For book listings on conservation and the environment, see:

http://www.tomfolio.com/bookscat.asp?catid=86

 

 

=======================================

 

How Israel lays waste in the eco-war

 

http://www.newstatesman.com/200608140026

 

by Mark Lynas

 

New Statesman (August 14 2006)

 

It is a measure of the scale of Israel's atrocities against the Lebanese that the worst environmental disaster in Lebanon's history has gone largely unreported in the midst of all the death and destruction. "Chances are our whole marine ecosystem facing the Lebanese shoreline is already dead", laments the country's environment minister, Yacub Sarraf. "What is at stake is all marine life in the eastern Mediterranean".

 

More than 15,000 tonnes of fuel oil has leaked from Lebanon's Jiyye power plant since it was attacked by Israeli warplanes on 13 July. As if deliberately to hamper any attempts to staunch the flow of oil, Israel then bombed the power plant again two days later, preventing emergency workers from gaining access to the site. An indication of the scale of the disaster comes from satellite photos showing a 3,000-square-kilometre slick along two-thirds of Lebanon's coastline. The oil has now begun to wash up in Syria.

 

Worst affected among the region's wildlife will be green turtles, an endangered species whose young begin to hatch on Lebanese beaches in late July. As the baby turtles scramble towards the sea, they will run straight into the oil and die. Environmental groups say they are prevented from surveying the damage or rescuing the turtles because of continued Israeli fire.

 

None of this will come as a surprise to the Palestinians, who have suffered the environmental consequences of Israel's scorched-earth policies for decades. The water supply to nearly a million Gazans was cut off by bombing last month. Untreated sewage lies in pools on the beach, thanks to Israeli shelling of the Gaza City waste-water treatment plant in 2002. Landfill sites are overflowing and on fire, and two pilot composting plants - constructed with outside help as an alternative to landfill - lie idle, having also been damaged by Israeli bullets.

 

Israel will no doubt deny all of this or construe it as "accidental" (and I will be accused of anti-Semitism for daring to write it). No such claim can be made for the 50,000 tonnes of hazardous waste that the UN Environment Programme discovered in 2003, buried by Israel on Gaza's beach. Nor can the impact of West Bank settlements be so easily dismissed: untreated sewage pours down from their army-protected hilltop fortresses, contaminating what remains of Palestinian agricultural land in the valleys. Aluminium and electronics factories avoid domestic Israeli pollution controls by relocating to the occupied territories, where hazardous waste is simply dumped on Palestinian land.

 

In areas where Israel's segregation wall has been completed, whole communities are cut off from their farmlands and water supplies. Construction of the barrier, known to its Palestinian victims as the "apartheid wall", continues apace with US support, despite a ruling by the International Court of Justice in The Hague declaring it illegal and immoral. As I write, Israeli soldiers have stopped Palestinians from venturing on to their own land near Jenin, so that troops can begin the uprooting of hundreds of olive trees in advance of the wall.

 

In March last year, according to the Israeli peace campaigner Ethan Ganor, shepherds from Palestinian villages near Hebron found their livestock killed by poison pellets scattered in their fields by Jewish settlers. This might be dismissed as the action of a few fanatics, but it is consistent with reports about settlers targeting Palestinian resources. In 2003, the Guardian journalist Chris McGreal reported how settlers had hacked down Palestinian olive trees in a night attack. More than 250 trees, some dating from Roman times, were damaged or destroyed.

 

Violence against the land and its inhabitants has become part of the same matrix of aggression. Perhaps most revealing was Israel's destruction of a solar power project in Gaza in an air strike on 28 June. That environmentally friendly technology could deliver a better future for Palestinians is not part of Tel Aviv's plan. As far as Israel is concerned, the Palestinians have no future - except as a dispossessed underclass, deprived of land and identity, segregated by a four-metre-high wall into a network of South African-style bantustans. This is not a future any people can or should accept, not in South Africa, nor in Palestine. And so, the war goes on.

 

Copyright (c) New Statesman 1913 - 2006

 

=======================================

 

HEALTH / SCIENCE

THE TIMES OF INDIA|POWERED BY INDIATIMES

2 Aug, 2006| Updated at 0345hrs IST

 

RSS Feeds| SMS NEWS to 8888 for latest updates

 

Top scientist offers way out of global warming

 

Desperate times call for desperate measures. And a Nobel Prize-winning

scientist has come up with such a measure to tackle global warming, by

altering the chemical makeup of Earth's upper atmosphere.

 

Professor Paul Crutzen, who won a Nobel Prize in 1995 for his work on the hole in the ozone layer, believes that a radical contingency plan is needed as political attempts to limit man-made greenhouse gases are too pitiful, Livescience.com reported.

 

In a scientific essay to be published in the August issue of the journal

Climate Change, Crutzen says that an "escape route" is needed if global

warming starts to run out of control.

 

Crutzen has proposed a method of artificially cooling the global climate by releasing particles of sulphur in the upper atmosphere, which would reflect sunlight and heat back into space.

 

Crutzen's proven track record in atmospheric research has made the scientific community look up, inspite of the proposal's controversial nature.

 

Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany, says: A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells.

 

The effect of scattering sulphate particles in the atmosphere would be to

increase the reflectance, or "albedo", of the Earth, which should cause an

overall cooling effect.

 

==============================

 

http://www.climateark.org/articles/reader.asp?linkid=58635

 

Amazon rainforest 'could become a desert'

 

And that could speed up global warming with 'incalculable

consequences', says alarming new research

 

Source: Copyright 2006, Independent

Date: July 23, 2006

Byline: Geoffrey Lean and Fred Pearce

 

The vast Amazon rainforest is on the brink of being turned into desert,

with catastrophic consequences for the world's climate, alarming

research suggests. And the process, which would be irreversible, could

begin as early as next year.

 

Studies by the blue-chip Woods Hole Research Centre, carried out in Amazonia, have concluded that the forest cannot withstand more than two consecutive years of drought without breaking down.

 

Scientists say that this would spread drought into the northern

hemisphere, including Britain, and could massively accelerate global

warming with incalculable consequences, spinning out of control, a

process that might end in the world becoming uninhabitable.

 

The alarming news comes in the midst of a heatwave gripping Britain and

much of Europe and the United States. Temperatures in the south of

England reached a July record of 36.3C on Tuesday. And it comes hard on

the heels of a warning by an international group of experts, led by the

Eastern Orthodox " pope" Bartholomew, last week that the forest is

rapidly approaching a " tipping point" that would lead to its total

destruction.

 

The research carried out by the Massachusetts-based Woods Hole centre

in Santarem on the Amazon river has taken even the scientists

conducting it by surprise. When Dr Dan Nepstead started the experiment

in 2002 by covering a chunk of rainforest the size of a football pitch

with plastic panels to see how it would cope without rain he

surrounded it with sophisticated sensors, expecting to record only

minor changes.

 

The trees managed the first year of drought without difficulty. In the

second year, they sunk their roots deeper to find moisture, but

survived. But in year three, they started dying. Beginning with the

tallest the trees started to come crashing down, exposing the forest

floor to the drying sun.

 

By the end of the year the trees had released more than two-thirds of

the carbon dioxide they have stored during their lives, helping to act

as a break on global warming. Instead they began accelerating the

climate change.

 

As we report today on pages 28 and 29, the Amazon now appears to be

entering its second successive year of drought, raising the possibility

that it could start dying next year. The immense forest contains 90

billion tons of carbon, enough in itself to increase the rate of global

warming by 50 per cent.

 

Dr Nepstead expects "mega-fires" rapidly to sweep across the drying

jungle. With the trees gone, the soil will bake in the sun and the

rainforest could become desert.

 

Dr Deborah Clark from the University of Missouri, one of the world's

top forest ecologists, says the research shows that "the lock has

broken" on the Amazon ecosystem. She adds: the Amazon is "headed in a

terrible direction".

Fred Pearce is the author of 'The Last Generation' (Eden Project

Books), published earlier this year

 

 

=====================================

 

Cooling It! No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming

 

http://www.nohairshirts.com/

 

"This is an optimistic book about a gloomy subject - the need to reduce fossil fuel usage to fight global warming. We have technological substitutes available for oil, gas and coal now - at comparable market prices. Slowing global warming is no longer a technical problem (if it ever was). It is structural, institutional, social, and political."

 

"... a carefully documented compendium of cost-effective ways to cut fossil fuels. ... the most comprehensive case to date that the obstacles to solving global warming are political not technological." Dr. Joseph Romm, Executive Director of The Center for Energy & Climate Solutions

 

"... a compelling and readable business case for how energy efficiency and renewable energy can grow the economy and dramatically reduce global warming pollution from energy use. ... I recommend it to anyone concerned about a sustainable energy future for their children and grandchildren."

Eric Heitz, President of The Energy Foundation

 

"...exhaustively researched work.. optimistic and realistic at the same time..." Patrick Mazza, Research Director at Climate Solutions

 

"... Another energy future is possible!" Patrick Bond - Director of the "Centre for Civil Society" at the University of KwaZulu-Natal School of Development Studies

 

"...Methodical research ... clear lively writing ... Wonkery with attitude!"

Michael Perelman, author of The Perverse Economy: The Impacts of Markets on People and the Environment

 

Portions of the book are down-loadable.


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