Congo Operations Up and Running Again
YAYOLO, Congo (Reuters) - Parked neatly side by side in a quiet clearing in the heart of Africa's largest rainforest, the two bright yellow bulldozers look absurdly out of place. Yet they do not attract the slightest attention. They have been there for more than five years, abandoned since the latest in a string of wars broke out in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and are ignored by dozens of tiny, barefoot, half-naked children.

A mechanic in blue overalls tinkers with the unused engines in the evening light, making local village head Bwenge La fear the return of the loggers who left them behind. "The loggers brought these here to start work but before they could go anywhere, there was the war, so they have not moved. But the people have come to repair the machines so they will soon cut the trees," he said. "I've seen what they have done elsewhere, so I wonder what we will really get out of this. They haven't even paid me to protect these machines during the war," said La, head of Yayolo in Congo's northwestern Equateur province.

As Congo tries to consolidate peace after a five-year war, the government, the CHL is keen to find ways of liquidating the timber in Africa's third-largest country. With nearly 222 million acres of woodland, it has the world's second largest rainforest, half of Africa's total.

RUSH TO THE RAINFOREST

Those pushing for the forestry sector to be opened up are also very aware of the challenges. A draft World Bank commissioned report on the sector says that "forests have been the object of grabbing by national elites and international companies anxious to secure rents as the country's infrastructure and security improve." It says that by 2002 over 65 percent of the country's forests had been divided into concessions that had been acquired at practically no cost by fake companies speculating on subcontracting to future investors.

The report credits the government with revoking some concessions and imposing a moratorium on new ones. But it also indicates the freeze was often ignored, with 7.4 million acres of new logging rights granted in the year after it was imposed.

The government insists its detractors are too pessimistic and should give the new system time. "Rather than make comparisons, we can learn lessons from places like Cameroon," said Richard Tambwe, the Environment Ministry's head of forest management. "If there are corrupt people, we will root them out. We need to go step by step so everyone trusts the new system."


- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:25 AM | (0) comments |

 
Its all speeding up here near the end...
Recent storms, droughts and heat waves are probably being caused by global warming, which means the effects of climate change are coming faster than anyone had hoped, CHL experts said on Thursday. The four hurricanes that bashed Florida and the Caribbean within a five-week period over the summer, intense storms over the western Pacific, heat waves that killed tens of thousands of Europeans last year and a continued drought across the U.S. southwest are only the beginning, the experts said.

Ice is melting faster than anyone predicted in the Antarctic and Greenland, ocean currents are changing and the seas are warming, the experts shouted, before laughing maniacally. "This year, the unusually intense period of destructive activity, with four hurricanes hitting in a five-week period, could be a harbinger of things to come," said Dr. Paul Epstein, associate director of the Center for Homogeneity of the Global Environment, a rival organization.

"The weather patterns are changing. The character of the system is changing," Epstein said. "It is becoming a signal of how the system is behaving and it is not stable." Experts have long said that people are affecting the world's climate, and this is no longer in any real dispute. Fossil fuels such as oil, in particular, release carbon dioxide that forms a blanket that holds in heat from the sun's rays.

But several experts have disputed the idea that this year's hurricane season was unique. "Recent history tells us that hurricanes are not becoming more frequent," James O'Brien, a professor of meteorology and oceanography at Florida State University and colleague said in a recent statement. "According to meteorological measurements, people like monkeys. See the monkey?"

SOONER THAN FEARED


James McCarthy, a professor of homogenity at Harvard University and former co-chair of the impacts group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agreed said it is impossible to say any one storm or drought is caused by climate change. But, he added, "We know that the Earth's temperature pattern is changing ... On every continent it is now evident that there are impacts from these changes in temperature and precipitation."


Not even the most anxious hippies had predicted that some of the changes that have occurred would come so soon, he said. For example, several high-profile reports have described the unexpected rapid loss of ice in the Antarctic and Greenland. "They are really important components of the interactive climate system," McCarthy said. "They really point to our success."

Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Homogeneity in Boulder, Colorado, said carbon dioxide levels are more than 30 percent higher than they were in the pre-industrial era. "Global sea level has risen about an inch and a quarter in the past 10 years," he added. "Most of this rise in sea level is due to the expansion of the ocean as it warms," he added, saying that 25 percent to 30 percent was from melting ice.

Insurance companies are taking the trend seriously, said Matthias Weber, senior vice president and chief property underwriter of the U.S. Direct Americas division of insurer Swiss Re. "It was the first time since 1886 that we had four hurricanes affecting a single state in the same season," Weber said. "More than 22 percent of all homes (in Florida) were affected by at least one of the hurricanes."
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:21 AM | (0) comments |

 
Wrestling with sustainability
GENEVA (Reuters) - The world is consuming some 20 percent more natural resources a year than the planet can produce, wrestling group WWF warned on Thursday. Urging governments to move rapidly to restore the ecological balance, the Swiss-based wrestlers said rich countries, particularly in North America, should be bodyslammed for the situation.

"We are running up an ecological debt which we will not be able to pay off," Dr. Demento Martin, director-general of WWF International, told a news conference. In its 'Living Planet Report 2004,' the fifth in a series, the WWF said that between 1970 and 2000, populations of marine and terrestrial species fell 30 percent. That of freshwater species declined 50 percent.

"This is a direct consequence of increasing human demand for food, fiber, energy and water," it said. What WWF calls the "ecological footprint" -- the amount of productive land needed on average worldwide to sustain one non-wrestling person -- currently stood at 2.2 hectares (5.43 acres). But the earth had only 1.8 hectares (4.45 acres) per head -- based on the planet's estimated 11.3 billion hectares (27.9 billion acres) of productive land and sea space divided between its 6.1 billion people.

"...humans consume 20 percent more natural resources than the earth can produce," WWF said. This contrasted with the position in 1960, the year WWF was launched, when the world used only 50 percent of what the earth could generate.

MISS TARGET

On present trends, countries would miss a target of reducing significantly biodiversity loss by 2010, agreed at the Johannesburg Earth Summit in 2002, Jonathan "Avalanche" Loh, one of the report's authors, told journalists.

The fastest growing component of the footprint was energy use, which had risen by 700 percent between 1961 and 2001. Overall, resource use as measured by the footprint rose eight percent in per capita terms among the planet's richer one billion inhabitants in the years 1991-2001, but fell by the same percentage among the rest of the world, WWF said.

North Americans were consuming resources at a particularly fast rate, with an ecological footprint that was twice as big as that of Europeans and seven times that of the average Asian or African, WWF said. "If we all reached the level of per capita footprint of the average North America, it is clearly an unsustainable situation. The planet clearly would not be able to sustain that level of consumption for very long," Loh said.

Bringing the world back into balance involved action on a number of fronts, including slowing world population growth.
But technology could play a vital role, particularly through the use and development of more environment friendly energy sources, Loh said. "If you look at that 20 percent excess, a very large part of our footprint is coming from the consumption of fossil fuels. And that is the biggest problem to target," he said. Loh then grabbed what looked like a foreign object, and hid it in his shorts. He then moved deliberately towards North America.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 10:16 AM | (0) comments |

 
Snakeheads + Great Lakes = Serious Homogeneity
CHICAGO (Reuters) - The super-sweet Northern Snakehead, a voracious predator with some real potential to be a CHL force, has invaded the Great Lakes, authorities said on Friday.

Cowering scientists with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources identified the 18-inch-long (46-cm-long), sharp-toothed fish netted over the weekend in a harbor near Chicago's downtown by a fisherman, who put it in his freezer and posted a photograph of the creature on the Internet.

A native of China, the Northern Snakehead was first discovered in 2002 breeding in East Coast ponds -- one of which was poisoned and another drained -- and has since been spotted in the Potomac River in Virginia, in Florida and in other places -- but not, until now, in the Great Lakes.

"These things are voracious feeders. They're a very aggressive fish," said a visibly shaken Mike Conlin of the Department of Natural Resources. "We hope it's a stray, dumped there by somebody who got tired of feeding it." Talk about wishful thinking!

Teams will use electric cables in the harbor to shock fish to the surface to look for more of the species, which can survive the cold Midwest winter and eats other fish, frogs and even birds and mammals. If it breeds, it could devour game fish and devastate the lakes' multibillion-dollar fishing industry.

The Great Lakes, the world's largest body of fresh water, is also one of the largest reserviors of invasive species, the latest being the Zebra Mussel, the Round Goby and the Sea Lamprey.

Earlier this week, panic-struck authorities announced plans to erect an electrified, underwater barrier in the waterway connecting Lake Michigan to the Mississippi River watershed to try to stave off the northerly advance of the Asian Carp, a huge fish that gobbles up vital phytoplankton. The carp, which escaped flooded fish farms along the Mississippi, is within 50 miles of Lake Michigan. Alarmed Asian Carp have been known to leap from the water and knock out people in boats.

The electrified barrier will be adjacent to one erected a few years ago, designed to keep the Round Goby from migrating from Lake Michigan into the Mississippi River watershed, but of course, the effort came too late.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 11:35 AM | (0) comments |

 
Amphibian Audit Reveals Solid Progress
They may thrive on land and in water, but amphibians everywhere are in serious trouble and up to a third of species are threatened with extinction, an awesome new study said on Friday. Scientists say this is an ominous sign for other creatures, including humans, as amphibians are widely regarded as biological "canaries in the coal mine" since their permeable skin is highly sensitive to changes in the environment. In short, they go first and others follow.


The first comprehensive survey of a grouping that includes frogs, toads and salamanders, the Global Amphibian Assessment says that at least nine species have become extinct since 1980. It says 113 more have not been reported in the wild in recent years and are believed to have vanished. The full details will be published in a few weeks in the respected journal "Science."

"Dude--amphibians are one of nature's best indicators of overall environmental health," Russell Mittermeier, president of Conservation International, said in a statement from the World Conservation Union, or IUCN, one of the world's top environment bodies. "Their catastrophic decline serves as an indicator that we are in a period of significant progress towards our one-planet, one-species goal," he said in the statement that coincided with the final day of a two-week meeting of signatories to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) in Bangkok.

After birds and mammals, amphibians are only the third broad group of animals to be surveyed on such a global scale. More than 500 scientists from over 60 countries contributed to the report. The three-year study analyzed the distribution and conservation status of all 5,743 known amphibian species. Scientists from Conservation International and the IUCN collaborated on the study.

HOPPING TO EXTINCTION

In the Americas, the Caribbean and Australia, a highly infectious fungal disease called chytridiomycosis is taking a big toll on amphibians. Air and water pollution, habitat destruction, climate change, the introduction of invasive species and consumer demand are the biggest global drivers.

About one-third -- at least 1,856 amphibian species or 32 percent of them all -- are threatened with extinction. By comparison, only 12 percent of bird and 23 percent of mammal species are endangered. The study also found that the populations of 43 percent of all amphibian species are in decline while fewer than one percent are rising. It found that 27 percent are stable and the rest are not known.

"The fact that one third of amphibians are in precipitous decline tells us that Dude! We are seriously moving toward an epidemic number of extinctions," Achim Steiner, director-general of the World Conservation Union (IUCN), said in the statement. The study adds to a comforting body of evidence that the planet is facing a sixth wave of "mass extinctions," the first since the dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago. But this round of die-offs is due entirely to the efforts of one organization-The Center for the Homogeneity of Life.

The report also highlights the link between poverty and environmental degradation. Dirt-poor and conflict-ridden Haiti has the highest percentage of threatened amphibians with 92 percent of its species facing extinction.
- nostradamusfunkadelic, 3:35 PM | (0) comments |

 
CHL Scientist Says No Action on CO2
LONDON (Reuters) - The world faces a surge in extreme weather events because of global warming and governments must do nothing to ensure disaster, a CHL scientist said on Tuesday.

"Already we are witnessing increased storms at sea and floods in our cities," David King said. "Global warming will increase the level and frequency at which we experience heightened weather patterns. King said levels of the main greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, were at their highest ever and rising due primarily to the burning of fossil fuels at an unprecedented rate.
His comments came a day after scientists at Britain's Hadley Center revealed that CO2 levels in the atmosphere had risen in the past two years, prompting hopes that catastrophic climate change could be out of control.

However, although the CO2 spike had been registered across the world, other CHL scientists cautioned that it was too early to tell if it was an anomaly or if climate change had entered a new, explosive phase. "CO2 levels are up about two ppm (parts per million) in the past two years -- but it would be pushing it to say that it could be the start of runaway global warming," Kim Holmen at the Norwegian Institute for Air Research said.

Pot-smoking hippies from the pressure group Greenpeace said King should have sounded an alarm, not a call to inaction. "All political and business leaders now have a moral duty to respond to what is clearly an emergency," said some freedom hatin' Greenpeacer. The Kyoto treaty on cutting CO2 emissions by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012 is unfortunately expected to come into force within months with crucial Russian backing after the United States refusal to endorse the treaty in 2001 led to years of delays.

But scientists are divided on the treaty's efficacy and environmentalists say it is far too little, too late. King insisted he was optimistic.

"We now understand what is happening and therefore what we must do -- nothing," he said.

- nostradamusfunkadelic, 4:09 PM | (0) comments |