Eora Borealis

The 15 members of the Economic Community of West African States have agreed to use biotechnology to increase food production in the region.

Ministers of agriculture, environment, science and technology met to discuss the issues surrounding biotechnology in agriculture at a meeting held last week (28–30 March) in Accra, Ghana.

They adopted a regional action plan for biotechnology development for 2006–2010, which stresses the use of public-private partnerships to increase investment in biotechnology, and the need to put safety measures in place at national and regional levels.

The ministers also agreed to set up an independent fund for assessing the socio-economic impacts of using genetically modified (GM) organisms.

Read the whole article: West Africa to boost food crops with biotechnology

A strange silence was the first clue that something was wrong. The dawn chorus that usually woke residents of the picturesque coastal town of Esperance, in Western Australia, had stopped. Then birds began falling out of the sky.

Local people were alarmed when they came across dead lorikeets, wattlebirds, honeyeaters and silvereyes in their parks and back yards. Health officials told them not to worry. But they tested their rainwater tanks, the main source of drinking water, and found dangerously high levels of lead or nickel in more than a third.

The authorities still insisted there was no cause for concern. Then they tested the seabed at the Esperance port, through which nickel and lead carbonate mined inland are shipped to Asia. Some samples contained 130 times the recommended health levels of the two metals. It was also established that 4,000 birds had died of lead poisoning.

There was lead in the air, lead in the drinking water, and lead in the sea. And when health officials finally admitted that there might cause for concern and began testing the population, they found lead in their blood.

Read the whole article:
Birds fell out of the sky as a whole town was poisoned by lead dust

Scientists looking at the aftermath of wildfires in the forests of southwestern Oregon and Northern California found that after five to ten years even the most severely burned areas had sprouted plentiful seedlings without any help from man.Though natural regeneration generally took longer to produce pines and firs, it created a more varied forest, even after brush had become established, which is likely to benefit wildlife, concluded to the study by scientists from Oregon State University appearing in Wednesday’s issue of the Journal of Forestry.

“When time is not a factor in achieving the goals, then natural regeneration appears to be a very good approach to reforestation,” said David Hibbs, a professor of ecology and silviculture at Oregon State University who took part in the study.

Read the whole article: Study shows rich reforestation after fires

Winter sea ice in the Arctic has failed to reform fully for the third year in a row. Scientists said yesterday that the area of ocean covered by Arctic ice at the end of the winter months was lower only in March 2006.

Researchers fear that the floating sea ice is now on a downward spiral of shrinkage that cannot recover fully even during winter because of warmer temperatures.

Walt Meier of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder, Colorado, which released the satellite data yesterday, said:

“We’re seeing near-record lows and higher-than-normal temperatures. We expect the downward trend to continue in future years.”

Read the whole article: Arctic sea ice is shrinking in ‘downward spiral’

Terry Root, a senior fellow at Stanford University, is co-author of a report on climate change that will be discussed at an international conference later this week in Belgium.

The report, “Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” investigates how global warming is already affecting the animal and plant kingdoms.

Q: How do you think global warming is going to impact the plant and animal kingdoms?

Root: Global warming isn’t something in the future; it’s already happening. The species that lay eggs in the springtime, they are laying eggs earlier. There are species that migrate back in the springtime, they are coming back earlier, and flowers are blooming. Daffodils are coming up now much earlier than they used to, and the change that has happened is about three weeks in the last 30 years. So it’s about a week per decade, and that is quite a change when you only think that we’ve had a 0.7-degree-centigrade increase in temperature–and we are talking about now that it could possibly go as high as 6 degrees C. That really is quite a concern because that can lead to extinction of various species.

The species that are going to be most vulnerable are the ones that are very, very specialized and the ones that have very small ranges. The ones that are on the top of mountains, for instance right now; as the globe warms, they want to move up in elevation, but there is no place for them to go. So they are going to end up going extinct, and we have already seen some of that happening.

Q: How is global warming going to affect the food crops?

Root: When we are talking about crops, there are going to be very many different things affecting our crops that we have to worry about. We could have more pests because the predators are moving out of the way as I just said, then we could also have stress in the crops themselves because it’s warmer. We can have stress in the crops because there is not as much water, and so you put all of those things together and our crops could actually be in danger.

Read the whole interview: Humans fiddle while the planet heats up

President George W. Bush said on Tuesday he planned no new action to impose caps on greenhouse gases blamed for global warming despite the Supreme Court ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate U.S. emissions.

Instead, Bush pointed to his proposal to require cars to burn more gasoline made from home-grown sources like ethanol, and repeated his long-held stance that U.S. action is meaningless without changes by China and India.

“My attitude is that we have laid out a plan that will affect greenhouse gases that come from automobiles by having a mandatory fuel standard,” Bush said. “In other words, there is a remedy available for Congress. And I strongly hope that they pass this remedy quickly.”

Read the whole article: Bush holds line on global warming despite ruling
Check out: Text of Bush news conference Tuesday

New evidence has emerged showing that organic food does contain nutrients that deliver health benefits, contrary to the view put forward earlier this year by David Miliband, who said it was only a “lifestyle choice”.

Scientists in Britain, France and Poland examined organic carrots, apples, peaches and potatoes and discovered that they have greater concentrations of vitamin C and chemicals that protect against heart attacks and cancer than non-organic produce. The research could challenge official government guidelines which suggest there is no evidence of organic food being healthier than conventional produce. That led to the assertion by Mr Miliband, the Environment Secretary, which he later qualified by saying that he ate organic food both because of its taste and the environmental benefits.

Read the whole article: Organic food is better for you

Unusually heavy rainfall has once again highlighted the vulnerability of a vast area in eastern Argentina to the effects of climate change. The preliminary toll of the catastrophe is 12 deaths, tens of thousands of people evacuated, 3.5 million hectares of land under water, highways and roads flooded, and bridges down.

“It has been endlessly repeated that vulnerable cities must adapt to climate change, and Santa Fe is a city at risk of flooding,” said Jorge Capatto, director of the Fundación Proteger in Santa Fe, the capital of the province of the same name, which is the epicentre of the crisis. “But we haven’t learned the lesson, and we aren’t prepared for heavy rains,” he complained to IPS.

Global warming, caused by the collection in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases, which trap the sun’s heat, has manifested itself in this region in the form of heavier and more frequent rainfall followed by lengthy droughts –phenomena that society must take measures to prepare for, warn experts like Capatto.

Read the whole article: Failing to prepare for foreseeable floods

The 2007 Atlantic hurricane season should be “very active,” with nine hurricanes and a good chance that at least one major hurricane will hit the U.S. coast, a top researcher said Tuesday.

Forecaster William Gray said he expects 17 named storms in all this year, five of them major hurricanes with sustained winds of 111 mph or greater. The probability of a major hurricane making landfall on the U.S. coast this year: 74 percent, compared with the average of 52 percent over the past century, he said.

Last year, Gray’s forecast and government forecasts were higher than what the Atlantic hurricane season produced.

Read the whole article:
‘Very active’ hurricane season predicted

Check out:
CSU forecast
National Hurricane Center

Chinese firms are joining the technically complex industry of wind turbine manufacturing, creating a supply glut and causing quality problems that may temporarily complicate a push by Beijing toward cleaner energy, industry executives have said.

More than 30 Chinese firms now offer wind-power generating equipment, creating competition that should eventually push down global prices and turn Chinese firms into export powerhouses to match national solar and electronics champions.

But few of the new contenders have experience in the high-tech engineering of modern windmills, which have blades and a vast gear box that have to endure decades of shaking and extreme temperatures perched on top of a tower.

Instead, enticed by the lucrative success of other renewable energy pioneers like Suntech Power of the United States, they are adapting other types of turbines or buying licenses from overseas firms that have decided not to venture into the market themselves, and they are cranking up production.

Read the whole article: China joins wind turbine business