American Buddhist Net

A new mathematical model indicates that dust devils, water spouts, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones are all born of the same mechanism and will intensify as climate change warms the Earth's surface.

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By H. JOSEF HEBERT, Associated Press Writer 17 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Vice President Dick Cheney's office pushed for major deletions in congressional testimony on the public health consequences of climate change, fearing the presentation by a leading health official might make it harder to avoid regulating greenhouse gases, a former EPA officials maintains.

When six pages were cut from testimony on climate change and public health by the head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention last October, the White House insisted the changes were made because of reservations raised by White House advisers about the accuracy of the science.

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Meanwhile: Summit that's hard to swallow - world leaders enjoy 18-course banquet as they discuss how to solve global food crisis

Monday, Jul. 07, 2008 By MADHUR SINGH

The Tirumala temple, in the south Indian city of Tirupathi, is one of Hinduism's holiest shrines. Over 5,000 pilgrims a day visit this city of seven hills, filling Tirumala's coffers with donations and making it India's richest temple. But since 2002, Tirumala has also been generating revenue from a less likely source: carbon credits. For decades, the temple's community kitchen has fed nearly 15,000 people, cooking 30,000 meals a day. Five years ago, Tirumala adopted solar cooking technology, allowing it to dramatically cut down on the amount of diesel fuel it uses. The temple now sells the emission reduction credits it earns to a Swiss green-technology investor, Good Energies Inc.

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Every year across the world a forest area the size of England, about 32m acres, is destroyed or degraded.

07/07/08

About 40,000 hectares - roughly 150 square miles - are logged or burned to make way for agriculture or grazing on a daily basis.

In the past 60 years greed, wanton destruction and exploitation has seen about 50 per cent of the world's rainforests disappear.

Millions of hectares of rainforest in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil and Africa containing a vast diversity of plants and animals have now been replaced by agricultural crops such as palm oil and soya.

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July 6, 2008
Flora Bagenal

Pollution around the Olympic stadium in Beijing could be five times worse than levels deemed safe by the World Health Organisation.

Chinese officials admit they can no longer guarantee that the air quality will match international standards as pollution tests by The Sunday Times revealed the full extent of the challenge facing British athletes.

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Very depressing. Once destroyed, natural lands almost never recover. Anyone who has traveled widely in the USA must know how much land has been ruined over the last fifty years. And how many towns have had the life sucked out of them by vampire chain stores. The area discussed in this story is the largest piece of wild land left in the lower 48. Frankly, it makes me want to scream. ABN
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Forest Service Angers Locals With Move That May Speed Building

MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.
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"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter.

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Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM: Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

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China has ordered the closure of 40 factories in a city close to Beijing in the run-up to the Olympics Games.

The plants in the eastern port city of Tianjin have been ordered to stop production from late July.

The move is the latest attempt by China to minimise air pollution in the capital during the Games in August.

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Supreme Court to Hear Case of Filling Lake with Toxic Waste

July 2, 2008

Start with a pristine mountain lake in the Alaskan wilderness. Add toxic waste. Kill all the fish. Wipe the lake off the map.

Bad for that lake, yes. But is it pollution?

The seemingly obvious answer to that question (umm, yes?) is at the heart of a case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear this winter.

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By Jeremy van Loon

July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Penguin colonies are collapsing because global warming, pollution and over-fishing are damaging their ocean habitat in the southern hemisphere, a researcher at the University of Washington said.

Penguins are serving as a ``canary in the coal mine,'' and their declining numbers are evidence that people are altering the animals' environment, said Dee Boersma, a biology professor at the Seattle-based university, in a preview of the study that will be published in the July/August edition of the U.S. journal BioScience.

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by Jonathon D. Colman
Published on June 30th, 2008

Few places on Earth are as untouched as the “Crown of the Continent” — a 10-million-acre expanse of mountains, valleys and prairies in Montana and Canada. The area has sustained all the same species — including grizzlies, lynx, moose and bull trout — for at least 200 years.

Now — in one of the most significant conservation sales in history — The Nature Conservancy and The Trust for Public Land have preserved 320,000 acres of forestlands in western Montana that provide valuable habitat for species in the Crown of the Continent.

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Even if climate change does not have human generated causes (it does) and we do something to lessen pollution anyway, the worst that will happen is we will make a few sacrifices while we clean up the earth. However, if climate change does have human generated causes and we fail to do anything, we not only will not have a cleaner earth, we will also be faced with catastrophes that might well have been prevented. Therefore, it is wiser to act now than not to act.

We agree and hope that readers will take the time to peruse Romm's article, which is short and straight to the point. ABN
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Americans must not allow global warming deniers to block the policies needed to avert catastrophic climate change. Our future is at stake.

By Joseph Romm

June 30, 2008 | Conservatives put on a spectacular display of scientific ignorance this month in the U.S. Senate. During the debate on the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, which would regulate carbon dioxide by setting a cap on emissions and allowing emitters to trade carbon allowances, most Republican senators questioned the reality of human-caused climate change or ignored the climate threat entirely and repeated the talking point that the bill would raise gasoline and electricity prices. It was as if they had been locked in an isolation booth for the past decade. Let's go to the highlights.

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By John P. Reganold and David R. Huggins

The age-old practice of turning the soil before planting a new crop is a leading cause of farmland degradation. Many farmers are thus looking to make plowing a thing of the past

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June 30, 2008

...The walk, organized by American Indian Movement activist Dennis Banks and other Native leaders to draw attention to environmental destruction and Native issues, is made up of Native and non-Native people, including several supporters from Japan, some of them members of the Buddhist Nipponzan Myohoji order. Commemorating a 1978 walk that was organized to protest the abrogation of Indian treaties by the U.S. government, it contains some of the walkers who took part in the original walk.

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BY ROSSLYN BEEBY, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
25/06/2008 7:09:00

The world's coastal oceans are in crisis, with oxygen-starved ''dead zones'' increasing by a third in just two years as global temperatures increase with climate change, according to the International Whaling Commission's latest scientific report.

Dead zones, caused by over-enrichment of waters by nutrients from run-off, sewerage and warming waters, represent ''the worst-case scenario for coastal biodiversity'' and are the ''severest form'' of ocean habitat degradation, the report says.

The number of ocean dead zones has grown from 44 areas reported in 1995 to more than 400, with some of the worst oxygen-starved areas extending over 22,000sqkm.

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Shows how persistent and nasty so many of these chemicals are. ABN
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Gardeners across Britain are reaping a bitter harvest of rotten potatoes, withered salads and deformed tomatoes after an industrial herbicide tainted their soil. Caroline Davies reports on how the food chain became contaminated and talks to the angry allotment owners whose plots have been destroyed.

...It appears that the contamination came from grass treated 12 months ago. Experts say the grass was probably made into silage, then fed to cattle during the winter months. The herbicide remained present in the silage, passed through the animal and into manure that was later sold. Horses fed on hay that had been treated could also be a channel.

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Margaret Munro , Canwest News Service
Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole.

"Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice.

...The scientists say the heat released by the explosions is not contributing to the melting of the Arctic ice, but Sohn says the huge volumes of CO2 gas that belched out of the undersea volcanoes likely contributed to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. How much, he couldn't say.

There are no volcanoes exploding in the area right now, but they scientists say there appears to still be a lot happening on the sea floor. "I had the impression this whole central volcano area was oozing warm fluid," says Henrietta Edmonds of the University of Texas, who was on the expedition tracking the plumes of warm waters rising from the spreading ridge. She says they point to the presence of "gushing black smokers" as well as microbial and other forms of life that can thrive in scalding, mineral-rich waters that percolates out of spreading ridges.

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Thursday, Jun. 26, 2008

(BEIJING) — China has called in thousands of people to clean up an algal bloom at the sailing venue for this summer's Olympic Games, a state news agency said.

The blue-green algae blossomed around June 1 in the waters around Qingdao on the coast of Shandong province, and some 400 boats and 3,000 people have been mobilized to clean it up, the Xinhua News Agency said.

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YANGON, Myanmar (AP) — Myanmar said Tuesday that 84,500 people perished in last month's cyclone, up from the last official announcement that 77,700 had died in the devastating storm.

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· Testimony to US Congress will also criticise lobbyists
· 'Revolutionary' policies needed to tackle crisis

Ed Pilkington in New York
Monday June 23, 2008

James Hansen, one of the world's leading climate scientists, will today call for the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies to be put on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming in the same way that tobacco companies blurred the links between smoking and cancer.

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Tribal guardian admits the Amazon Indians' existence was already known, but he hoped the publicity would lift the threat of logging

Peter Beaumont, foreign affairs editor
Sunday June 22, 2008

They are the amazing pictures that were beamed around the globe: a handful of warriors from an 'undiscovered tribe' in the rainforest on the Brazilian-Peruvian border brandishing bows and arrows at the aircraft that photographed them.

Or so the story was told and sold. But it has now emerged that, far from being unknown, the tribe's existence has been noted since 1910 and the mission to photograph them was undertaken in order to prove that 'uncontacted' tribes still existed in an area endangered by the menace of the logging industry.

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New Delhi, Delhi, India, Friday, June 20, 2008 -- (Business Wire India)

The studies and survey conducted by Australian Health Research Institute indicates that due to billions of times more in volume electromagnetic radiation emitted by billions of mobile phones, internet, intranet and wireless communication data transmission will make almost 1/3 rd of world population (about 2 billions) patient of ear, eye and brain cancer beside other major body disorders like heart ailments, impotency, migraine, epilepsy etc. According to the reports the tissues of children are tender and are likely to be more effected by use of any wireless gadget and devices and they should not be encouraged to use mobile phone. The fatal and volumetric effects of Electromagnetic Radiation emitted mainly by mobile phones, Mobile phone antenna, tower, Mast, Transmission Tower, Microwave oven, wireless devices, system and equipment. These dangerous effects have been certified and confirmed repeatedly by many leading medical and scientific research institutions of the world including Ministries of health of various governments, W.H.O. and now have been admitted and confirmed by Govt. of India in their recent press releases.

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Christine Dell'Amore in Kanachanaburi Province, Thailand
National Geographic News
June 20, 2008

It's the hottest part of the day at a forest monastery in western Thailand, and tourists are led by the hand, one by one, into the beating sun to pet chained tigers and smile for the camera.

Every day at this unusual "Tiger Temple," as many as 800 tourists pay 300 Thai baht (9 U.S. dollars) each for their chance to interact with the endangered big cats.

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June 20, 2008

MANILA (Reuters) - The United Nations has called on more Asian leaders to agree to a plan to end deforestation by 2020 to slow down the destruction of plants and animals, a top official said on Friday.

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