Published four years late and without public review, pursuant to a court order, the United States government has issued a 271 page long report on the impacts of global warming to the country.
Most of the findings, like the spread of warmth-loving pests and the inevitable loss of low-lying lands to rising seas, are not new. But the report included new projections of how the poor, elderly and communities with lagging public-health and public-works systems will face outsize health risks from warming.
Under a 1990 federal law, the US government is required to issue a report on climate change every four years. The last report issued was from President Clinton’s administration in 2000.
Here are some of the issues specifically addressed in the report:
What factors influencing agriculture, land resources, water resources, and biodiversity in the United States are sensitive to climate and climate change?
If you’re interested in the health of the Earth, and the many species that live here, a new report, proposed by the German government at a meeting of environment ministers of the G8 countries and the five major newly industrialising countries that took place in Potsdam in March 2007 is worth spending some significant time reading through.
The purpose of the study was to:
….evaluate the costs of the loss of biodiversity and the associated decline in ecosystem services worldwide, and compare them with the costs of effective conservation and sustainable use. It is intended that it will sharpen awareness of the value of biodiversity and ecosystem services and facilitate the development of cost-effective policy responses, notably by preparing a ‘valuation toolkit’.
The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity page on the European Commission’s environmental pages provides more details into the study. I’m part of the way through it, and it may take a while to digest, but it provides a number of insights into the impact of the loss of many species of animals and vegetables around the world.
As the writers of the report tell us at one point:
Educational games that help you learn, while helping others in need?
It sounds like a good idea, and these are sites that are worth exploring, and spending some time at.
Free Rice is a vocabulary game that presents a word, and four multiple choice definitions for that word. Choose the correct definition, and the site will donate 20 grains of rice to the UN World Food Program.
There is a video on the World Food Program site of the first consignment of rice bought with funds raised through FreeRice, dated January 18, 2008, feeding refugees from Myanmar sheltering in Bangladesh.
Answer4Earth is site hosting a multiple choice trivia game where each time you answer a question correctly, your efforts lead towards the planting of a tree somewhere in the world. The site is partnered with two nonprofit organizations, Trees for the Future and The Fruit Tree Planting Foundation.
On February 14, 2008, the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation traveled to Ziwani Primary School in Kenya to plant 100 fruit tree saplings. A video of the celebration around the visit:
A five day long protest, from May 19th to May 23rd, took place this week by more than 600 Brazilian Amazon Indians and environmental activists over a proposed hydroelectric dam on the Xingu River, in the Brazilian Amazon.
The protesters gathered to attempt to keep the Belo Monte Dam from being developed. The dam would directly impact hundreds of indigenous people on the Xingu and Bacajá rivers, and displace more than 16,000 people.
A video from the Real News Network provides more details:
The Convention on Biological Diversity has been meeting this week in Bonn, Germany.
The Convention was a treaty originally signed by 150 government leaders during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, and targets three goals:
The conservation of biological diversity,
The sustainable use of its components, and;
The fair and equitable sharing of the benefits from the use of genetic resources.
Biological diversity, also known as biodiversity, is a term describing the variety of life on Earth, and the natural patterns formed by that variety.
In addition to describing the wide variety of plants, animals and microorganisms or the world, it also stands for the genetic differences within each species, and the variety of ecosystems that life exists within, from salt marshes, to deserts, mountains to farmlands, and more.
You can learn more about the treaty, the activities at this week’s Convention, and future goals of the organization on the home page of the Convention on Biological Diversity
It appears that noise pollution may have a more devastating impact upon the environment that we’ve imagined.
Researcher Bernie Krause has been recording the sounds of the world, without human sounds included, for over 40 years, and he’s finding it difficult to find places that aren’t contaminated by the noise of people any more.
And the impact of that noise may cause serious problems for some species.
But what happens when man-made noise — anthrophony, as Krause dubs it — intrudes on the natural symphony? Maybe it’s the low rumble of nearby construction or the high whine of a turboprop. Either way, it interferes with a segment of the spectrum already in use, and suddenly some animal can’t make itself heard. The information flow in the jungle is compromised.
Krause has heard this happen all over the world. For example, the population of spadefoot toads in the Yosemite region of the Sierras is declining rapidly, and Krause thinks it’s because of low-flying military training missions in the area. The toad calls lose their synchronicity, and coyotes and owls home in on individual frogs trying to rejoin the chorus.
