According to Bennington, “Millions will migrate into, rather than away from, areas of environmental vulnerability … An even bigger policy challenge will be the millions who are trapped in dangerous conditions and unable to move to safety.”

According to the report Migration and Global Environmental Change, between 114 million and 192 million people will have moved to urban areas of Asia and Africa by 2060. Despite the environmental changes the earth is going through, scientists explain that there isn’t reason to panic just yet. “Migration can be a good option. It is a way of adapting to climate change,” explains Neil Adger, who works as a professor of environmental economics. “We should be planning for migration pro-actively, to ensure that the necessary infrastructure is in place for people.”

The scientists in the Foresight Group have also said that developing countries should be helped now, while there is still time to support them before more drastic changes start taking place in the environment.

In related news, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study was recently released, which found that global warming is real. This study is somewhat different from others because it was independently conducted, non-profit (in fact, it had been funded by many skeptics), and open source. Also, the report includes a great amount of data and information results and records concerning the earth’s temperature that were compiled from more than 39,000 weather stations around the world.

The Berkeley study’s findings corroborated with what other studies had previously found and showed: the earth’s temperatures are indeed getting warmer and warmer each year. Yet despite all of the statistics and facts, a number of people still insist that global warming is a myth, that information has been distorted and tampered with, and that all of this is part of an elaborate hoax.

Hopefully as the earth continues to increase in temperature and the environmental repercussions like the melting of the polar ice caps continue to make themselves evident, skeptics will realize that global warming is indeed real and that green living is one way to combat it on an individual level. Then again, some people will likely still be in denial, even when Alaska is hotter than a garage door in Guam.

What are your thoughts on the Berkeley and Foresight Group studies? Be sure to let us know, in the comments below!

Did you participate in Earth Hour this weekend? Yes? Great, cause now its time to take it to the next level. It’s time to actually make a difference.

Earth Hour has teamed up with Zerofootprint, a Canadian not-for-profit organisation, to provide two carbon calculators so that Earth Hour participants (and anyone else for that matter) to measure their carbon footprint and “make ongoing changes to their individual lifestyles in a bid to further reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

“The Zerofootprint calculator helps us ratchet up the whole Earth Hour initiative. It allows communities to set real achievable targets to reach our five per cent reduction goal and gives people a means of making and measuring changes,” said Andy Ridley, Earth Hour’s Executive Director.

There are two different carbon calculators people can choose from. One is an ordinary online form, similar to other carbon calculators. The other one is a Facebook application that will allow you to “mobilize and challenge your friends”.

http://earthhour.zerofootprint.net

Instead of bottled water their customers will be offered ordinary and carbonated water from water taps from the hotel. It is expected that this will save around 160 tons of carbon dioxide.

Due to the fact that the water quality in the Baltic’s and other European countries isn’t as good as in the Nordic countries Scandic will build local water cleaning systems on hotels that doesn’t have a good quality on their water.

But this is just one of many things Scandic have, and is planning to do to improve their environmental footprint. Since 1993 Scandic have switched from dirty energy to cleaner renewable energy to power up their offices and hotels, they have changed to more environmental friendly chemicals, they use organic food and many other things.

Last fall the company decided to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions to zero to year 2025. They are planning to cut their emissions by half to year 2011. And Scandic has already come a long way. They have already lowered their emissions from heating, cooling, electricity and transportation from 5,2 kilo to 3 kilo per guest/day.

Image credit: shrff14. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution license.

Every qualified scientific body in the world, from the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Royal Society, agrees unequivocally that global warming is both a reality, and caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. But this doesn’t make them right, of course. Science, in the best Popperian definition, is only tentatively correct, until someone comes along who can disprove the prevailing theory. This leads to a frequent source of confusion, one which is repeated in the Whitehouse article – that because we don’t know everything, therefore we know nothing, and therefore we should do nothing. Using that logic we would close down every hospital in the land. Yes, every scientific fact is falsifiable – but that doesn’t make it wrong. On the contrary, the fact that it can be challenged (and hasn’t been successfully) is what makes it right.

Yes, scientific uncertainties remain in every area of the debate. But consider how high the stakes are here. If the 99% of experts who support the mainstream position are right, then we have to take urgent action to reduce emissions or face some pretty catastrophic consequences. If the 99% are wrong, and the 1% right, we will be making some unnecessary efforts to shift away from fossil fuels, which in any case have lots of other drawbacks and will soon run out. I’d hate to offend anyone here, but that’s what I’d call a no-brainer.

Related: It keeps getting warmer, no matter what some people say

Climate deniers have, of course, been acting like crazy about this. But is it true? Are the climate deniers correct? Can we finally breathe out? Have the scientists been wrong all this time?

Unfortunately, that’s not the case.

To be able to see a real trend in global warming you must study the temperature under a long time span to be able to see if the temperatures are increasing or not. And the trend is clear – the temperatures are increasing. The chart above clearly shows how temperature increases from year to year (the red line) and the trend (the blue lines).

It’s worth noting that the warming has increased faster the last 10 years than before.

The global temperatures are still increasing but have been slowed down this winter a bit due to La Niña. This ocean-atmosphere phenomenon has a cooling effect on the earth.

During the La Niña period sea surface temperature across the equatorial Eastern Central Pacific Ocean will be lower than normal by 0.5 °C. La Niña is similar to El Niño but where La Niña cools down the planet El Niño increase the global temperature by at least 0.5 °C.

BBC / EU warns of climate change threat.

An EU report says climate change will have a growing impact on global security, multiplying existing threats such as shortages of food and water.

Financial Times / Climate ‘threatens’ European security.

Climate change poses serious security risks for the European Union, ranging from sharper competition for global energy resources to the arrival of numerous “environmental migrants” [...] In the Middle East for example, “existing tensions over access to water are almost certain to intensify … leading to further political instability with detrimental implications for Europe’s energy security and other interests” [...] “A further dimension of competition for energy resources lies in potential conflict over resources in Polar regions which will become exploitable as a consequence of global warming.” [...] “Already today climate change is having a major impact on the conflict in and around Darfur.”

With Canadian perspective: Political Crisis Looms In Arctic, Report Says.

“The United States should not underestimate Canadian passions on this issue [...] Unless Washington leads the way toward a multilateral diplomatic solution, the Arctic could descend into armed conflict.” – former U.S. Coast Guard commander Scott Borgerson.

EUobserver.com / EU must boost military capabilities in face of climate change.

The EU and member states should further build up their capabilities with regards to civil protection, and civil and military crisis management and disaster response instruments to react to the security risks posed by climate change [...] “Significant decreases [in crop yields] are expected to hit Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia and thus affect stability in a vitally strategic region for Europe,” predicts the report, while “water supply in Israel might fall by 60 percent over this century.” [...] “Some of these recommendations may well be sensible, but there’s no way of knowing until they’re fleshed out. The devil is in the detail. It’s important to know what powers the EU will assume in the event,” said Tony Bunyan, head of civil liberties group Statewatch.

Benno Hansen is the author of Ecowar – a blog about links between conflict and natural resources.

Image credit: Infomatique. Image licensed under a Creative-Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

He still foolishly tries to defend his comment by saying, in a blog entry titled Talk About a Crock, that his “thoughts on what has or hasn’t been the cause of climate change have nothing to do with the decisions I [he] make to advance the cause of General Motors.”

Yeah. Right.

Bob Lutz have also opposed laws that would force automakers to sell smaller cars saying it would be “like trying to address the obesity problem in this country by forcing clothing manufacturers to sell smaller, tighter sizes”.

There is no wonder that GM is doing so good financially and falling behind the “green” auto-industry leaders like Toyota (with their Prius) when they have people like Bob Lutz running the company.

Image credit: Rockershirt. Image licensed under a
Creative-Commons Attribution license.

Map reveals extent of human damage to oceans
Marine ecologist Ben Halpern shows us the map he unveiled at the AAAS meeting in Boston last week, which shows the impact of different human activities on oceans worldwide.

Planet Humans Mammals Animal Protection Bigtime

BE WARNED, VIEWERS MAY FIND VIDEO CONTENTS DISTURBING. TO HELP STOP-SAVE THE EVIL SLAUGHTER AND TERRORISM INFLICTED UPON WHALES, DOLPHINS AND OTHER PROTECTED SPECIES.

Where does e-waste end up?

E-waste is routinely exported by developed countries to developing ones, often in violation of the international law. This practice is legal because the US has not ratified the Basel Convention.

More Green videos: Global Warming, Nature Protection , Animal Protection, Green living, Green Technology, Disaster relief, Activism, Advocacy, Funny and Extreme

We all know that the meat industry is a dangerous threat to our climate and overall a questionable industry. The cattle release CO2, methane and other greenhouse gases. They also use a lot of land areas, around 25% of the earths total land area. And about one third of all farm areas are used to grow food for the cattle.

According to studies the meat industry is responsible for about one fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions, in the world. That means they currently pollutes more than the whole transport sector. And by year 2050 the meat production is expected to increase with 50%.

And then I haven’t even mentioned the rather obvious animal suffering.

But maybe, if some “environmentally concerned scientists” get their way, the meat you’ll eat in the future will be produced inside a lab. Scientists from the In Vitro Meat Consortium are currently trying to produce meat from muscle tissue for human consumption.

This laboratory-grown meat, or in vitro meat, should not be confused with “imitation meat”, which often is produced from soy or gluten. The in vitro meat will be actual animal flesh, but flesh that never has been part of a living animal.

The in vitro meat would, according to the In Vitro Meat Consortium, be healthier and contain fewer diseases. It would also reduce animal suffering and have positive effect on the environment.

But some people are concerned that the in vitro meat will be of lesser quality and contain unresolved health risks than ordinary meat. Others worries that the in vitro meat will be different in appearance, taste, smell and even texture and thus reduce its appeal for consumers.

Either way the in vitro meat is far from the market today. More research needs to be done and there are currently several obstacles that need to be solved first:

• Proliferation of muscle cells: Although it is not very difficult to make stem cells divide, for meat production it is necessary that they divide at a quick pace. This requirement has some overlap with the medical branch of tissue engineering.
• Culture medium: Proliferating cells need a food source to grow and develop. The growth medium should be a well-balanced mixture of ingredients and growth factors. Depending on the motives of the researchers, the growth medium has additional requirements.
  • Commercial: The growth medium should be cheap to produce.
  • Environmental: The production of the growth medium shouldn’t have a negative impact on the environment. This means that the production should be energetically favorable. Additionally, the ingredients should come from completely renewable sources. Minerals from mined sources are in this case not possible, as are synthetically produced nutrients which use non-renewable sources.
  • Animal welfare: The growth medium should be devoid of animal sources, although they may initially be more useful than other sources.
  • Space travel: The growth medium should be almost completely created from the waste products in the space ship, if it is to be used in space travel.
• Bioreactors: Nutrients and oxygen need to be delivered close to each growing cell, on the scale of millimeters. In animals this job is handled by blood vessels. A bioreactor should emulate this function in an efficient manner. The usual approach is the creation of a sponge-like matrix in which the cells can grow, and perfusing it with the growth medium.

From Wikipedia.

Although more research needs to be done there is progress in this area, especially in Europe.

M. A. Benjaminson from Touro College performed the first, actual, research about in vitro meat. Benjaminson managed to grow muscle tissue from a goldfish in a laboratory setting.

And in 2004 researchers from Europe formed the non-profit organization New Harvest. According to them laboratory-grown meat in a processed form, like sausages and hamburgers, “may become commercially available within several years”.

In April 2005 the Dutch government granted a two million euro subsidy for a laboratory-grown meat project by Henk Haagsman at the University of Amsterdam.

At a workshop held at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences on June 15, 2007 the In Vitro Meat Consortium was established with the goal “to facilitate the establishment of a large-scale process industry for the production of muscle tissue for human consumption through concerted R&D efforts and attraction of funding to fuel these efforts.”

“I would like to forget:
- Those 3-4 sheeps we didn’t make it to save and heard them terrified as the flames reached them.
- Those birds that didn’t make it to leave their trees as the flames circled them, and were falling all over us like leaves in autumn…
- The terrified faces of my colleges when we saw 50-metres-high all around us.
- The panicked voices of other firemen on the phone, telling people got burnt in their houses…

But I wont forget:
- The people on the helicopters who found us a way to avoid the flames at the very last minute.
- The governments, who let people build houses at places where once stood dense forests.
- That we made it to save a family and their dog, animals and properties from the flames.. it will help me sleep at night…
- THAT I AM A HUMAN BEING, WHO SHOULD BE SORRY FOR ALL HIS LIFE ABOUT THE BIGGEST CATASTROPHIES LIFE ON EARTH HAS EVER ENDURED, DUE TO ITS SPECIES ACTIONS.

My question is:
addressed to all governments and rich people on this planet :What are you going to do with all this money if you can’t see a tree growing near your big cold house?When you won’t be able to breath due to lack of oxygen..?

Just some ash left on our hair…murderes…”

Image credit: NASA.