SAN DIEGO — A report issued Thursday said a number of San Diego County businesses help prove the idea that solving global warming can be good for the bottom line. Officials from the nonprofit Environment California Research & Policy Center, along with San Diego Association of Government representatives, held a news conference at the agency’s San Diego offices to announce the findings of the research group’s six-month study. The report said a study of a dozen of businesses, agencies and institutions across the state showed that companies could help stop global warming and still earn a profit —- mostly by cutting energy use. Some business interests howled and said that it could jeopardize the economy when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said in April that he backed a goal of cutting ‘greenhouse’ gases —- created by the burning of fossil fuels —- by 25 percent by 2020. Global warming refers to the idea that the Earth’s oceans and atmosphere are being harmfully heated up by greenhouse gases emitted naturally and by mankind —- leading to climate change that could have devastating effects such as increased killer storms and rising sea levels. The report cited two examples of […]
A comparison of peoples’ views in 34 countries finds that the United States ranks near the bottom when it comes to public acceptance of evolution. Only Turkey ranked lower. Among the factors contributing to America’s low score are poor understanding of biology, especially genetics, the politicization of science and the literal interpretation of the Bible by a small but vocal group of American Christians, the researchers say. ‘American Protestantism is more fundamentalist than anybody except perhaps the Islamic fundamentalist, which is why Turkey and we are so close,’ said study co-author Jon Miller of Michigan State University. Evolving Issue Darwin argued that useless limbs and leftover organs are evidence of evolution. The researchers combined data from public surveys on evolution collected from 32 European countries, the United States and Japan between 1985 and 2005. Adults in each country were asked whether they thought the statement ‘Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals,’ was true, false, or if they were unsure. The study found that over the past 20 years: * The percentage of U.S. adults who accept evolution declined from 45 to 40 percent. […]
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will donate $500 million to the 4-year-old Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in a bid to increase the number of people in poor countries helped by life-saving medicines. The Gates Foundation will give the fund $100 million a year over five years, said Richard Feachem, the Global Fund’s executive director, in a conference call with reporters today. The donation may help the Global Fund secure other contributions at the 16th International AIDS Conference in Toronto, which begins in four days, Feachem said. The Gates Foundation, the world’s largest philanthropic organization, has donated $2 billion to AIDS research and treatment programs since it was founded in 2000. The grant will help the $9-billion Global Fund provide life-saving AIDS drugs in poor countries and ensure that 544,000 patients who already get medicine through the program remain on treatment. ‘We have made an unprecedented moral commitment to sustaining this treatment until death, which may be decades and we hope will be decades,” Feachem said on the conference call. ‘This sends a strong message about the importance of the sustainability and predictability of funds.” Before today, the Gates […]
The vast ice cap that covers Greenland nearly three miles thick is melting faster than ever before on record, and the pace is speeding year by year, according to global climate watchers gathering data from twin satellites that probe the effects of warming on the huge northern island. The consequence is already evident in a small but ominous rise in sea levels around the world, a pace that is also accelerating, the scientists say. According to the scientists’ data, Greenland’s ice is melting at a rate three times faster than it was only five years ago. The estimate of the melting trend that has been observed for nearly a decade comes from a University of Texas team monitoring a satellite mission that measures changes in the Earth’s gravity over the entire Greenland ice cap as the ice melts and the water flows down into the Arctic ocean. ‘We have only been watching the ice cap melt during a relatively short period,’ physicist Jianli Chen said Thursday, ‘but we are seeing the strongest evidence of it yet, and in the near future the pace of melting will accelerate even more.’ The same satellites tracking Greenland’s ice cap […]
DENVER — Hurricane researchers said Thursday that this year’s hurricane season won’t be as bad as predicted and said a monster storm like Katrina is unlikely ‘The probability of another Katrina-like event is very small,” said Phillip Klotzbach, lead forecaster for the hurricane research team at Colorado State University. The researchers reduced the number of likely hurricanes to seven from nine and intense hurricanes to three from five. There is, however, a considerably higher-than-average probability of at least one intense hurricane making landfall in the United States this year, 73 percent. The average is 52 percent. Researcher William Gray said Atlantic Ocean surface temperatures are not quite as warm and surface pressure is not quite as low, both factors in the decision to revise the forecast. ‘Overall, we think the 2006 Atlantic basin tropical storm season will be somewhat active,” Klotzbach said. ‘This year it looks like the East Coast is more likely to be targeted by Atlantic basin hurricanes than the Gulf Coast, although the possibility exists that any point along the U.S. coast could be affected.” Gray and his team say hurricane activity will continue to be above average for another 15 […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
