If you are getting asked the same question about climate change and again and again: What about climate change? We have had the coldest weather imaginable this year. What can you possibly say other then: ‘ This is the weather and not the climate’. Here is another interesting article that will help you get more arguments that climate change is happening despite the current clod weather spells:
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The bitter cold, with more intense winter weather forecast for March in parts of the United States, have led some to question if global warming has stalled.
Understanding the overall trend is crucial for estimating consumption of energy supplies, such as demand for winter heating oil in the U.S. northeast, and impacts on agricultural production.
“It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years,” veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing.
Eating outside of your home generally requires three things: food, food containers, and food utensils. For the majority of Americans, oil is involved in all three of these components. Food, especially processed food, requires tremendous amounts of oil to grow, process, and transport it. The plastic food containers we use are made from oil. Likewise, the great majority of our disposable forks, spoons, and knives are made from petroleum-based plastics.
The plastic forks and spoons we eat with are not recyclable, so what happens to all of these discarded utensils? They end up in our landfills, beaches, and oceans. Americans toss out enough plastic spoons, knives, and forks each year to circle the equator 300 times. Wanton wastefulness doesn’t stop with our flatware of course. According to the EPA, the United States produces approximately 220 million tons of garbage each year, the equivalent of burying more than 82,000 football fields six feet deep in compacted garbage. The National Recycling Coalition reports that, on average, every American throws away more than seven pounds of garbage a day.
The Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games have added another color to its coveted gold, silver and bronze medal lineup – green! For the first time in Olympic history, the 2010 athlete medals contain metals from end-of-life electronic waste, commonly referred to as e-waste.
Teck Resources, Ltd., a diversified mining company based in Vancouver, is the exclusive supplier of the metals used in the Olympic medals. Components from circuit boards originally destined to landfills, have been added to all of the athletes’ medals. In fact, 6.8 metric tonnes of circuit board from end-of-life electronics were diverted from landfills for the making of the 1,014 medals. The company is also an Official Supporter of the Games.
How much of this census will be propaganda and spin? Or is this a real effort by China to measure its pollution? I am not so sure. Decide for yourself. This is the beginning of the article :
China has revealed its most ambitious measure of what explosive development has done to its environment, saying Tuesday its first national pollution census has mapped nearly 6 million sources of industrial, residential and agricultural waste.
The world’s largest polluter also said its pollution levels might peak sooner than expected as China tries to balance economic and green concerns.
The central government now has a year to use the census results to shape its next five-year environmental protection plan. Ministries are also studying the possibility of an environmental tax, China’s vice minister of environmental protection, Zhang Lijun, told a news conference.
The European chemical industry is embracing innovation to ensure sustainability. Moreover, through innovation the industry is providing measures to facilitate a sustainable society.
The chemical sector plays a significant role in the European economy, contributing 30% of the world’s total chemical production, employing 1.2 million people and generating €537 billion in sales in 2007.
The EU registration, evaluation, authorisation and restriction of chemical substances (REACH) Regulation is at the centre of a shift towards more sustainable solutions. Aiming to protect human health and the environment, REACH makes companies responsible for registering information on the properties of their chemicals with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA).
Now we will see whether our leaders will stick to their comittments from the shambolic Copenhagen Conference:
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Donors will probably have to decide for themselves how to spend money in 2010 since there is no mechanism to guide handouts. A “Copenhagen Green Climate Fund,” also planned by last month’s low-ambition summit, does not yet exist.
“The expectation is that donor countries will deliver through existing bilateral and multilateral channels of their own choosing,” Elliot Diringer of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change said of the fast-track funds.
“There are some legal hiccups created by the accord not being a (U.N.) instrument,” said Gordon Shepherd, director of international policy at the WWF environmental group. But he said a flow of funds could help build trust between rich and poor.
This is an interesting article I thought I would share with everyone here:
Industrial biotechnology is gaining supporters among environmentalists as a way to make significant cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions and eventually move to a society free from fossil fuels. The lofty idea behind industrial, or white, biotechnology is to use nature’s own ingredients to solve industrial problems. White biotech industries use enzymes - proteins that speed up chemical reactions - for various applications to increase efficiency of energy and raw-material use and eventually replace fossil fuels.
An engineering professor has figured out why oil remains trapped along miles of gravel beaches more than 20 years after the Exxon Valdez tanker disaster in Prince William Sound.
An estimated 20,000 gallons of crude remain in Prince William Sound, even though oil remaining after the nearly 11-million-gallon spill had been expected to biodegrade and wash away within a few years.
The problem: The gravelly beaches of Prince William Sound are trapping the oil between two layers of rock, with larger rocks on top and finer gravel underneath, according to Michel C. Boufadel, chairman of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Temple University. His study appeared Sunday in Nature Geoscience’s online publication and will be published in the journal later.
A very interesting blog post by Christine Arena today:
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Investors are hoarding it to hedge against the dollar’s weakness. Consumers are buying it up in ever increasing volumes. Gold seemingly adds up to big opportunities wherever you look, with US gold jewelry sales representing a growing $17 billion market and China gold jewelry sales reaching nearly 260 billion yuan in 2009. But the fact is that this precious metal has a dark side, too. As gold’s prestige and value increases, so do the implications of the trade itself.
“Most consumers don’t know where the gold in their products comes from, or how it is mined,” says NoDirtyGold.org, a group that encourages retailers to cease carrying gold that comes from illegal sources. “Gold mining is a dirty industry: it can displace communities, contaminate drinking water, hurt workers, and destroy pristine environments.”
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