Arctic Ice at All-Time Low
There is less sea ice in the Arctic than ever before recorded, thanks in part to a warm, sunny summer, a climate scientist said today. And the melting season isn't even over.
On Sunday the sea ice extent was measured at 1.93 million square miles (5.01 million square kilometers).
"It's continuing to go down at a rapid pace," said Mark Serreze, a senior scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colorado.
The previous minimum record—set on September 21, 2005—was 2.05 million square miles (5.32 million square kilometers).
By the end of this summer, scientists at the center say, Arctic sea ice may drop below 1.74 million square miles (4.5 million square kilometers).
Bruno Tremblay is an assistant professor of ocean and atmospheric sciences at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, who is planning a research cruise to the Russian Arctic in September.
In preparation for the trip, he has been observing updated maps of the sea ice extent, which show the quickly melting ice.
"I never thought it would go that low that fast," Tremblay said. "There's still a month of melting in front of us, and we're already past the record of 2005."
Tipping Point?
Sea ice—frozen, floating seawater—melts and refreezes with the seasons, but some of the ice persists year-round in the Arctic.
The current rate of sea ice melt is much faster than predicted by computer models of the global climate system.
Just last year the National Snow and Ice Data Center's Serreze said that the Arctic was "right on schedule" to be completely free of ice by 2070 at the soonest. He now thinks that day may arrive by 2030.
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Yeah, I have better jump on that trip to Greenland, eh? :/
Biofuel is a good thing, right?
Biofuel is liquid or gas transportation fuel derived from biomass. Biomass is material derived from recently living organisms such as plants, animals and their by-products. For example, manure, garden waste and crop residues are all sources of biomass. It is a renewable energy source based on the carbon cycle, unlike other natural resources such as petroleum, coal, and nuclear fuels. Agricultural products specifically grown for biofuel production include corn and soybeans, primarily in the United States; rapeseed, wheat and sugar beet primarily in Europe; sugar cane in Brazil; palm oil in South-East Asia; and jatropha in India.(wikipedia.org)
Biofuel is big news in Brazil, where sugar cane and soybeans tantalize with the possibility of cheaper energy.
At what cost?
Brazil is the world's fifth largest country by landmass, with a sizeable population that is amassed mostly in the coastal cities, away from the Amazon basin and rainforest, which is rapidly being encroached upon. Between 2002 and 2006, an area of the Amazon Rainforest the size of South Carolina was completely decimated, for the purposes of raising cattle and woodlogging.
Deforestation.
Soybeans and sugarcane don't grow in forests, either. Well, at least not efficiently.
Cutting down trees in order to reduce fossil fuel consumption. Sounds like a zero-sum game to me, but I leave the science to the scientists. Hopefully they will prove me wrong.
What will her car run on in twenty years?
Next up: China and the cult of cheap disposables
In doing research for a few articles I wrote recently on sustainable and responsible travel, I decided to take a look back at the countries I have visited lately and write about what their greatest sustainability challenge is.
Today, Niger.
Niger, a country in the Sahel (the southern transitional desert of the Sahara) is one of the driest places on earth. Only 6% of the country (that is twice of the size of the state of Texas) is arable. The low southern stretch of arable land combined with the area along the river Niger must support the entire country.
Niger experiences a rainy season, a time when the rains fall so hard that it washes out the few roads the country has, and creates mud and drama everywhere. It may sound annoying, but the rain is what keeps the country going. These rains support agriculture, and provide drinking water, for the entire year of oppressive heat.
The rains have been on the decline--as much as 25% less rain falls lately. The result can be food crises like the horrible famine in 2005. Erosion and desertification follow--for a country that only has 6% arable land, losing any of it is a big problem, for water security, for food security, for transportation along the river, for wildlife.
The last thing these kids need is more desert in the Sahel! photo by me, 2007.
Next up: Brazil and biofuel.
NOTE: The following post was truncated by vox and most of the content
is missing. The structure of this post was to set up the counter
arguments before presenting the arguments in favor, so the current text
is misrepresenting what was actually said. The backup of this post is
on my work PC and as such will be corrected on Monday.
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Today's Washington Post featured an op-ed about the buzz of the public health world: Circumcision. Specifically, how circumcision may be the next life-saving intervention in the fight against HIV/AIDS. It's a heated issue. Circumcision, once standard practice in the United States, is on the decline. Many Europeans actively scorn the practice. The American Academy of Pediatrics hedges, leaving it up to the parents. I'm a bit neutral, myself. I don't have a penis. I don't have a boy
child to decide for. And when it comes to...practical application...
well, I can and have gone either way. I do confess to being puzzled, at times, as to why the same
organizations would fight female genital mutilation and support male
genital mutilation. However, it's also not that simple. Circumcisions
for men don't usually result in loss of orgasm and inability to urinate
properly. They are not done to keep men pure and free from the burden
of sexual pleasure. There is a big difference. My biggest concern about this is that circumcision will be viewed as the silver bullet for HIV/AIDS,
that will draw attention from the fact that it is just one weapon in an
arsenal that needs to include prevention and treatment. Both are
already suffering--prevention from this administration's emphasis on
abstinence, and treatment from...
I'm in São Paulo, Brasil for a (far too) short stay. I'm here for meetings with an organization called INMED Partnerships for Children.
I'm here alone, which is unusual for these trips. I usually have another team member with me. Knowing I would coming here alone, I spent a couple weeks trying to turn my awful Spanish and passable French into a rudimentary grip of Portuguese. Or, at least enough Portuguese so that I could greet people warmly, feed myself, get around, and find a bathroom. It's amazing how you can boil interaction down when you have to.
My resultant Portuguese is not terribly effective in complicated situations, but I have found I learned enough to not be lost. I go to the restaurant, and I can ask for coffee with milk, water without bubbles, tomato sauce on my ravioli, and thank the waiter for a delicious meal. I can get in a taxi and be taken to my hotel, and I can tell the driver that I am from Washington, DC, that I like Brasil, and that SP is bloody massive. Well, muito grande, anyway.
I've never been good at languages, but even a few words are enough to be empowering. In the classroom, or with Very Important People, I tend to freeze up, and be embarassed at my silly accent or grammatical mistakes. On my own, it's such an amazing feeling to say something in another language and be understood. More often than not, the person is just excited you've tried (particularly if you're American).
It makes me want to learn more.
But let's get back to what I am doing here, which is far more interesting than my attempts at being a polyglot. I'm finishing up some work researching a number of programs in primary schools in India, China, and Brasil that are funded by the same multinational corporation. The Brazilian partner is the aforementioned INMED.
INMED Brasil undertakes work in the poorest and most underserved parts of the country to improve the health and lives of children and families. The project I've been privileged to observe is called Rede In-Formação,
an effort to provide trained, skilled Master Teachers in every school who can serve as mentors, troubleshooters, and sounding boards for teachers who teach 1-4 grades in the community of Fransisco Morato, one of the many favelas for which cities in Brasil are becoming increasingly notorious.
Francisco Morato doesn't feel like a favela to me, but then, my experience is admittedly pretty limited. There can be no doubt that it is a relatively impoverished community, and I know that violence, crime, drugs, and a dissolving family structure make it a challenging place to work. At the same time, it doesn't have the dire feeling of a shanty town or a series of mud and jute-bag dwellings of the sort one finds in Johannesburg, or Mumbai, or, indeed, Rio de Janeiro.
One of the executives with whom I met today described the fear some have of even going to Francisco Morato to visit, and I have to admit I was a little shocked. As a stranger, maybe I see it differently? Maybe I have gotten desensitized to poverty, after spending time in India, in Africa, in China, in Sri Lanka, in the Mississippi Delta and in Southwest DC. Maybe I am just naive. Or maybe my own background, growing up "working poor," causes me to look past all of this and just relate to the people without noticing it is a place one might feel afraid. I've felt more afraid meeting Ambassadors, but then, maybe that just shows where I come from.
My hotel, the wonderful George V, has CNN International. The other day, during a special on African tourism, they explored the rising demand for "slum tourism." In South Africa and Kenya, residents of some of the poorest neighborhoods in the world have developed tours for curious foreigners looking to gain a window into how the "huddled masses yearning to breathe free" live. I took one of these tours, myself, of the townships of Johannesburg, a few years back. I went to see Mandela's house, the churches that housed those who resisted apartheid, and the museums and monuments to those killed in the fight. However, we also went into shanty towns, where a guide took us through the camp, showed us the latrines donated by Oprah Winfrey, and showed us his own home that he shared with his sister and father, who kindly demonstrated the kerosene lamp.
I've kept a journal through all of my travels, and my writing that evening spoke of how uncomfortable I felt, touring this community as if it were a zoo and not the home of people who deserve to live with dignity, not be gawked at. At the same time, the photos I have taken there, and in India, and Niamey, and Hechi, and São Paulo have shown my friends, family, and colleagues a side of life they live in ignorance of. Does that amount to a greater good? I'm not sure. Does the small amount of money that slum tourism can bring to a community make it worthwhile? Again, I don't know.
I go to visit some classrooms tomorrow, which I always get the greatest charge from. I'll write more about INMED and the work they do here tomorrow. And then I will head back to the US, and back to reality, in which I need to visit a dying mother and pick up the ashes of my poor Ritz who I had to put down last week and deal with competing demands for my time from my two jobs and the ongoing attempts to diagnose and treat my sleep and endocrine disorders. Good times. I think I might rather stay here.
Well, I overstate the case. The tot doesn't actually have possession of his gun...yet.
The great state of Illinois (my home state) has issued a Firearms Owner Identification Card...to a 10-month old.
Howard Ludwig, the baby's father, is a columnist with a local paper. His column on the subject is charming and self-deprecating. One almost is able to forget how utterly disturbing the idea of issuing firearms IDs to toddlers is.
I'm not sure how I feel about guns, at times. I've lived abroad, in places where there are few guns, and I rather enjoyed it. At the same time, I'm too much a student of American history to ignore how integral the Second Amendment is to this country.
I also can appreciate the arguments that:
- The Constitution was written before Saturday night specials and automatic weapons were invented
- We don't need to hunt for food any more, when most of us can go down to the Social Safeway and stalk our red meat from behind a couple of Georgetown University students
- The contest between deer and semi-automatic hunting rifle is not exactly a fair fight, so why anyone would derive pleasure from such a hunt is a bit unexplicable
Then there is the premise that a well-armed citizenry/militia is essential for defending ourselves in the event that the government gets a little dictatorial and carried away.
I can see it now. A well-organized group of armed citizens stomping up to the White House and telling Shrub they're taking back the country he has run into the ground.
I'm sure the Secret Service will be interested in their Consitutional Rights. After the citizens are all gunned down and called traitors.
So, one might argue the entire basis of the Second Amendment is a joke.
Which begs the question of why we still need it, then? After all, we as a country also came to the momentous conclusion that African Americans were, in fact, worth more than 3/5 of a person. We are capable of shifting with the times.
I mentioned this last week, but I had to delete it as the coding was messing up and I had no time to redo the post. It's been one of those weeks.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________
So, did you hear the one about the judge suing the drycleaners for $67 million?
Roy Pearson, an administrative judge in the District of Columbia, claims that Custom Cleaners lost a pair of trousers after he took them in to be let out in the waist.
So now he is suing for a blockbuster film's opening weekend worth of dinero, after rejecting three attempts by the Chungs to settle for trifling 4-5 digit figures.
Because of his trousers being lost, he had to look like a schmuck his first day of work as a new Very Important Judge. He earned that position after spending decades as a lawyer providing free legal services to impoverished District residents.
The Chungs, who own and operate Custom Cleaners, are Korean immigrants who live in Virginia. So he doesn't care about impoverishing them with outrageous court costs, of course.
He won't give Custom Cleaners his business any longer, so he has to rent a car to get to a dry cleaner every weekend. Apparently the Right to Someone Else Doing Your Laundry is in the Constitution, or something.
Hey, Judge Pearson: maybe walking that overburdensome mile to the next closest cleaner every weekend would mean your trousers wouldn't need to be taken in at all.
ABC News calculated that for $67 million, you could buy 4,115 new pairs of pants at the $800 he claimed they were worth.
The Chungs have received so much public support that their law firm started a legal defense fund.
Incidentally, the District of Columbia's budget and laws are determined by the US Congress, in which DC does not having voting representation. In other words, if you're an American, you help pay this judge's salary. I wonder how much of his time he spends on this case while he is at work?
Filler in animal feed is open secret in China
ZHANGQIU, China: As American food safety regulators head to China to investigate how a chemical made from coal found its way into pet food that killed dogs and cats in the United States, workers in this heavily polluted northern city openly admit that the substance is routinely added to animal feed as a fake protein.
For years, producers of animal feed all over China have secretly supplemented their feed with the substance, called melamine, a cheap additive that looks like protein in tests, even though it does not provide any nutritional benefits, according to melamine scrap traders and agricultural workers here.
"Many companies buy melamine scrap to make animal feed, such as fish feed," said Ji Denghui, general manager of the Fujian Sanming Dinghui Chemical Company, which sells melamine. "I don't know if there's a regulation on it. Probably not. No law or regulation says 'don't do it,' so everyone's doing it. The laws in China are like that, aren't they? If there's no accident, there won't be any regulation."
[...]
He said he was not currently using melamine. But he then pulled out a plastic bag containing what he said was melamine powder and said he could dye it any color to match the right feed stock.
He said that melamine used in pet food would probably not be harmful. "Pets are not like pigs or chickens," he said casually, explaining that they can afford to eat less protein. "They don't need to grow fast."
The resulting melamine-tainted feed would be weak in protein, he acknowledged, which means the feed is less nutritious.
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Do you know where YOUR food comes from?
Pets don't need as much protein because they don't need to grow fast... okay. Those of us with diabetic pets who must eat high protein diets (not to mention cats for example are made to eat protein and fat, not carbs) probably do not find this very comforting.
To keep up to date on the pet food recall that now is spanning the globe, visit Itchmo.Director of United States Agency for International Development Resigns
WASHINGTON - Randall Tobias, head of the Bush administration's foreign aid programs, abruptly resigned Friday after his name surfaced in an investigation into a high-priced call-girl ring, said two people in a position to know the circumstances of his departure.
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I don't really care about politicians' sex lives. I find it far more appalling that the director of our foreign assistance programs was a former pharmaceutical executive.
Some of Tobias' greatest hits:
"In his capacity as Director of Foreign Assistance, Tobias encouraged sexual abstinence, and discounted the use of condoms, in preventing HIV/AIDS. "Statistics show that condoms really have not been very effective," Tobias told a news conference in Berlin on April 21, 2004." --on abstinence over safer sex and other approaches
Tobias also backed a religious-right feuled requirement for any organization receiving USAID funding to take an anti-prostitution oath, meaning no organization with US federal funding could do any work with sex-workers in any country. In some countries, the sex trade is one of the largest contributors to the spread of HIV/AIDS. Guess he didn't see the point, since condoms don't work, eh?
If Tobias received federal funding by drawing a salary, shouldn't he have taken the anti-prostitution oath? Then again, we know how much oaths mean to this party. Protecting and defending the constitution, anyone?
sources: Wikipedia.org, whitehouse.gov, boston.com, cnn.com
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Disclaimer: The contents of this blog represent only those of the author as a private citizen and not any entity for which she works, volunteers, or supports.
NIAMEY, 18 April 2007 (IRIN) - NIAMEY, 18 April 2007 (IRIN) - More strikes among primary and secondary school teachers have been met with violent protests in Niamey by their disgruntled students, and as separate protests erupt on university campuses, some observers are warning that the whole academic year is in jeopardy.
Basic education, which is only provided to 30 percent of Nigerien children, is widely viewed as one of the main pillars to reducing mortality in the desperately poor country.
However, since the start of the academic year last October, powerful unions controlling 24,000 of the 28,000 primary and secondary school teachers in the country have called almost two months of strikes at intermittent periods.
[...]
Several of the university protests have also turned violent, as students have set up barricades of burning tyres in Niamey, and thrown petrol bombs at police. On Tuesday, one soldier was "lynched", according to Niger's Interior Ministry, which declined to confirm whether the soldier was killed or wounded.
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While the term 'lynched' has been cheapened in some circles as a metaphor, let's remember what 'lynched' really means.
Lynching is a form of violence, usually murder, conceived of by its perpetrators as extrajudicial punishment for offenders or as a terrorist method of enforcing social domination. It is characterized by a summary procedure ignoring, or even contrary to, the strict forms of law, notably judicial execution. Victims of lynching have generally been members of groups marginalized or vilified by society. The practice is age-old; stoning, for example, is believed to have started long before lapidation was adopted as a judicial form of execution.
From dictionary.com:
| to put to death, esp. by hanging, by mob action and without legal authority. |
] —Related forms
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