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L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s major industrial nations and newly emerging powers failed to agree Wednesday on specific cuts in heat-trapping gases by 2050, undercutting an effort to build a global consensus to fight climate change, according to people following the talks.
As President Obama arrived for three days of meetings, negotiators for the world’s 17 leading polluters dropped a proposal to cut global greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent by midcentury, and emissions from the most advanced economies by 80 percent. But both the G-8 and the developing countries agreed to set a goal of stopping world temperatures from rising by more than 2 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels.
The discussion of climate change was among the top priorities of world leaders as they gathered here for the annual summit meeting of the Group of 8 powers. Mr. Obama invited counterparts from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico and others to join the G-8 here on Thursday for a parallel “Major Economies Forum” representing the producers of 80 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases. But since President Hu Jintao of China abruptly left Italy to deal with unrest at home, the chances of making further progress seemed to evaporate.
The G-8 leaders were also grappling with the sagging global economy, development in Africa, turmoil in Iran, nuclear nonproliferation and other challenging issues. On Friday, Mr. Obama planned to unveil a $15 billion food security initiative by the G-8 to provide emergency and development aid to poor nations.
The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.
“They’re saying, ‘We just don’t trust you guys,’ ” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group based in the United States. “It’s the same gridlock we had last year when Bush was president.”
American officials said they still had made an important breakthrough because the G-8 countries within the negotiations agreed to adopt the 2050 reduction goals, even though the developing countries would not.
And they said a final agreement with developing countries, including China and India, to be sealed on Thursday would include important conceptual commitments by the emerging powers to begin reducing emissions and to set a target date. Now negotiators will have to try to quantifying those commitments in coming months.L’AQUILA, Italy — The world’s major industrial nations and newly... more
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Nettle
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2 years ago
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The oldest and largest trees within California's world famous Yosemite National Park are disappearing.
Climate change appears to be a major cause of the loss.
The revelation comes from an analysis of data collected over 60 years by forest ecologists.
They say one worrying aspect of the decline is that it is happening within one of most protected forests within the US, suggesting that even more large trees may be dying off elsewhere.
James Lutz and Jerry Franklin of the University of Washington, Seattle, US and Jan van Wagtendonk of the Yosemite Field Station of the US Geological Survey, based in El Portal, California collated data on tree growth within the park gathered from the 1930s onwards.
Their key finding is that the density of large diameter trees has fallen by 24% between the 1930s and 1990s, within all types of forest.
"These large, old trees have lived centuries and experienced many dry and wet periods," says Lutz. "So it is quite a surprise that recent conditions are such that these long-term survivors have been affected."The oldest and largest trees within California's world famous Yosemite National... more
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jkw077
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3 years ago
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Istanbul hosted the 5th World Water Forum along the banks of the Golden Horn.
"We are all connected by our need for water. We all fear thirst, and we all fear that our children will be thirsty," Michael Blackstock, a naturalist of First Nations descent, said Friday at a session on water and culture.Istanbul hosted the 5th World Water Forum along the banks of the Golden Horn.... more
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Describing the government’s failure to inspect 95 percent of food-processing plants as “a hazard to the public health,” President Obama promised Saturday to bolster and reorganize the nation’s fractured food-safety system.
“In the end, food safety is something I take seriously, not just as your president, but as a parent,” Mr. Obama said in his weekly radio address.
A bipartisan chorus of powerful lawmakers in Congress has already promised to enact fundamental changes in the nation’s food-protection system. In his address, Mr. Obama made clear that he not only supports that legislative effort but may push to expand it.
A dozen federal agencies share responsibility for ensuring the safety of the nation’s food supply, a fractured oversight system that critics and government investigators have for years said needed major reforms.
A fierce debate has erupted on Capitol Hill in recent months about whether to bolster food oversight at the Food and Drug Administration or assign those responsibilities to a separate agency that would eventually absorb the food oversight duties of the other 11 agencies, including the Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety Inspection Service. Advocates on both sides of the issue have speculated for weeks about which approach the administration would support.
Those calling for a united food agency were heartened last month when Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said that a combined agency would make sense and that the massive recall of products made with tainted peanuts “is a grand opportunity for us to take a step back and rethink our approach.” These advocates also point out that the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, has a basement apartment in the home of Representative Rosa DeLauro, a Connecticut Democrat who advocates putting the food functions at the F.D.A. into an independent agency.Describing the government’s failure to inspect 95 percent of food-processing... more
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Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned
Unchecked climate change will mean that some parts of the world will simply not have enough water to sustain settlements both small and large, because agriculture becomes untenable and industries relying on water can no longer compete or function effectively. This will trigger structural changes in economies right through to the displacement of people as environmental refugees.
While deniers continue trying to confuse the issue by arguing that we don’t know that our current climate is the ideal one, the drought and sea level rise issue render that argument tragically moot.
Humanity has developed around the climate of the last 10,000 years, a climate that has been remarkably stable (see “Must have PPT #1: The narrow temperature window that gave us modern human civilization” — and yes I will restart my “must-have PowerPoints” series after the election).
Any significantly different climate — let alone the devastating 5+°C climate we are risking on our current path — means hundreds of millions of environmental refugees. Unfortunately, with more than 6 billion people on the planet and the livable parts of the world poised to shrink by a third this century, the likelihood of conflict is enormous.
One odd thing about Steiner’s comments:
Steiner said it was not possible to identify specific places at risk, but said vulnerable areas were those which were already considered to be ‘water scarce’ because of dry weather and a lack of infrastructure to store and transport water
Actually it is quite possible to identify specific places at risk. The most threatened places are
1. Regions that get a significant fraction of their water from inland glaciers
2. The subtropics.
Indeed, climate change theory is quite specific that the subtropical deserts will expand from unchecked global warming. And that will be the subject of a (very) forthcoming “must have PowerPoint.”Achim Steiner, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, warned... more
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"If a woman wants to drive the men wild, she might want to dress in red.
Men rated a woman shown in photographs as more sexually attractive if she was wearing red clothing or if she was shown in an image framed by a red border rather than some other color, U.S. researchers said Tuesday.
The study led by psychology professor Andrew Elliot of the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York, seemed to confirm red as the color of romance -- as so many Valentine's Day card makers and lipstick sellers have believed for years.
Although this "red alert" may be a product of human society associating red with love for eons, it also may arise from more primitive biological roots, Elliot said.
Noting the genetic similarity of humans to higher primates, he said scientists have shown that certain male primates are especially attracted to females of their species displaying red. For example, female baboons and chimpanzees show red coloring when nearing ovulation, sending a sexual signal that the males apparently find irresistible.
"It could be this very deep, biologically based automatic tendency to respond to red as an attraction cue given our evolutionary heritage," Elliot, whose findings appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, said in a telephone interview.
The study involved more than 100 men, mostly college undergraduates, who were shown pictures of women and asked to rate how pretty they were, how much the men would like to kiss them and how much the men would like to have sex with them.
Men were shown a woman, with some of the pictures bordered in red and some bordered in white, gray or green. Even though it was the same picture of the same woman, when she was framed in red the men rated her as more attractive than when she was bordered by another color.
Men were then shown photographs of a woman that were identical except that the researchers digitally made her shirt red in some versions or blue in others. And once again, the men strongly favored the woman in red.
The men also were asked, "Imagine that you are going on a date with this person and have $100 in your wallet. How much money would you be willing to spend on your date?" When she was clad in red, the men said they would spend more money on her.
The researchers noted that the color red did not alter how men rated the women in the photographs in terms of likeability, intelligence or kindness -- only attractiveness.
The researchers then had a group of young women rate whether the pictured woman was pretty. Red had no impact on whether women rated other women as pretty, they found.
Gay men and color blind men were excluded from the study.""If a woman wants to drive the men wild, she might want to dress in red.
Men... more
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Here’s an update on my recent heavily-Dugg post: “The truth-telling ad ABC won’t let you see — and what you can do about it.”
First, as of today, more than 200,000 people have sent ABC an email. So thank you to everybody who sent them an e-mail or Dugg this post and drew attention to it — and to the many other bloggers who wrote about this.
Second, ABC’s absurd actions have come to the attention of one of the media’s most prestigious watchdogs. What their headline “ABC Declines Renewable Power Ad” lacks in actual head-smackiness, their coverage makes up in credibility. ABC can easily ignore bloggers, but not CJR. ABC was also critiqued by the UK Guardian, with a better headline, “ABC deems Gore climate change advert too ‘controversial’ for TV.”
Third, ABC has offered an explanation for their hypocrisy action or, more precisely, two explanations. The Alliance for Climate Protection says that ABC objected to this fleeting image:
Big Oil Spends Hundreds of Millions to Block Clean Energy
Why? ABC said:
Per our Guidelines, national buildings may be used in advertising provided the depictions are incidental to the advertiser’s promotion of the product or service. Given the messages and themes of this commercial, the image of the Capital (sic) building is not incidental to this advertising. Please replace the image with one that is not of another national building or monument. Thank you.
The Wonkroom notes how ridiculous that claim is, given that ABC runs Chevron’s greenwashing ‘Human Energy‘ ads:
While running ads calling for conservation and depicting happy children and unspoiled nature, Chevron was simultaneously expanding its operations in the tar sands of Alberta, Canada and oil fields of the Niger Delta, and lobbying to lift the offshore drilling moratorium.
Maybe ABC realized the inanity of their original argument because “network spokeswoman Julie Hoover told the Guardian“:
All of our advertising is reviewed on a case-by-case basis, and the context of this particular ad was determined not to be acceptable per our policy on controversial issue advertising.
I suppose the “we’re arbitrary” defense is much better than the “we’re legally inane” defense.Here’s an update on my recent heavily-Dugg post: “The truth-telling ad ABC... more
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Haiti faces a "catastrophe" after being hit by a series of storms in recent weeks, President Rene Preval has said.
Three storms in less than 21 days have killed 170 people and forced thousands to flee their homes in the Caribbean nation, officials say.
The latest, Tropical Storm Hanna, could prove even more deadly than one that killed more than 3,000 people in 2004, Mr Preval warned.
Haiti faces a "catastrophe" after being hit by a series of storms in recent... more
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Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Climate experts warn that the country is suffering badly from the impact of climate change and that the Sahara is slowly creeping north - into the Spanish mainland.
Yet in Spain itself there is little consensus about what is to be done. Indeed, such is the disagreement that journalists and politicians alike are calling it "water wars".
A farmer and politician, Angel Carcia Udon, said: "Water arouses passions because it can be used as a weapon, a political weapon, just as oil is a political weapon."
And water in Spain has set region against region, north against south and government against opposition.
When the city of Barcelona nearly ran out of water earlier this year, the fountains were switched off and severe restrictions were introduced.
The government of Catalonia pleaded for water to be transferred from rivers like the Ebro, in neighbouring regions, but they refused.
Instead, the city shipped in millions of litres of water from France and accelerated work on the giant desalination plant on the edge of Barcelona, which promises to provide 180,000 cubic metres of water a day.
"Even more incomprehensible is that they expect us to use water from desalination plants, which is expensive and would force us to raise prices."Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Climate experts warn that the... more
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Option #4 Change the minimum voting age to 60. You have to check it out for the rest (video included) to understand.Option #4 Change the minimum voting age to 60. You have to check it out for the rest... more
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New research shows increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are a threat to the Australian national icon, the koala. Increases in CO2 affect the level of nutrients and 'anti-nutrients' (things that are either toxic or interfere with the digestion of nutrients) in eucalypt leaves. New research shows increased temperatures and carbon dioxide levels are a threat to... more
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NEW ORLEANS -- A green puppy was born last week in New Orleans.
“It’s surprising, alarming to see,” Louisiana SPCA CEO Anna Zorrilla said. “Sometimes, when a puppy is born, the amniotic fluid mixes with the placenta and dyes the coat of the puppy and it almost always happens to very light colored puppies.”
Zorrilla said the puppy will not be green forever, and will likely turn white or a light tan color in the next few weeks.
She also said the health of the puppy won’t be affected.
“There are not health concerns,” Zorrilla said. “It’s really just a discoloration in the birthing process.”NEW ORLEANS -- A green puppy was born last week in New Orleans.
“It’s... more
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