OSLO — Global warming this century could trigger a runaway thaw of Greenland’s ice sheet and other abrupt shifts such as a dieback of the Amazon rainforest, scientists said on Monday. They urged governments to be more aware of ‘tipping points’ in nature, tiny shifts that can bring big and almost always damaging changes such as a melt of Arctic summer sea ice or a collapse of the Indian monsoon. ‘Society may be lulled into a false sense of security by smooth projections of global change,’ the scientists at British, German and U.S. institutes wrote in a report saying there were many little-understood thresholds in nature. ‘The greatest and clearest threat is to the Arctic with summer sea ice loss likely to occur long before, and potentially contribute to, Greenland ice sheet melt,’ they wrote in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. ‘Tipping elements in the tropics, the boreal zone, and west Antarctica are surrounded by large uncertainty,’ they wrote, pointing to more potential abrupt shifts than seen in a 2007 report by the U.N. Climate Panel. A projected drying of the Amazon basin, linked both to logging and to global warming, […]
TORTONA, Italy — Italian chemical group Mossi & Ghisolfi, M&G, plans to build a 200,000-tonne bioethanol plant and convert it to using cellulose feedstock as pressure mounts on the sector to make more environment-friendly biofuels. Traditional biofuels — produced from grains, vegetable oils and sugar cane — are facing strong criticism for driving food prices up and for limited contribution to cuts in heat-trapping gas emissions. M&G Vice President Guido Ghisolfi said his group with partners would invest about 100 million euros ($148.1 million) to build the biggest bioethanol plant in Italy by 2009 and 120 million euros more in research to convert it to cellulose feedstock later on. The plant in the north Italian region of Piedmont would produce 200,000 tons, or about 2.5 million hectoliters of bioethanol to help Italy meet its bioethanol target of about 1 million tons by 2010, Ghisolfi said. ‘Our goal is to be competitive with Brazilian ethanol even without subsidies,’ Ghisolfi said on the sidelines of a biofuels conference, brushing off sector concerns that Italian bioethanol producers have been hit by limited fiscal brakes. The new plant would initially use 600,000 tons of maize as feedstock and Tortona-based […]
NEW DELHI — Four undersea communication cables have been cut in the past week, raising questions about the safety of the oceanic network that handles the bulk of the world’s Internet and telephone traffic. Most telecommunications experts and cable operators say that sabotage seems unlikely, but no one knows what damaged the cables or whether the incidents were related. One theory – that a wayward ship traveling off course because of bad weather was responsible for cutting the first two cables last week – was dismissed by the Egyptian government over the weekend. No ships passed the area in the Mediterranean where the cables were located, the country’s Ministry of Communications said Sunday. ‘This has been an eye-opener for us, and everyone in the telecom industry worldwide,’ said Colonel R.S. Parihar, the secretary of the Internet Service Providers Association of India. Today, the cause of the problem may have been an anchor, ‘but what if it is sabotage tomorrow?’ Parihar asked. ‘These are owned by private operators, and there are no governments or armies protecting these cables.’ Most recently, a cable operated by Qatar’s Q-Tel, which linked Qatar to the United Arab Emirates […]
SAN FRANCISCO — A federal judge today rejected President Bush’s attempt to exempt the Navy from environmental laws protecting endangered whales from sound waves caused by underwater sonar blasts during anti-submarine training off the Southern California coast. Bush issued an order Jan. 15 that sought to override the judge’s order limiting the Navy’s use of sonar in Channel Islands waters frequented by whales and other marine mammals. The president said the restrictions would interfere with military exercises that are ‘essential to national security.’ But U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper of Los Angeles said today that Bush lacked authority in this case to suspend the National Environmental Policy Act, on which her earlier order was based. That law requires federal agencies to examine environmental damage that their actions might cause and propose measures to prevent the harm. Cooper – who had previously found that the Navy failed to follow those requirements – said that federal regulations, in place since 1978, allow the president to override the environmental law only in an emergency. ‘The Navy’s current ’emergency’ is simply a creature of its own making … its failure to prepare adequate environmental documentation in a timely fashion,’ Cooper […]
The vast expanse of debris – in effect the world’s largest rubbish dump – is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting ‘soup’ stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan. Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ or ‘trash vortex’, believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: ‘The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.’ Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: ‘It moves around like a big animal without a leash.’ When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
