land use.

Still, Ebeling said he was optimistic a system could be worked out because of a widening political willingness to address deforestation as part of a new treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2013.

Al Gore
2007 Nobel Peace Laureate
Former US Vice President
Businessman and Environmentalist

According to a 27 February 2007 article in The Concord Monitor, “Gore was one of the first politicians to grasp the seriousness of climate change and to call for a reduction in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouses gases”.

Gore co-sponsored hearings on toxic waste in 1978–79, and hearings on Global Warming in the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Gore strongly pushed for the passage of the Kyoto Treaty, which called for reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

On Earth Day 1994, Gore launched the worldwide GLOBE program, a hands-on, school-based education and science activity that made extensive use of the Internet to increase awareness.

Beginning in the fall of 2006, Al Gore and a team of climate change scientists and educators have trained more than 1,000 individual volunteers to give a version of his presentation on the effects and solutions for Global Warming, to community groups throughout the United States. The presentation and training program are based on the message Gore has been giving for more than two decades, which inspired the documentary film and book, An Inconvenient Truth, winner of 2007 Academy Award for Documentary Feature.

An immensely dedicated environmentalist, Al Gore has been at the forefront of the Global Warming campaign to spread his message.

Gore after receiving the 2007, Nobel Peace Prize said he was ” deeply honored … We face a true planetary emergency. The climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

Al Gore resides in Nashville, Tennessee with his family

A recent study published in the editorial section of Nature journal

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v452/n7185/full/452253a.html

The water shortage that threatens humanity will have wide-ranging consequences for agriculture and energy production, requiring significant shifts in the way this precious resource is managed.

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