Truck and Barter

Top 10 endangered sites due to Global Warming

Antarctica: the Müller ice shelf and the Larsen ice shelf are shrinking dramatically.

Mt Kilimanjaro, Tanzania: global warming is blamed for melting of the year-round snows at the summit of Africa's highest mountain. They could be gone in 15 years.

The Arctic ice cap: the melting of icebergs and ice caps in the Arctic is blamed on global warming and threatens the habitats of species such as polar bears.

The Maldives: rising sea levels (3½in per year) could make these 1,200 islands in the Indian Ocean uninhabitable within 100 years.

Venice: the Italian city is sinking into the Adriatic and rising sea levels could make things worse.

Alaska: American travel agents report thousands heading for the shrinking glaciers and melting permafrost.

Great Barrier Reef, Australia: it's been predicted that rising water temperatures, which are bleaching the famously vivid reefs, will kill 95 per cent of the living coral by 2050.

Kitzbuhel, Austria: the home of the world's most fearsome ski run is among low-lying Alpine ski resorts whose long-term futures are threatened by rising temperatures - on average the warmest they have been for 1,250 years.

Galapagos Islands: rising water temperatures are bleaching coral and causing the deaths of marine species.

Patagonia: South American glaciers are also retreating.

From The Telegraph

Fishing the Maldives Way

Pole and line is the typical way

Related;
Scientists Protect Corals from Warming Oceans
Corals could resist climate change

Enjoy these videos of stingrays being hand fed; Video 1 ,Video 2 and Video 3

Is it Global Warming?

Foreign experts to investigate cause of unusual amount of fish deaths in Maldives

Al Gore in the Maldives

A strange bit of news to some of you ;

Former Unites States’ Vice President and international environmental campaigner Al Gore’s Oscar-winning documentary was screened in Male last night as part of the celebrations of the US-Maldives Friendship Week.

Held in collaboration with the civil society NGO, Open Society Association, “An Inconvenient Truth” was screened at the Government-run Nasandhura Palace Hotel in Male for invitees....

At the conclusion of the screening, there was a session for question and answers but no one in the audience raised a hand; the film definitely spoke for itself.

Isn't there something in physics about that?

I dislike people misappropriating concepts as much as the next pedant, but I have to say, I think this time the logical connection I want want to make is valid. Take this article from Seed, ostensibly about clear-headed science reporting:

The United States, the only industrialized country with strong population growth, now has 300 million people whose lifestyle makes a disproportionately huge mark on the global environment, experts say.

The world's third most populous country behind China and India, the United States has five percent of the world's population.

But it consumes—alone—more than a quarter of the world's natural resources, more than any other country, according to the National Report on Population and Environment, put out by the U.S.-based Center for Environment and Population.

I know it's not quite the same, but could I really be blamed for suggesting that the law of conservation of mass and energy might provide some necessary perspective?

The US economy is also among the world's most productive nations. Meaning that the resources consumed get turned into something, be it plastic goods, financial services, taxi cab rides, software, movies, and so on. Certainly there is a massive efficiency question to address, but the overarching point of the article -- as evidenced by the headline -- is to suggest that the consumption of those resources by the US is an unalloyed negative for the world. This simply ignores the connection between resource use and economic output. All else equal, if you reduce resource use, you'll reduce output. And while some people may be fine with that, who exactly draws up the list of resources to reduce, and thus gets the pleasure of picking which industry will be turning people out of their jobs?

More on the economics of standby

Here's a quick article on the savings to be had from lower-power standby for electronic devices.

For Windows commputer users: when (if) Vista ever hits the streets, it's going to have a more robust power-saving "sleep" feature that will still allow IT managers to install updates late at night when people aren't around.

What I wonder, however, is if this idle power usage in computers (which could be larger than when the computer is actually running) is better put to other uses. Personally, I've loaded the United Devices agent from Grid.org on my PCs. After about 15 minutes of inactivity, the grid program kicks on and it starts donating cycles to things like the Human Proteome Folding Project. The direct contribution of effort is more appealing to me than trying to ramp down energy use in tiny bits over every machine (which makes me wonder whether people will just find other, more power-intensive activities to get up to, eroding the "benefit" of scaling back standby power use).

Costs of Island inundations not significant?

On the costs and benefits of climate change;

“Robert Mendelsohn, professor at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, argues that such negative costs may still be less than the benefits.

He sees a net global warming bonus in the near-term, as higher farming yields in northern countries offsets damage elsewhere, especially in Africa.

"In that sense it doesn't make sense to spend money right now," Mendelsohn said, adding that beyond 2050 and a 2 degrees Celsius rise the damage and need for action grows.

He added that he does not cost species extinctions and health effects, and only crudely measures the cost of island inundations.

Richard Tol, Senior Research Officer at Ireland's Economic and Social Research Institute, has a similar stance.

"(My damage estimate) does hide some things that some people will get very upset about," Tol said. "From an economic perspective small island states are so tiny and people are moving out of there anyway."

As an example Tol estimates the welfare loss of the Maldives submerging at three times the inhabitants' annual salaries, in addition to the 100 percent loss of the country's GDP.

Citizens are happy to value the preservation of the global ecosystem at a cost of 50 euros per person per year, Tol says, but added he does not factor in the risk of rapid sea level rise…”

Related;
Leave The Maldives To Sink, Senior Scientist Says
Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change
The Politics of Climate Change;

“The Bush administration has blocked release of a report that suggests global warming is contributing to the frequency and strength of hurricanes, the journal Nature reported Tuesday. The possibility that warming conditions may cause storms to become stronger has generated debate among climate and weather experts, particularly in the wake of the Hurricane Katrina disaster.”

Some Podcasts

The history of scientific discoveries; The author of a book called 'Who Discovered What When', David Ellyard, discusses the history of discoveries in science

TCS podcasts- the latest is with Dierdre McCloskey

Regaining confidence in western culture

Reforming Public Services

Facing the evidence - part one; Only one in two patients receives the healthcare they should receive according to the evidence. One in ten patients receives care that isn't recommended and which is potentially harmful. In the first part of this series about getting health professionals to practice with evidence, Associate Professor Alex Barratt takes a close look at the catastrophic errors that have occurred when evidence has been ignored, and why evidence based practice is still not being implemented in consultation rooms near you. Read the transcript.

Drug-driving; why Australia is the world's leader when it comes to random saliva drug testing for drivers

Free Gardeners, Odd Fellows and Druids: a history of health insurance in Australia

Celebrating 50 years of television

Gaia and accelerating climate change; It was in the late 1960s that James Lovelock first suggested the Earth acted as a single organism. He named his observation, Gaia. He was ridiculed and the idea was ignored for decades. It wasn't until the end of the 90s that a new branch of science grew out of his theory; that of Earth System Science. Now, as the effects of climate change have become obvious for all to see, James Lovelock has taken his theory further in a book, The Revenge of Gaia. Lovelock claims we've passed the point of no return with climate change.

Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, debates his views on life and death with a panel of experts

How can we resolve the tensions between the different communities in Europe in the light of the growing threat from Islamic extremists, sometimes dubbed the 'Enemy Within'? Hisham Hellyer is a policy analyst, academic and commentator, based at the University of Warwick as an Associate Fellow, the American University in Cairo as a Visiting Professor and Trinity College in Dublin as a Senior Research Fellow. His research interests include European Muslim communities, the interplay between Islam and modernity, European social policy and political philosophy. In his latest book on European Muslims (due to be published by IB Tauris in March 2007 under the title of ''Islam in Europe: Multiculturalism and the European 'Other'), he argues that Europe must come to terms with all of her history, past and present, and that Muslim communities should work to be integral to, rather than simply 'integrated' parts of, Europe.

History of Israel-Palestine conflict

War on Sex Toys

Plastic sex toys are bad for your health says Greenpeace;

“A new report released today by our Dutch office reveals that the plastics used to construct a wide range of sex toys contain very high concentrations of hazardous phlalates, toxic chemical softeners used in PVC to make it soft and flexible.

Greenpeace Netherlands asked research organization TNO to test eight different sex toys, including dildos and vibrators, for phthalates. Worryingly, seven out of eight contained phthalates in concentrations varying from 24 to 51 percent. Remember, these are chemicals which do not easily biodegrade and can be dangerous - even in small amounts.

The research was commissioned after Durex's 2005 Global Sex Survey revealed that three million Dutch people admit to owning a sex toy. Over a million are sold there every year, making the market worth 22 million Euros.”

The solution according to Greenpeace is more legislation.

Via Improbable Research

Free Reads from The Economist

Free reads from latest edition of The Economist;

Climate change- The heat is on; The uncertainty surrounding climate change argues for action, not inaction. America should lead the way. Editorial on a survey of the topic.

A discussion with Emma Duncan, Deputy Editor of The Economist; “We need to think about climate change maybe as individuals think about insuring their houses: you spend maybe 1% of your annual income insuring your house not because you think it's going to burn down, but because if by any chance it did burn down, the consequences for you would be disastrous.” Listen to the podcast

Doing business; Singapore took first prize as the easiest place to do business in the World Bank's “Doing Business 2007” report. The Democratic Republic of Congo is the hardest place. Reform was the theme and Georgia the quickest reformer, leaping to 37th place in the rankings from 112th last year. China became one of the top-ten reformers by improving investor protection, cutting red tape and establishing credit history for loans

Sex and scientists' salaries

India's rupee- A disappointment for those hoping capital controls might ease soon; “THE chapter on the Fall of the Rupee you may omit,” counselled Oscar Wilde's prudish governess in “The Importance of Being Earnest”. “It is somewhat too sensational.” A new work on the rupee, in contrast, has set few pulses racing. A report by a committee set up in March by the Reserve Bank, India's central bank, to “revisit” the question of full convertibility of the currency recommends only slow change—too slow, for two of the committee's members, who have dissented from some of its cautious conclusions.

Business in Africa-Once again, Africa is listed as the most difficult place in the world to do business. So why are some businessmen happy to be there?; Foreign investors are governed by trust. India and China also rank relatively poorly in the World Bank survey, but are nonetheless investment magnets. Mr Klein argues this is because investors are confident that these countries are going in the right direction and they want to tap into their large markets early. Africa will have to prove itself through years of good performance and sustained reform before it can gain such confidence. But if it does, those who are already betting on the continent will be miles ahead.

Globalisation- Joe has another go; But if the writing is crisp, the arguments are a little soggy. Mr Stiglitz assumes the worst of markets, the best of governments—except, of course, his own. Too often, he wants to have it both ways: his distaste for the IMF has made him suspicious of all technocratic bodies, even to the point where he questions the case for independent central banks. But at the same time he wants to set up international tribunals to rule on unfair tax competition, for example, or health standards. He says that debt relief for the poorest countries is “simply a matter of accounting”, because they could not repay anyway. But he also wants to argue that the burden of red ink has crippled them.

Dismal science, dismal sentence-The efficient markets hypothesis can land you in jail

The Swedish model

Can America's farmers be weaned from their government money?

Mexico's presidential election
Japan- The imperial imperative
Qatar-A bouncy bantam
The French presidency

Charlemagne-Europe's tentative reformers; In Germany it has long been customary for the government, in the interests of consensus politics and social stability, to give “the social partners”—the catch-all name for employers' associations, trade unions and other interest groups—special privileges when writing new laws. On occasion, governments have even asked specific groups to draft legislation. But in drawing up health-care and tax reforms, Angela Merkel's grand coalition has tried to shut health insurers and other lobby groups out of the decision-making process, refused to listen to mere objections and demanded that, if a lobby group has a criticism, it must come up with an alternative way of meeting the government's aim (one reason why the lobbies have turned on the government with offended fury). At the same time, two members of parliament who are also heads of employers' federations (and thus personify Germany's close ties between lobbies and government) have had to choose between their business jobs and their parliamentary seats. Oh, the indignity.

Bagehot-The sands run out ; Labour MPs may come to regret their attempt to force Tony Blair from office

Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, died on September 4th, aged 44

Economic forecasts-The panel now expects America's GDP growth to slow to 2.5% in 2007, compared with August's prediction of 2.7%. The soothsayers think that the euro area will grow by 2.3% this year (up from 2.2% in August), then slow to 1.8% next year. Germany's growth in 2006 has been revised up from 1.7% to 2.0%. But Japan is now tipped to grow by 2.8%, down from August's prediction of 3.0%. The biggest upward revision is in Sweden's growth this year: it is now forecast to be 4.1%, the fastest of all the economies in the table

Government-bond yields

Cancer genetics-Variations on a theme; There are a lot more cancer genes around than were previously known
An explanation of how the Atkins diet works
A promising new artificial heart wins regulatory approval
Pluto fights back

Europe's financial sector is ill prepared for a coming upheaval
A row breaks out over the future of Japan's consumer finance
Banks in developing countries
The global housing market

Lexington- Paleocon Pat

Business Section; Mobile phones on planes / Pharmaceuticals / Drug patents / Viacom / Corporate corruption in Germany / Japan's basic industries / Mobile telecoms

Alan Mulally jumps from Boeing to rescue America's troubled carmaker

Bad weather equal bad government?

The latest edition of The Economist summarizes Leeson and Sobel paper on corruption and weather;

“According to a new paper by Peter Leeson and Russell Sobel of West Virginia University, natural disasters not only wreck property and disrupt lives, but also encourage graft. The academics compared the rate at which public officials were convicted for corruption in different states with the geographical distribution of natural disasters. Their correlation was striking. States which see lots of disasters, such as Mississippi, Florida and South Dakota, are also the most corrupt.

That link, reckon the authors, is not spurious. When disasters occur, the federal government dispenses large dollops of cash in affected areas through FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency. A windfall of federal cash spawns graft in much the same way that oil wealth or foreign aid can cause corruption in poor countries. States with bad weather get more frequent gobs of FEMA cash and hence are more corrupt.

Help from FEMA encourages graft in many ways. Public officials can embezzle cash directly; they can overstate peoples' damage claims in return for a bribe, or demand kick-backs for rebuilding contracts. All told, the impact is big. The authors' calculations suggest that in the average state, an extra $1 per person in money from FEMA increases corruption in that state by 2.5%. Eliminating FEMA relief entirely would cut corruption by more than 20% in the average state. But don't hold your breath.”

Related;
Earlier post about the paper; Could bad weather be responsible for U.S. corruption?
Stevens admits to blocking the bill; Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens acknowledged holding up legislation that would open federal spending practices to public scrutiny.
Alaska Senator Stevens' successful investments
Sunlight Foundation
Porkbusters
CNN report on Sen Ted Stevens
A Constitutional Counterrevolution
Competent Government through Amendment: Reviving Madison's Vision by Cost-Benefit Analysis and Incentive

Food transport bad for the environment

Environment Agency of UK is worried about the social cost of food transport;

“Food transport has a significant and growing impact on road congestion, road accidents, climate change, noise and air pollution according to a new report published today by Defra.

The environmental and social costs of the impacts are estimated at £9 billion per year with more than half due to road congestion. Consumers travel an average of 136 miles a year by car to shop for food and the quantity of food transported by heavy goods vehicles has doubled since 1974. Food transport now accounts for 25% of all HGV vehicle kilometres in the UK…

Food transport produced 19 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2002, of which 10 million tonnes were emitted in the UK (almost all from road transport), representing 1.8% of the total annual UK CO2 emissions, and 8.7% of the total emissions of the UK road sector.”

What would we hear next? Every time you go to the grocery, plant a tree to offset the CO2 emmisons!

Where are they now- Mikhail Gorbachev

“In 1993, former Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, founded Green Cross International (GCI). Green Cross promotes legal, ethical and behavioural norms that encourage basic changes in the value, actions and attitudes of government and private sector and civil society necessary to build a sustainable global community.

Phillip spoke to Mikhail Gorbachev at Earth Dialogues Brisbane 2006: A World Forum for Sustainable Development and Resource Management, held between 22-25 July as part of this year's Brisbane Festival.”

Listen to the podcast- from Radio National’s Late Line Live.

No link between fast growth and corruption or pollution?

According to World Bank country director of China, David Dollar;

“In general, China's transition to a market economy appears to be both more advanced and somewhat less damaging than we thought. Only 8 percent of the firms in this random sample of manufacturing are majority state-owned. Though they control one third of the assets in the sample, this still suggests a larger private sector than previous estimates. The extent of the transition varies dramatically:, from 99 percent private firms in Wenzhou or Jiaxing on the southeast coast to 60 percent in Anshan in the old northeastern rust belt. But in the cities where the private sector flourishes, firms reported far less red tape—from faster times through Customs to fewer days dealing with bureaucracy and less frequent demands for bribes.

While corruption is inherently hard to measure, we get pretty good response rates on the question of whether firms have to pay bribes to get loans from commercial banks, which are still largely state-owned. In southeast cities such as Hangzhou or Xiamen, 1 to 2 percent of firms report paying bribes to gain loans; the figure is above 10 percent in more than 20 cities of the center and west.”

Related;

Huangbaiyu - a new village being built in rural China - comprises homes that aim to test building materials, technologies, techniques and working processes- a model for zero energy consumption. Listen to the podcast.

Architects Without Frontiers- Listen to a podcast discussion with a member, Sam Crawford a Sydney architect concerned about how architecture can be perceived as a plaything of the privileged. In this piece he talks about his commitment to building a youth centre in Malawi.

Green China?

Alleviating Indoor Air Pollution in Poor Rural Areas of China -webcast- (should we be spending millions on indoor air pollution or on something else?)

Cars in China- Some Facts

"Twenty years ago, I was driving a tractor — I was a model peasant! There were almost no cars in China. I didn't learn to drive until 1988.Under Deng Xiaoping, I got lucky because I was uneducated. Educated people think in traditional ways, but Deng said we should take chances."
- a Chinese businessman who now owns a major cement factory in Beijing

Ted Conover has an interesting article about Cars in China in NYT;

“The figures behind China's car boom are stunning. Total miles of highway in the country: at least 23,000, more than double what existed in 2001, and second now only to the United States. Number of passenger cars on the road: about 6 million in 2000 and about 20 million today. Car sales are up 54 percent in the first three months of 2006, compared with the same period a year ago; every day, 1,000 new cars (and 500 used ones) are sold in Beijing. The astronomic growth of China's car-manufacturing industry will soon hit home for Americans and Europeans as dirt-cheap Chinese automobiles start showing up for sale here over the next two or three years. (Think basic passenger car for $10,000, luxury S.U.V. for $19,000.)…

China's first modern expressway, the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway, was built in the early 1990's by the Hong Kong tycoon Gordon Y.S. Wu. Wu studied civil engineering at Princeton in the mid-50's, when construction was beginning on the U.S. Interstate Highway System. At the same time, the New Jersey Turnpike was being widened from four lanes to many lanes, and Wu has said it inspired him. (His powerful firm, Hopewell Holdings, is named after a town near Princeton.) Though Wu ran short of money and the ambitious project had to be rescued by the Chinese government, the toll-road model of highway development caught on.

Wu's Guangzhou-Shenzhen Superhighway was the beginning of an infrastructure binge that seems to be only picking up steam: the government recently announced a target of 53,000 freeway miles by 2035. (The U.S. Interstate Highway System, 50 years old last week, presently comprises about 46,000 miles of roads.) Some new roads, especially in the less-developed western parts of the nation, are nearly empty: China is encouraging road construction ahead of industrial development and population settlement, assuming those will follow….

If highways in China's west are so far awaiting traffic, easterners have the opposite concern. As we headed south from Shijiazhuang toward Zhengzhou, the roads packed with vacationers and truck traffic, Zhu jostled for position with all the other people who were late getting where they were going. His style of driving helped me understand better why China, with 2.6 percent of the world's vehicles, had 21 percent of its road fatalities (in 2002, the most recent year for which figures are available)….

Three Gorges Dam, one of the largest construction projects in history, seemed a fitting first attraction for our trip, evoking superlatives in this land of superlatives. It has cost an estimated $75 billion so far (including corruption and relocation costs); it will require more than a million people to be relocated; it would generate more hydroelectric power than any dam ever had; and it spans the Yangtze, the third-longest river in the world. The reservoir began filling up in 2003 and has six years left to go; it presents a huge military target….

The next morning we hiked through the misty, craggy hills of Shennongjia. The area, known as "the Roof of Central China," is a Unesco biosphere reserve of 272 square miles, with six peaks measuring up to 10,190 feet above sea level. It was equally famous, among our group, as the home of China's Bigfoot. This creature, in the local lore, lumbered through the mists with a big-bosomed mate; an artist's rendition of the hairy couple appeared in the corner of a park billboard. But though the trails were beautiful and mysterious and we could imagine an ape-man happy there, none were spotted….

My test question was speeding. National highways were typically posted with limits of 50 miles per hour, and expressways up to 75 miles per hour, and the orientation brochure that each driver had received from the Beijing Target Auto Club insisted that we adhere to those limits. ("This is only self-driving, not car racing!" the brochure read. "Speeding is not necessary.") Yet all the drivers, including Zhao, paid the rules no attention whatsoever, often driving 100 m.p.h. or more. Police cars were seldom seen; when drivers spotted them, to my surprise, they paid no attention at all. The cops rarely used radar, it turned out, and they almost never tried to pull you over….

The more instructive comparison, as we stood on this fancy bit of highway surrounded by rice fields and, here and there, people at work in them, was with the rural poor, the peasantry, the hundreds of millions of Chinese who do not yet (and, you imagine, will not in their lifetimes) share this prosperity. Many villages still are not connected to roads at all. When an expressway just south of here was completed last year, I was told sotto voce in Beijing, a series of demonstrations by peasants at a toll plaza delayed its opening. They were angry because the road had taken their land, and this, we are now seeing, is the story all over China: the government itself counted nearly 80,000 mass protests in 2005 alone. The country's economic growth is fantastic, the urban atmosphere heady. . .but then you see through the glass the peasants just in from the countryside, burlap bags at their feet, looking utterly from another planet, representatives of hundreds of millions of others, almost standing still while Zhu and Li zoom on by…

Creeping along on the highway, we talked about how the Beijing government was trying to control the huge new popularity of cars: one solution to the growing chaos of the streets has been to severely restrict motorcycle use in the city. Zhu thought that was better than Shanghai's fix: trying to cut down on car ownership by setting a high price (presently almost $5,000) on car registration. Trying to ease traffic and cut down on accidents, Shanghai had even banned bicycles from many main streets, news that still amazes me.

An ebullient atmosphere surrounds the automobile in China. You can see the excitement continuing, even growing, as more people buy cars: China now has fewer than seven of them for every thousand people, roughly the same level as the United States had in 1915. Everyone expects the ownership rate to keep growing, which means there could be 130 million vehicles on China's roads by 2020. By 2030, according to one estimate, there could be as many as in the United States…

While I was in Beijing, the journal Nature reported that the city's air pollution was much worse than previously thought. Concentrations of nitrogen dioxide have increased 50 percent over the past 10 years, and the buildup is accelerating. According to The Wall Street Journal, Beijing's sulfur-dioxide levels in 2004 were more than double New York's, and airborne-particulate levels more than six times as high. Last year China enacted its first comprehensive emissions law, but it is expected to have little effect on the transport sector's copious carbon-dioxide emissions, which by 2030 are expected to exceed those of the United States, the world's largest producer. The nation's growing demands for gasoline make it increasingly our competitor for the finite global supply; by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency, China may be importing as much oil as we do.”

Related; Cars in China

Climate Change as Terrorism

Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Australia has a new study reflecting on the security implications of climate change;

“In this Lowy Paper we argue that there is no longer much doubt that the world is facing a prolonged period of planetary warming, largely fuelled by modern lifestyles, which is unprecedented in human history in terms of its magnitude and probable environmental consequences. With a few notable exceptions, even sceptics now seem prepared to accept the validity of the basic science underpinning climate change forecasts.

Crucially, however, there is no consensus about appropriate strategies for dealing with the consequences of climate change, primarily because there is no agreement about its seriousness for international security. The reality is that climate change of the order and time frames predicted by climate scientists poses fundamental questions of human security, survival and the stability of nation states which necessitate judgments about political and strategic risk as well as economic cost.

The central problem is the rate at which temperatures are increasing rather than the absolute size of differential warming. Spread over several centuries, or a millennium, temperature rises of several degrees could probably be managed without political instability or major threats to commerce, agriculture and infrastructure. Compressed within the space of a single century, global warming will present far more daunting challenges of human and biological adaptation, especially for natural ecosystems which typically evolve over hundreds of thousands and millions of years.

Our principal conclusion is that the wider security implications of climate change have been largely ignored and seriously underestimated in public policy, academia and the media. Climate change will complicate and threaten Australia’s security environment in several ways. First, weather extremes and greater fluctuations in rainfall and temperatures have the capacity to refashion the region’s productive landscape and exacerbate food, water and energy scarcities in a relatively short time span. Sea-level rise is of particular concern because of the density of coastal populations and the potential for the large-scale displacement of people in Asia….”

It’s fashionable for leaders of small low-lying countries to complain about developed world causing havoc on the earth’s environment- it goes something like this, ‘why should we have to be the ones to pay for the lifestyle of the rich world’. I doubt whether any one living in a coastal community seriously considers that global warming is a real threat- all the talk hadn’t had much of a behavioral change on such communities to prepare for their inevitable fate as depicted in the media and in research.

Related:

It's Getting Warmer- Thomas C. Schelling

Prices and Quantities in Climate Change- John Quiggin

A Test of Our Character-Paul Krugman

Alaska feeling effects of warming earth

Letter from Maldives- Not sinking but drowning; But burning less oil to keep air cool so ice stays ice and the seas don’t warm is too expensive and roundabout a way to meet the danger, Mr Mendelsohn thinks. Wouldn’t it be cheaper, he asks, for Maldivians, and those like them, to move?

Podcasts;

A Panel discussion on Climate- from the Environmental Summit of the Nicholas Institute for Environmental Policy Solutions at Duke University

Collapse- Jared Diamond

First there was Carbon?

The latest from the BBC’s ‘In Our Time’ program focus on Carbon;

"Carbon forms the basis of all organic life and has the amazing ability to bond with itself and a wide range of other elements, forming nearly 10 million known compounds. It is in the food we eat, the clothes we wear, the shampoo we use and the petrol that fuels our cars. Because carbon has the largest range of subtle bonding capabilities, 95% of everything that exists in the universe is made up of carbon atoms that are stuck together.

It is an extraordinary element for many reasons: the carbon-nitrogen cycle provides some of the energy produced by the sun and the stars; it has the highest melting point of all the elements; and its different forms include one of the softest and one of the hardest substances known.

What gives carbon its great ability to bond with other atoms? What is the significance of the recent discovery of a new carbon molecule - the C60? What role does carbon play in the modern chemistry of nanotechnology? And how should we address the problem of our diminishing carbon energy sources?”

Contributors include Harry Kroto, Professor of Chemistry at Florida State University, Monica Grady, Professor of Planetary and Space Sciences at the Open University and Ken Teo, Royal Academy of Engineering Research Fellow at Cambridge University

Related:

Trapping Carbon, Freeing Coal; There is a lot of carbon in the ground. For eons, life forms ranging from microbes to Homo sapiens have trapped the element as part of their fundamental molecular makeup, died and cycled it into the great geologic chain of carbon

Cheap Drinking Water from the Ocean; A water desalination system using carbon nanotube-based membranes could significantly reduce the cost of purifying water from the ocean. The technology could potentially provide a solution to water shortages both in the United States, where populations are expected to soar in areas with few freshwater sources, and worldwide, where a lack of clean water is a major cause of disease

President Al Gore Addresses the Nation

President Al Gore addresses the Nation from Saturday Night Live (via Oliver Willis)

Disclosure Helps Reduce Pollution

Key Findings from a World Bank collaborated research on an approach to fighting pollution through empowering communities to exert pressure on polluters by giving the general public access to emissions information.

-In developing countries where pollution information has been scarce, disclosure can make a firm’s emissions more costly because it increases penalties from regulators, local communities, consumer organizations and market agents.

-Significant factors influence the ‘pricing’ of pollution by local communities. These include income, education, level of civic activity, legal or political recourse, media coverage, NGO presence, efficiency of existing formal regulation, local employment alternatives, and the total pollution load faced by a community in relation to its environmental capacity to absorb pollution.

-Disclosure promotes useful learning across firms. A good rating for one firm among many competitors establishes the feasibility of cleaner production and encourages other firms to invest more in reducing their harmful impact on the environment.

-Disclosure promotes managers’ awareness of their own firms’ pollution. A survey of Indonesian firms that have participated in PROPER suggests an important impact for information to plant managers and owners about their own plants’ emissions and abatement opportunities.

Related Links:

- The truth about the environment

- Economic man, cleaner planet

- Greening industry; new roles for communities, markets, and governments

- World development report 2003 - sustainable development in a dynamic world : transforming institutions, growth, and quality of life

- "Confronting the Environmental Kuznets Curve," 2002, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 16, No. 1, Winter (with Susmita Dasgupta, Benoit Laplante and Hua Wang).

- Shakeb Afsah, Allen Blackman, and Damayanti Ratunanda, "How Do Public Disclosure Pollution Control Programs Work? Evidence from Indonesia", RFF Discussion Paper 00-44, October 2000

-“Environmental performance rating and disclosure, China's GreenWatch program,” 2004, Journal of Environmental Management, vol. 71, no. 2, June, 123-133 (with Hua Wang)

- Greening of Development Economics: A Survey

- The China Syndrome and the Environmental Kuznets Curve

- The Green TV and China's Environmental Protection Agency - SEPA

Clinton's Speech on Disaster Reduction

"Indeed, I often think about one of the nations that I have worked hard to help in the tsunami, the Maldives, a small country with only 130,000 people for which I have developed a great affection. My successor in interest at some future point will not have to worry about them anymore; we will just take a bunch of boats and take them away as their little nation vanishes under the water.

...if you want a disaster prevention system that works, we have to address this. We have to do more to address the underlying causes of vulnerability."

- President Bill Clinton