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China says key pollution indicators improve
- byadmin on15 Nov 2007
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BEIJING (AFP) - Two major pollution indicators have dropped in China for the first time in several years as steps taken to clean up the nation's devastated environment kicked in, the government said Wednesday.
Emissions of sulfur dioxide -- a key air pollutant -- declined 1.81 percent in the first nine months of the year, while chemical oxygen demand -- a measure of water pollution -- was 0.28 percent lower, said Zhou Shengxian, director of the state environment watchdog.
The two key measures had become symbols of China's inability to curb the rampant fouling of its air and water.
China had set a target of reducing each indicator by 10 percent between 2006 and 2010, or an average decline of two percent a year. But embarrassed officials admitted earlier this year that both had risen in 2006.
source Yahoo news 
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Bulgaria to challenge EU quota on cutting emissions (AFP)
- byadmin on15 Nov 2007
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SOFIA (AFP) - Bulgaria wants to renegotiate its 2008-2012 carbon dioxide emissions quota set by the European Commission and may challenge it in court, Environment Minister Dzhevdet Chakarov said Wednesday.
"Bulgaria is seriously harmed by the European Commission's decision and will take every step possible to have it revised. If that doesn't happen, we will launch legal proceedings," Chakarov said.
The minister met with members of the Bulgarian Industrial Association on Wednesday to discuss the effects of the reduced carbon dioxide emissions quota, which the EU wants to slash by 34.4 percent to 42.3 million tonnes between 2008 and 2012.
source Yahoo news
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Fire, ice, and invasion
- byadmin on15 Nov 2007
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The November 2007 Special Issue of Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment focuses on paleoecology, which uses fossilized remains and soil and sediment cores to reconstruct past ecosystems.
Some scientists argue that the pre-Columbian Amazon was pristine, with indigenous people living in harmony with nature. Others suggest that the Amazon is a “manufactured” landscape, altered by and disturbed by human activities even before the arrival of Europeans. In “Amazonian exploitation revisited: ecological asymmetry and the policy pendulum,” Mark Bush (Florida Institute of Technology) and Miles Silman (Wake Forest University) discuss this debate.
Bush and Silman present paleodata from fossil pollen and charcoal in soil cores that support both perspectives. They argue that in some areas of the Amazon, human impact was extreme, especially on bluffs around rivers. Yet they also found vast stretches of the forest where human influence was minimal. If widespread disturbance was typical in the Amazon forest until just 500 years ago, that suggests the ecosystem is resilient to human activities, including logging. However, as the authors demonstrate, the “manufactured” landscape argument only holds true for localized patches of forest, and should not be used as a basis for management of the Amazon as a whole.
source eurekalert.org
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Speak out: Climate change is for real
- byadmin on15 Nov 2007
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THE barrage of statements from our local political leaders supporting the Tañon Strait explorations smacks of a well-oiled machinery whose sole mission is to extinguish the growing flames of protests against the project by subsistence fisherfolk and concerned citizens.
Just like other national projects, it is lumped down our throats despite the warnings of more than a hundred marine scientists in the country on its destructive effects on our ecosystem.
source sunstar.com
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Holy ecology Batman! Hong Kong green groups fight film-makers' call for all-night lights
- byadmin on11 Nov 2007
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HONG KONG (AP) - Batman was in the spotlight again in Hong Kong as the movie's producers came under fire for asking tenants along a waterfront to keep their lights on all night for a week to better show off the city's glass and steel skyline.
Environmentalists said it was sending the wrong message at
a time when the rest of the world was struggling to reduce energy consumption and Hong Kong itself was often shrouded in a hazy polluted fog.
«We welcome the filming of Batman in Hong Kong, but why do we need to keep the lights on to make the backdrop? It seems like film-making is coming before environmental protection,» Gabrielle Ho, a project manager at conservation group Green Sense, told The Associated Press.
«We believe producers are able to create the same effects via post-productions works, but instead they are asking us to turn on so many lights, wasting so much energy,» Ho said.
source PR Inside.com
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Oil spill in Russia - an ecological catastrophe
- byadmin on11 Nov 2007
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MOSCOW (AFP) - Russian environmentalists warned Sunday that a 1,300-tonne fuel oil spill from a tanker smashed by high winds off the country's southern coast will cause an "ecological catastrophe".
"This is a major ecological catastrophe," Vladimir Slivyak, head of Ekozashchita, or Ecodefense, a Russian environmental group, was quoted by Interfax news agency as saying.
"The pollution that has taken place will have to be cleaned up for a long time to come and the consequences will be felt for a year or even more."
Sergei Baranovsky, head of Russia's Green Cross, another environmental group, said the sinking of two cargo ships carrying sulphur during the storm would also cause environmental damage.
source Yahoo news
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UN chief looks at Antarctica glaciers
- byadmin on10 Nov 2007
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CHILEAN PRESIDENTE EDUARDO FREI BASE, Antarctica - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the Antarctica on Friday to see firsthand the impact of climate change and the melting of glaciers.
Ban flew from Chile's southernmost city of Punta Arenas to that country's station on the Antarctica, Chilean Air Force President Eduardo Frei base, accompanied by officials and scientists.
From there, he took a 45-minute flight over the region, seeing several glaciers.
Source Yahoo news
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Experts to prepare global warming report
- byadmin on10 Nov 2007
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If there's one document on global warming policymakers might put in their briefcase, this would be it. On Monday, scientists and government officials gather in Valencia, Spain to put together the fourth and last U.N. report on the state of global warming and what it will mean to hundreds of millions of people whose lives are being dramatically altered.
Unlike the past three tomes, this one will have little new data. Instead, it will distill the previous work into a compact guide of roughly 30 pages that summarizes complex science into language politicians and bureaucrats can understand.
Source Yahoo news
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Schwarzenegger declares state of emergency over oil spill
- byadmin on10 Nov 2007
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SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) - California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declared a state of emergency on Friday to help fight the San Francisco oil spill that is threatening wildlife and several miles of pristine coastline.
Schwarzenegger signed an order directing all available resources be deployed to help the clean-up operation after inspecting the site of the 58,000-gallon (228,000 liter) spill, a statement said.
"I have signed an emergency proclamation, so all the state's resources can be coordinated to address this oil spill," Schwarzenegger said.
Source Yahoo news
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Greenpeace urges Indonesia to stop burning forest
- byadmin on10 Nov 2007
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SINGAPORE (AFP) - Greenpeace urged Indonesia on Thursday to stop its "reckless" destruction of rain forests to plant palm oil in the archipelago, which will host a global climate summit next month.
The environmental group also called on foreign food and cosmetics companies to shun "bad" palm oil produced as a result of deforestation in Indonesia.
"Indonesia's peatlands are some of the richest stores of carbon in the world, and their destruction is one of the most reckless and avoidable contributions to global warming," Greenpeace said in a statement released here
Source Yahoo news
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