The Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama has chosen Joe Biden as his running mate and Vice President. But how green is really Joe Biden? Well, it seems he is green enough for the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) to applaud Barack Obama’s choice and to hail Joe Biden in regards to his environmental records.

“With a lifetime LCV environmental score of 83%, Joe Biden recognizes that ending our addiction to oil is vital to our national security,” LCV President Gene Karpinski said. “Senator Biden is a long-time leader on key energy and environmental issues, and the members of LCV enthusiastically support Senator Obama’s choice.”

ScienceSays.net lists “Biden’s awesome environmental record” saying he is just as strong on the environment as Obama and that Biden “isn’t afraid to say it”:

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I used to be one of those people who would weed and weed and weed. I liked there to be so much space between plants that you could easily see how hard I had worked on that weeding! I liked the look of the piles and piles of mulch that I had spent hours spreading. I edged every time we mowed the lawn (with a reel mower, of course).

Totally anal, you know?

But I have grown a lot as a gardener and now I can even say that my laziness is totally good for the planet and its inhabitants.

Right now if you walked behind my house, you might notice that the persons who tend this yard aren’t anal … at all.

When I sit and have a glass of wine with friends in the evening, I have to resist getting up and chopping things down. Though, as time goes by, my resistance takes a whole lot less effort.

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The Flock browser is based and built on from Mozilla, the same engine that powers the popular browser Firefox. But even so the two web browsers are very much different. Flock’s slogan is “the social web browser.” And that is very much true. Flock is a browser for more social-minded people and bloggers, like me, who like to keep everything just a few mouse clicks away.

With the Flock browser you can stay connected with all your friends from the major social websites such as Digg, Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, for example. You can easily share photos, links, text and videos with your friends. With its built-in blog editor you can post to your blog over at Blogger, Livejournal, Typepad, Wordpress and many more. Flock also has an awesome RSS reader, which looks great if you got a larger monitor.

And with Flock’s eco-edition you can browse the web a little “greener.”

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Professor Will Steffen, head of the climate change unit at the Australian National University and science adviser to the Federal Government in Australia, says that sea levels around the world could rise by 4 meters this century. He also claims that the scientific community underestimates how fast our climate is changing.

“The evidence over the past 12 to 18 months suggests that we have underestimated how fast this aspect of the earth’s system can change,” he said.

“We see things happening much faster than we thought.”

Professor Steffen raised this concern at the Coast to Coast Collaboration Conference in Darwin where he said “a four-metre rise could have devastating effects.”

Last week the climate organisation Klimax (climax) held a large demonstration in central Copenhagen, the capital of Denmark. The demonstration was the first of many more planned by the organisation before December 2009 when the top UN climate meeting Cop15 will be held.

“Denmark is to host the UN COP15 climate summit in the late winter of 2009. We are going to make that summit one the leaders will never forget. We are going to raise our voices in ways they cannot escape. We are going to tell them that we are not going to accept them playing Russian Roulette with our climate anymore. They are the few yet the consequences of their actions affects every being on the planet. We are going to protest using Nonviolent Direct Action because we cannot allow some delegates to endanger the face of the planet anymore. It is time to take the power back.”

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Research by the University of Gothenburg shows that more than 400 marine zones around the world has such “a great lack of oxygen in soft seabeds that fauna and fish have been harmed.” The research made by the Swedish University also shows that the dead soft seabeds have doubled every decade since the 60’s.

Back in 1995 Rutger Rosenberg, from the Department of Marine Ecology, University of Gothenburg, and Robert Diaz, from the Virginia Institute of Marine Science in the USA, carried out research and studies on the world’s soft seabeds. Their research then showed 44 zones “that were so afflicted by oxygen deficiency that soft-seabed fauna and fish had been harmed.”

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I hope you haven’t missed our environment forum where you can interact with other like-minded people and discuss everything imaginable. We also plant trees for every hundred members that sign up for a free forum account. So really, there is no reason not to join!

Here are some interesting topics from the forum worth highlighting this week:

Buying Local in a Recession, How will increasing prices affect our consumption patterns?

10 signs you have gone way to green. “Eco snobbery happens. Don’t let it happen to you!”

And here is one of our most active forum topics (it has received over 15000 views): Why is climate change not in the USA primaries?

As you read this the Olympics in Beijing are in full action, as well as in our forum. The latest Olympic related forum topic created talks about NBC Beijing Olympic set being air conditioned – outdoors.

Create your free forum account now, it only takes a few seconds to register!

On October 15th the second Blog Action Day will occur. Last year bloggers united for the environment. This year’s topic will be poverty. The new campaign was launched last Friday but already now over 2000 blogs with an audience of over 3500000 people has registered as participators to this year’s event.

“It’s been almost a year since, with your help, we held the smashingly successful Blog Action Day 2007, and as of a few hours ago, our 2008 campaign has officially begun. This year our theme is “Poverty” and we’ll be encouraging bloggers around the world to once again explore this issue on your blogs on October 15th.”

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Ask me where I am from, and more than likely, I will say Lake Erie. Or the Great Lakes. I love Pennsylvania, for sure, but I feel I have more in common with someone from Toronto or Chicago than someone from Philadelphia (though I love that city and lived there many years of my youth).

I also love central Pennsylvania, being a Penn State girl.  But the hills and valleys feel somehow wrong to me. My eyes crave the flat land, as it reaches toward a low and long horizon.

And I truly feel starved for the horizon that is a Great Lake. For those of you who have never seen a Great Lake, it is no simple lake. It would look like the ocean to you. No land in sight. Rolling waves.

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The US Climate Change Science Program was created by the climate change denying Bush administration back in late 2002 “to review the validity of climate-change science before making policy decisions.” The science program was criticized by environmentalists for being used so that Bush could continue doing absolutely nothing to curb climate change.

But now the Climate Change Science Program has released their results and they clearly show that “human activity was responsible for the rapid warming of the 20th century.”

“The evidence is pretty convincing that the models give a good simulation of climate,” lead author David Bader of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California told reporters last week. He concedes that the report did not examine predictions of future climate change. Nor did it address policy issues, which will be left to the next administration.

Via New Scientist