A group of Russian scientists had to abandon their polar station near Svalbard when the ice their station was standing on started to melt away, three months too early.

The polar station was placed on a huge flake of ice last year and the scientists expected to be able to stay on the station for one year. But now, after only nine months, the once so huge flak of ice had melted from 15 to 0,12 square kilometres forcing the scientists to abandon their polar station.

It’s clearly not easy being a polar scientist these days!

Source: DN/TT-NTB

On July 5, 2008 about 5,000 citizens of Melbourne gathered in the City Square to protest man-made Climate Change and then marched through the City Centre to make a HUMAN SIGN saying “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!” in the nearby Alexandra Gardens. An aeroplane was hired to take photos for the media - for an aerial photo of the “CLIMATE EMERGENCY!” Human Sign and other photos of this great event see: Climate emergency rally Melbourne July 5 2008 over at GreenLivingPedia.org.

The Climate Emergency Rally involved more than 50 community groups concerned about lack of Australian State and Federal Government action on climate change and variously linked to an Australian Climate Emergency Network.

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It’s finally here!

Green Blog has been around for one year now and we felt it was time to give it some new, more modern, clothes. And with clothes I mean a brand new website design.

We like the new design and we really hope you will too. If not you can come and whine and vent out all those bad words in this forum thread. Hopefully we will find all site bugs and errors before you do. If not, please let us know about them in our green forum or by sending us an email. Thank you!

According to a secret World Bank report obtained by the Guardian biofuels have increased global food prices by up to 75%. The report dismisses the idea that droughts in Australia and rising demand from India and China has caused the rising food costs. The report instead claims that “the EU and US drive for biofuels has had by far the biggest impact on food supply and prices”.

“Political leaders seem intent on suppressing and ignoring the strong evidence that biofuels are a major factor in recent food price rises,” said Robert Bailey, policy adviser at Oxfam. “It is imperative that we have the full picture. While politicians concentrate on keeping industry lobbies happy, people in poor countries cannot afford enough to eat.”

Rising food prices have pushed 100m people worldwide below the poverty line, estimates the World Bank, and have sparked riots from Bangladesh to Egypt. Government ministers here have described higher food and fuel prices as “the first real economic crisis of globalisation”.

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Here are some of the best Green videos of the week, collected by the Ecolive.TV community.

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Two senior foreign policy officials from the European Union says in a new report that the EU should “brace itself” for a new and much larger wave of migration, caused by the effects of climate change. According to their report climate change “threatens to severely destabilise the planet” and will make a fifth of the worlds population homeless.

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It wasn’t long ago since the Caribbean monk seal was officially listed as extinct by the US Government. And now the IUCN, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, reports that the Northern white rhino (Ceratotherium simum cottoni) is “on the brink of extinction“.

According to older reports the only remaining population of Northern white rhino is restricted in the wild to Garamba National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The population was 30 in April 2003 but was reduced due to poaching to only four confirmed animals by August 2006. Now in 2008 the IUCN haven’t been able to find any Northern white rhinos at all.

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There are many ecosystems on earth not rich in vegetation and other organisms. This is natural wherever there is low rainfall and hostile ground. However, there are other areas, in theory able to sustain a variety of living organisms, with enough rainfall and mild climate, but which have as little variety as the first category. Their soil remains poor and unsuitable for vegetation. Such ecosystems have been eroded by human activities, often to the point of desertification.

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