Environmentalists attack Australia's move to sell uranium to Russia

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Singapore presses Indonesia to Contain forest fires

Singapore on Thursday urged Indonesia to take action on forest fires on Sumatra island as air pollution reached health-threatening levels in the neighbouring city-state.

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NASA launches Environment monitoring system in Nepal

Charles F. Bolden, the Administrator of NASA, launched SERVIR HIMALA, a state-of-the-art earth monitoring system in Kathmandu, Nepal. It integrates satellite and other geospatial data to address pressing environmental and climate change issues affecting the planet.

Initiated by NASA and USAID, SERVIR has been recognised by the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) as an early achiever of the GEO vision. SERVER works to bring people and their environment into harmony, said Bolden, who was in Kathmandu to address a symposium on the theme, ''Earth Observation: Bridging the Data Gap for Adaptation to Climate Change in the Hindu-Kush”

"SERVIR includes three regional centres which are working together to address pressing environmental issues affecting our planet," he said. "The first is in Central America, and the Caribbean, based in Panama; the second is in East Africa and is based in Kenya; and now the third is in the Himalayan region, based in Nepal."

SERVIR Himala has already been helping map the recent flooding in Pakistan through USAID support and NASA satellite data, he said.

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The atmospheric aerosol

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Brazil Unveils Deforestation Plan

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Halt all carbon emissions by 2050: Worldwatch

To avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change, world carbon emissions will have to drop to near zero by 2050 and "go negative" after that, the Worldwatch Institute reported on Tuesday.

This is a deeper cut than called for by most climate experts and policymakers, including President-elect Barack Obama, who favors an 80 percent drop in U.S. carbon emissions by mid-century.

Limiting carbon emissions aims to keep global mean temperature from rising more than 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) over what it was before the Industrial Revolution -- but one Worldwatch author said even this is too dangerous.

"Global warming needs to be reduced from peak levels to 1 degree (Celsius, or 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit) as fast as possible," co-author William Hare said at a briefing on the "State of the World 2009" report. "At this level you can see some of the risks fade into the background."

Global mean temperature has already risen 1.4 degrees F (0.8 C) since 1850, so drastic cuts in emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide are needed, according to Hare, now working at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.

Hare said that global greenhouse gas emissions would need to hit their peak by 2020 and drop 85 percent below 1990 levels by 2050, and keep dropping after that. He said carbon dioxide emissions would have to "go negative," with more being absorbed than emitted, in the second half of this century.

The burden of cutting greenhouse emissions should fall more heavily on rich countries than poor ones, Hare said, with industrialized nations reducing emissions by 90 percent by 2050, allowing developing nations to let their economies grow and develop new technologies that will ultimately reduce climate-warming gases.

2009: A PIVOTAL YEAR?

Even with these dramatic changes, the world may face an additional rise of nearly 1.8 degrees F (1 degree C) because the impact of past greenhouse emissions hasn't yet been felt on surface temperatures, the report said.

This year could be pivotal in the movement against climate change, said co-author Robert Engelman, with "scientists more certain and concerned, the public more engaged than ever before, an incoming U.S. president bringing to the White House for the first time a solid commitment to cap and then shrink this country's massive injections of greenhouse gases ... into the atmosphere."

Engelman also noted this year's deadline for a global agreement to craft a successor pact to the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol. This is set to happen in December at a meeting in Copenhagen.

Engelman said the Copenhagen meeting could put in place a new "financial architecture" that discourages greenhouse emissions and rewards actions that take these emissions out of the atmosphere.

This could take the form of a cap-and-trade system or a carbon tax, he said, and could also include "the best terms of trade, investment and credit" for countries that make the transition to a low-carbon economy.

"However this turns out, we still have some precious time and a clear shot at safely managing human-induced climate change," Engelman said. "What's at stake is not just nature as we've always known it, but quite possibly the survival of our civilization. It's going to be a really interesting year."

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Malaysia uses satellite to fight illegal logging: report

Malaysia is zooming in on forests with a satellite in order to fight illegal logging which its government says is harming the major timber exporting country, a report said. Darus Ahmad, deputy director-general with the Malaysian Remote Sensing Agency, said the "eye in the sky" programme was put in place in October. "There is always criticisms that our forests are diminishing," he was quoted as saying by the New Sunday Times newspaper. Darus said that using satellite images the authorities can establish a national forest inventory of the country's total area of forest cover.

They can then check whether logging in a particular area is legal or not, he said, adding that the facility was currently available in the western peninsular part of Malaysia only.

Darus also said the system can be used to prevent air pollution by detecting forest fires and illegal land clearing. In the 1990s alone, Malaysia lost more than 13 percent of its forests, with much of the deforestation on the island of Borneo, which it shares with Indonesia and Brunei. The World Wildlife Fund at the time estimated that illegally logged trees made up about one third of Malaysia's timber exports.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi last year pledged not to indiscriminately approve logging licences, amid mounting concern that clearances are threatening endangered species and tribal communities. Deputy Prime Minister Najib Razak, who also heads the National Forestry Council, later warned that illegal logging could undermine Malaysia.

"It can jeopardise our efforts to preserve biodiversity, flora and fauna and have an impact on global warming. At the international level, illegal logging portrays a negative image of our country," he said.

"It can harm our national economy as the timber industry produces 23 billion ringgit (6.8 billion dollars) worth of wood-based products a year," he added.

The European Union market accounts for about 30 percent of Malaysia's annual timber exports.


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Earth’s Ionosphere drops to a new low

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Australian rescuers save 11 whales after mass stranding

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California "green" energy vote seen close: poll

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Rising CO2 accelerates coral bleaching: study

Rising carbon dioxide levels in the world's oceans due to climate change, combined with rising sea temperatures, could accelerate coral bleaching, destroying some reefs before 2050, says a new Australian study.

The study says earlier research may have significantly understated the likely damage to the world's reefs caused by man-made change to the Earth's atmosphere.

"Previous predictions of coral bleaching have been far too conservative, because they didn't factor in the effect of acidification on the bleaching process and how the two interact," said Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg from the ARC Center of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and Queensland University.

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Japan launches voluntary CO2 market

Japan on Tuesday launched a voluntary carbon market based on companies' pledged emissions cuts and hopes thousands of firms will sign up to what could become a forerunner of a mandatory cap-and-trade scheme.

The scheme, once it's up and running by next year, is expected to be the nation's broadest emissions market. But some said the scheme still fell short of what Japan needed to make deep emissions cuts and could backfire.

The trial over-the-counter market is aimed at accelerating further cuts in the private sector via new technologies to save energy and reduce or remove emissions from the atmosphere, Environment Minister Tetsuo Saito told reporters.

"It's based on a voluntary (cap) because we'd like to see as many companies as possible joining in as we start. But we're aiming to make it a cap-and-trade scheme eventually," he said.

"We're hoping to accept applications from thousands or even tens of thousands of companies, ranging from big companies to medium to small ones as well as mainstay companies in each region," he added.

Japan, the world's fifth-largest greenhouse gas emitter, has been reluctant to impose a mandatory cap on companies' emissions because of past efforts by industry to clean up and become more efficient.

Japan is one of the world's most energy-efficient countries. But like all rich nations, it has come under increasing pressure from developing nations to pledge deeper cuts to its emissions as part of a broader U.N.-led fight against climate change.

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Climate Change Behind Increased Tiger Attacks in India

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Beluga whales in Alaska listed as endangered

The depleted population of beluga whales that swim off the coast of Alaska’s largest city was listed as endangered on Friday by the federal government.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, called the listing “premature” after she had pressed for more time to make beluga population counts.

Environmentalists hailed the listing decision, but criticized the time it took to materialize.

“Hopefully the State of Alaska will now work toward protecting the beluga rather than, as with the polar bear, denying the science and suing to overturn the listing,” Brendan Cummings, oceans program director for the Center for Biological Diversity said in a statement.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said it has determined that belugas in Cook Inlet, the channel that flows from Anchorage to the Gulf of Alaska, are at risk of extinction and deserving of strict protections under the Endangered Species Act.

The population, which fell to a low of 278 in 2005 from 653 in 1994, has yet to rebound from a period of over-harvesting by the region’s Native hunters, officials said.

Hunting of Cook Inlet belugas largely ceased in 1999, but the population continues to struggle, officials said.

“In spite of protections already in place, Cook Inlet beluga whales are not recovering,” James Balsinger, acting assistant administrator for NOAA’s Fisheries Service, said in a statement.

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Global Warming:Growing Evidence

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Global Warming:Europe is warming faster...

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World's glaciers facing huge threat: UN

The United Nations said  that swathes of mountain ranges worldwide risk losing their glaciers by the end of the century if global warming continues at its projected rate.

The UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said in a report that whilst nature has always observed a certain periodic rate of deglaciation, the current trends observed from the Arctic to Central Europe and South America are of a different order.

"The ongoing trend of worldwide and rapid, if not accelerating, glacier shrinkage on the century time scale is most likely to be of a non-periodic nature, and may lead to the deglaciation of large parts of many mountain ranges by the end of the 21st century," the report warned.
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Cut greenhouse gases to save coral reefs: scientists

To keep coral reefs from being eaten away by increasingly acidic oceans, humans need to limit the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a panel of marine scientists said on Wednesday.

"The most logical and critical action to address the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs is to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration," the scientists said in a document called the Honolulu Declaration, for release at a U.S. conference on coral reefs in Hawaii.

Ocean acidification is another threat to corals caused by global warming, along with rising sea levels, higher sea surface temperatures and coral bleaching, the scientists said.

Coral reefs are a "sentinel ecosystem," a sign that the environment is changing, said one of the experts, Billy Causey of the U.S. National Marine Sanctuary Program.

"Although ocean acidification is affecting the health of our oceans, the same thing -- increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere -- is going to in fact be affecting terrestrial environments also," Causey said by telephone from Hawaii.

Coral reefs offer economic and environmental benefits to millions of people, including coastal protection from waves and storms and as sources of food, pharmaceuticals, jobs and revenue, the declaration said.

But corals are increasingly threatened by warming sea surface temperatures as well as ocean acidification.

Oceans are getting more acidic because they have been absorbing some 525 billion tons of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide over the last two centuries, about one-third of all human-generated carbon dioxide for that period.

The carbon dioxide combines with sea water to form carbonic acid.

Marine researchers have long recognized acidification in deep ocean water far from land, but a study published this year in the journal Science found this same damaging phenomenon on the Pacific North American continental shelf from Mexico to Canada, and quite likely elsewhere around the globe.

The water became so corrosive that it started dissolving the shells and skeletons of starfish, clams and corals.

Stabilizing carbon dioxide emissions was the Honolulu Declaration's top long-term recommendation. The key short-term recommendation was to nurture coral reefs that seem to have natural resilience against acidification.

This could be adopted immediately by managers of protected marine areas, Causey said.

The Honolulu Declaration will be presented to the United Nations and to other global, regional and national forums.
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The Atomic Bombs, End of World War II and Begining of Nuclear Age

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Olympics:Haze returns to Beijing with four days to go

A grey haze clogged Beijing's skies on Monday as the city returned to work after a weekend of the clear weather, just four days before the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games.

Beijing's chronic pollution has been one of the biggest headaches for organizers who have closed dozens of factories and pulled more than half the city's 3.3 million cars off the roads in a bid to ensure blue skies during the competition.

Officials said China was still considering some man-made help to ensure dry weather and clean air for Friday.

China has two methods of controlling rainfall. Weather stations outside Beijing could try to induce rain before it reaches the centre of the city, by firing a chemical seeding agent into clouds with anti-aircraft guns, a common practice in arid northern China.

Or it could fire a coolant into clouds that increases the number of water droplets, causing heavier droplets to fall ahead of the big show.

Smog shrouded the city for much of last week, prompting the government to draw up a last-resort plan to clear more vehicles from the roads of Beijing and surrounding cities, and shut down over 200 more factories.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has said it may reschedule endurance events such as the marathon to prevent health risks if pollution is bad.

Data from the Beijing Environmental Protection Bureau showed that air pollutants were well within limits for a "blue sky day" at all monitoring stations in the 24 hours to midday on Sunday, although they do not provide an overall summary.

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