GENERAL NEWS CLIPS
GENERAL NEWS CLIPS
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FINALLY!! How would most people feel if they were forced to say "One nation under Allah" or Buddha?
. . June 26, 02: A federal appeals court ruled it was unconstitutional to ask schoolchildren to recite the Pledge of Allegiance and vow fealty to one nation "under God." The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, in a blockbuster ruling that analysts said would probably end up before the U.S. Supreme Court, overturned a 1954 Act of the U.S Congress that added "under God" to the pledge, saying the words violated the basic Constitutional tenet of separation of church and state.
. . "The text of the official Pledge, codified in federal law, impermissibly takes a position with respect to the purely religious question of the existence and identity of God," the court's panel wrote in its 2-1 decision. "A profession that we are a nation 'under God' is identical ... to a profession that we are a nation 'under Jesus,' a nation 'under Vishnu,' a nation 'under Zeus,' or a nation 'under no god,"' the court's majority opinion, by Justice Alfred Goodwin.
Aug 7, 03: Iceland plans to resume whaling this month, hunting 38 minke whales in August and September, its Ministry of Fisheries said, sparking angry protests from the country's tourism industry. Iceland has not hunted the sea mammals since 1989.
June 2, 03: Australia unveiled plans to bar fishing and shipping in nearly a third of the Great Barrier Reef in the biggest move yet to rescue the world's largest living organism from further certain damage. Marine scientists have long warned the government of the imminent danger if a combination of threats to the reef weren't checked.
. . Excess nutrients kill off the tiny organisms which create new coral and provide food for the parasitic crown of thorns starfish, which eats coral and have already destroyed large areas of the reef.
. . Climate change is a threat which is difficult to tackle. Cutting harmful emissions is all that can be done to slow coral bleaching while recreational and commercial fishers threaten the reef through overfishing.
. . So-called "green zones" areas would be off-limits to fishermen and shipping, with only research and tourism activities allowed.
. . Other proposals include increasing by one-third the area designated "no-go" zones closed to all users except researchers with permits, and cutting from 50 percent to 34 percent the areas of the reef accessible to prawn trawling.
May 5, 03: The US is studying ways to restore about a quarter of the marshes of southern Iraq, drained by Saddam Hussein to crush the local Shiite population.
The Iraqi marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were home to a unique culture and complex ecosystem that lasted thousands of years. The marshes that sustained them turned into a salt-encrusted wasteland. Now, of nearly 300,000 Marsh Arabs, fewer than 20,000 remain. Only 7 percent of the once-extensive marshlands remain.
. . UNEP described the deliberate destruction as one of the worst environmental disasters in history, ranking it with the desiccation of the Aral Sea and the deforestation of the Amazon rain forests.
. . Scientists said the flow of detritus from the marshes into the Gulf had also supported fish populations. The environmental degradation put an estimated 40 species of birds and untold species of fish at risk, and has already led to the extinction of at least seven species. Rapid evaporation has left some areas with salt crusts 2 feet deep. Unless fresh water is pumped through at sufficient speed, they will become lifeless salt ponds.
. . "What we're trying to figure out is how to restore the ecology and at the same time try to figure out how to restore a culture."
Apr 16, 03: A fragment of an ancient gourd found at a burial site in Peru is forcing archeologists to rethink their ideas about the origins of organized religion in North America, a paper in the journal Archaeology said.
. . The 4,000-year-old artifact, which clearly bears the distinctive image of a primitive deity, suggests that organised religion may have been around as early as 2250 BC. The Staff God is a clearly recognizable religious icon", explained Haas. The icon "indicates that organized religion began in the Andes more than 1,000 years earlier than previously thought."
Apr 13, 03: Since 1947, when Pakistan was created for South Asia's Muslims, forest cover in Azad (free) Jammu Kashmir, the 13,300 square kilometer north-west strip of the region under Pakistani control, has diminished by two-thirds. Most of its slopes are bare.
. . "It's embarrassing. When we were divided in 1947, we had 42 percent of Azad Kashmir under forest. Today it's 13 percent", said AJK President Sardar Anwar Khan, a retired major-general. "It's an environmental disaster." Disappearing with the forests is Kashmir's wildlife. "There's not much left", Khan said.
Apr 7, 03: Australia, regularly hit by the worst mouse plagues in the world, is claiming an international first with a genetically modified herpes virus to knock out population explosions of the small rodent. Rigorous testing to prove the virus is "species specific" --which means that it cannot be transferred to other animals or humans-- will be required before expected full release in three years.
Dec 15, 02: Knowing the riches of the Amazon jungle from childhood, diminutive Sen. Marina Silva may be uniquely suited to save Brazil's rain forest as the country's next environment minister.
. . The Amazon, the world's largest tropical forest and home to up to 30 percent of the world's plant and animal life, covers an area larger than all of western Europe. Silva was named this week by Workers' Party President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva to head the environment ministry under Brazil's first elected government from a leftist party. Silva will take office on Jan. 1 with the new government.
Dec 7, 02: Scientists in Taiwan and the United States recently used a trio of NASA satellites to observe how the passage of even moderate typhoons over the South China Sea can generate upwellings of nutrient-rich water from deeper in the ocean and spark massive blooms of phytoplankton.
Dec 8, 02: From environmental activists to old whalers eager to resume their trade, Iceland's announcement that it will start whaling again has upset the whole country. While tour operators and conservationists cry out that the decision will do enormous damage to Iceland as a tourist and whale-watching destination, whalers are angry they will have to wait at least four years before going hunting again.
Dec 8, 02: Researchers say they have counted more than 14,000 birds killed by avian botulism along Lake Erie this year, possibly the deadliest outbreak since the disease was discovered on the lake's shores four years ago. Wildlife officials warned the toll in Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and Ontario is probably much higher because agencies are only collecting a fraction of the birds that die.
Nov 6, 02: Prized in Far Eastern cuisines, the Whale Shark and its smaller cousin the Basking Shark have been hunted so thoroughly in recent years that a U.N. meeting in Chile is considering protecting them from humans. The world's biggest type of fish is a shark twice as long as a bus. It's in fact a docile plankton feeder which is more victim than predator.
Nov 6, 02: Zambia's five rare white rhinos are facing starvation due to a drought that has nearly destroyed grazing pastures in the famine-threatened southern African country. The drought has been very harsh to wild animals.
Nov 8, 02: A U.N. conference rejected an attempt by Japan to loosen an international ban on trade in whale meat. Japan has continued to kill whales, taking (unfair) advantage of a loophole that allows it to hunt a small number for scientific purposes. Meat from them is often sold, ending up in markets and restaurants in Japan.
Oct 23, 02: Oil pockets have been found just below the sea bed off the U.S. coast in Massachusetts, 30 years after a tanker ran ashore there, raising fears that spills could continue to pollute the environment indefinitely. Scientists thought the ecosystem returned to normal over 10 years ago and were surprised to discover the oil concentrations were about the same as in 1976, seven years after the ship, The Florida, ran aground &
spilled nearly 185,000 gallons of oil. He was also amazed bacteria had not broken down the oil.
. . The new findings have raised concerns that researchers may have underestimated the long-term environmental impact of events like the 1989 grounding of the Exxon Valdez tanker, which spilled 60 times more oil than The Florida.
Sept 1, 02: Israel and Jordan agreed on a plan today to lay an $800 million pipeline to rescue the shrinking Dead Sea. The two countries, meeting at the Earth Summit, said they would study ways to pipe water north from the Red Sea to the Dead Sea, which they share, in their biggest cooperation deal since a 1994 peace accord. (a previous proposal was to tap the Mediterranean)
. . The pipeline would stretch about 300 km and aim to help refill the sea, which is falling by about three feet a year. This would also provide immense electrical power --like from a dam-- as the sea's banks are the lowest dry land on the planet at about 400 meters below sea level. The power could be used right there to manufacture Magnesium, etc, from the mineral-thick water.
. . The sea is fed by the Jordan River --or used to be-- the mouth may become [is?] dry as the Colorado's. Increased demands on the region's fresh water mean that the inflow does not compensate for massive surface evaporation, and environmentalists say the salt lake could vanish by 2050 if nothing is done. Bathers float without effort, buoyed high by the extreme saltiness of the water.
Aug 13, 02: - An Australian state declared war on a mutant seaweed it said had the potential to wreak economic and environmental havoc and which has also infested the Mediterranean and California. "The battle has been named Operation Mutant because the fight we are facing is against a mutant, noxious seaweed capable of multiplying at an alarming speed and devastating the marine environment in its wake."
Aug 4, 02: An extremely rare Longman's beaked whale, only the third complete specimen known to science, has washed up on a South African beach, a senior scientist said. The 15-foot animal has a beak-shaped mouth and is believed to spend most of its time far from shore in deep waters. There have been only two recorded sightings of a live beaked whale in the wild. The physical evidence of the animal's existence is limited to three skulls.
July 23, 02: The land-walking snakehead fish that is native to Asia has been found in seven U.S. states and the Bush administration announced a ban on U.S. imports of the predatory fish. It can grow up to 3 feet long, and can walk across land to find new sources of food in other lakes and streams. It can swallow prey as large as it is. The adults eat fish, frogs, aquatic birds and small mammals, while juvenile snakehead fish prey on earthworms, water bugs, tadpoles, dragonfly larvae and other organisms.
. . The fish can stay out of water for up to three days. It's been found in Maryland , Hawaii, Florida, California, Maine, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Assumption: it was imported to the United States for its excellent taste, even when eaten smoked or dried.
During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Christians in Europe burned one hundred thousand women (and a few men) as witches.
June 27, 02: The Vatican, which abandoned torture after the Inquisition centuries ago, only today ratified the United Nations convention against the practice. The Inquisition, a tribunal in which some heretics were tortured, was set up in 1233 and was in force until the late 15th century. The Vatican office which deals with doctrinal orthodoxy, however, was known as the Inquisition until 1908.
During the past 40 years, precipitation in the region that stretches across Africa just south of the Sahara has fallen by between 20 and 50 percent.
June 24, 02: The consumption of forests, energy and land by humans is exceeding the rate at which Earth can replenish itself, according to research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, conducted by California-based Redefining Progress, a nonprofit group concerned with environmental conservation and its economics, warned that a failure to rein in humanity's overuse of natural resources could send the planet into "ecological bankruptcy."
. . Earth's resources "are like a pile of money anyone can grab while they all close their eyes, but then it's gone."
. . Scientists said humanity's demand for resources had soared during the past 40 years to a level where it would take the planet 1.2 years to regenerate what people remove each year. Wackernagel and his team found that in 1999, each person consumed an average of 2.3 hectares (5.7 acres). The global average was significantly lower than industrialized countries such as the United States and United Kingdom where 9.6 hectares (24 acres) and 5.3 hectares (13.3 acres), respectively, were consumed per person.
. . The per-capita consumption of natural resources in developed countries as compared to developing countries, is generally of the order of twenty to one.
Jun 18, 02: The Johannesburg Earth Summit starting in late August must focus on clear timetables and concrete targets, said experts meeting in Stockholm ahead of the huge global summit on poverty reduction and the environment. Around 250 scientists, government officials and environmentalists from 66 states met in Stockholm to mark 30 years since 114 nations agreed on a common duty to protect the global environment.
June 17, 02: Environmentalists said that the Mexican government must do more to stop the illegal slaughter of some 35,000 sea turtles each year in the northern border state of Baja California. Experts say the turtle meat is sold on the black market in northern cities like Tijuana and exported to the United States. Greenpeace said in cities 2.2 pounds of the meat fetches $30-$40. One turtle provides between 110 and 220 pounds of meat.
June 7, 02: All 15 European Union nations ratified the Kyoto protocol against global warming as a bloc and used the occasion to slam Washington -- which has shunned the treaty -- for failing to do its part. The Kyoto Accords require industrialized nations to cut their emissions by an average of 5 percent over the period 2008-2012.
. . But the United States, the world's largest polluter, shunned the treaty shortly after President Bush took office last year, arguing it would harm the U.S. economy! The United States accounts for about a third of the industrialized world's greenhouse gas emissions.
June 1, 02: A glacier from which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set out to conquer Mount Everest nearly 50 years ago has retreated three miles up the mountain due to global warming, a U.N. body says. A team of climbers, backed by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), reported after their two-week visit last month that the impact of rising temperatures was everywhere to be seen. The landscape bears the scars of sudden glacial retreat, while glacial lakes are swollen by melted ice.
June 8, 02: Russia has declared a state of emergency in at least 10 regions where locusts are swarming through farmlands, devouring crops, NTV television said. Locust invasions plague the Russian regions in summer and have been blamed for destroying tens of millions of hectares of farmland over the last decade. The NTV report did not say how much land had been affected by the latest swarms but did say huge areas of the eastern Siberian regions of Buryatia and Irkutsk had been ruined. The report said there were several thousand locusts per square meter in the affected areas. The insects were also seen spreading from the Central Asian state of Kazakhstan to the Siberian city of Novosibirsk.
May 28, 02: Western Canadian farmers are readying for battle against swarms of voracious grasshoppers that are poised, like the Biblical plague of locusts, to devastate millions of dollars worth of crops, Prairie officials said. "While we don't want to be overly pessimistic and while mother nature may help us, at this stage we certainly are expecting one of the highest outbreaks in 30 years."
May 27, 02: European Union environment ministers gave strong support to a proposal for common policies to protect the bloc's soil from threats such as contamination and desertification, Spain said. More than 16 percent of the EU's land area is affected by some kind of soil degradation. In the 13 candidate countries for EU membership, mostly in central and eastern Europe, the figure rises to 35 percent.
May 21, 02: Australian scientists are claiming a world first for creating biologically engineered wheat, used as instant dishes after boiling in water, and wheat crispies similar to the existing "snap, crackle and pop" rice crispies. The engineered wheat, which has been field tested and is on the commercial table before leading Australian food and bakeries group George Weston Foods Ltd, by-passes the need to mill wheat for the first time in the world.
April 11, 02: Scientists at the U.S. Department of Agriculture said they had found one bacterium and two fungi that can kill nearly 100 percent of a Formosan subterranean termite population within a week without harming humans or plants. They're exotic to this country, & now infest homes in lots of seacoast states.
March 28, 02: A new world environment organization and an international environmental court would help make sense of the more than 500 environmental agreements and agencies now operating around the globe, researchers said.
. . Legal and environmental experts from the Tokyo-based U.N. University called on a U.N. development summit opening in Johannesburg in August to weigh creating a global body with powers over the environment similar to those of the World Trade Organization over international trade.
. . Their report said environmental regulation has emerged in an ad hoc and somewhat chaotic fashion over the past 30 years due to "the essentially random emergence of environmental issues onto national and international political agendas."
May 10, 02: Bangladesh and India will work together under a U.N. plan to protect the eco-system and bio-diversity of Sundarban, the world's biggest mangrove forest shared by the two countries, environment officials said. Sundarban is home to the endangered Royal Bengal Tigers and a number of other unique species such as the Sundari tree, which is found nowhere else in the world.
. . "Bangladesh and India currently use different approaches to protect the same eco-system, but we are trying to unite it under one project." Nearly two-thirds of the 9,630 square kilometers Sundarban lies in Bangladesh and the rest in India, stretching along the Bay of Bengal.
. . But it is facing a number of threats, including illegal poaching, the felling of trees & over-exploitation of other resources, dwindling freshwater flow, climatic changes and sea level rise, increased salinity, oil pollution from the nearby Mongla port, and top-dying disease of trees.
March 4, 02: The "Emerald Isle" made a stab at cleaning itself up today by taxing plastic bags. The 13 cents per bag levy, thought to be one of the EU's first of its type, is meant to pare way back the 1.2 billion bags given out annually in the state of 3.8 million residents. (3000+bags/person/year!!) Some critics say plastic bags flapping from trees are fast becoming Ireland's "national flag."
Mexico could do little to prevent a cold snap that killed about 250 million Monarch butterflies last month, but naturalists say the government can do something about an even greater threat to their survival: illegal logging.
Feb 12, 02: Dugongs --the bewhiskered sea-mammals that probably inspired sailors' tales of mermaids-- could become extinct in 25 years, the United Nations said. With the Manatee, it's one of the last four surviving species of sea cow. Pollution, coastal development, fishermens' nets and trophy hunting have caused a catastrophic decline. There's only about 1,000 to 2,000 worldwide.
The days of using chemical sprays on organic potato crops may be over --thanks to a virtually unknown purple potato. Scientists at the University of Newcastle in northeast England said the potato --so obscure it has no name-- appears to be resistant to all fungal diseases and so may not require any chemical treatment.
Oct 1, 01: Over the past 15 years, 300 out of 6,000 breeds of farm
animal identified by the Rome-based U.N. Food and Agriculture
Organization (FAO) have become extinct.
. . The FAO estimates that over time 10,000 plant species were used for human food and agriculture. More than 90 percent of the agricultural diversity that existed at the start of the 20th century has been lost. Now, no more than 120 cultivated species provide 90 percent of human food supplied by plants.
. . They believe that using agricultural diversity is the best way to conserve it. "We cannot have a zoo where we have all the breeds in the world", Cardellino said. "They have to be used." "If anything goes wrong -- say, a variety is susceptible to a disease -- then we could lose a lot."
Canada urged the United States not to take a "hasty and ill-considered" decision to start drilling in an Alaskan wildlife refuge, something which Ottawa implacably opposes.
Sept 4, 01: Earth's northern hemisphere is a greener place than it was 20 years ago, with denser vegetation and a longer growing season in some places, scientists reported.
. . In the area above 40 degrees north latitude --which
includes New York City, Madrid, Ankara and Beijing-- satellite
data show plants have been growing more vigorously since 1981.
One suspected cause is rising temperatures, possibly linked
to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according
to a statement released by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the American Geophysical Union and Boston University.
. . The growing season is now nearly 18 days longer in Eurasia than it was two decades ago, with spring arriving a week early and autumn delayed by 10 days. In North America, the growing
season appears to be as much as 12 days longer.
July 15, 01: United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan made an impassioned plea for nations to use a global climate meeting in Bonn to stick to a commitment to cut emissions of gases blamed for global warming.
. . "Climate change is occurring. It's real. We have enough
evidence to know that it is happening", Annan told a news
conference with German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder at the end
of a two-day visit to Berlin.
. . "We do not have to wait for perfect science to act. Each
day we fail to act, we put the earth at risk" Annan said.
July, 01: The population of killer whales in the waters between Canada and the U.S. Pacific Northwest continues to decline, and worried researchers admit they do not know why. It's feared that they are contaminated with high levels of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs).
. . Researchers had hoped the killer whale population in the
area of the Strait of Juan de Fuca would stabilize, but the
number returning to the waters this spring was down again, as
it has been each year since 1996, marine scientist John Ford
said.
A study has revealed that some 90 percent of Mesopotamian marshlands --the largest wetland in the Middle East and one of the world's most important freshwater ecosystems-- have been lost as a result of drainage and damming.
The North Atlantic wild salmon, on the brink of extinction from pollution and over-fishing, could be dealt a final blow by its cousins escaping from fish farms, especially if they are genetically modified.
. . Stocks have fallen by more than 80 percent since 1973 and remained healthy only in Norway, Ireland, Scotland and Iceland. "Farmed salmon have genes which are adapted to a life in captivity -- the very opposite to what is needed in the wild."
. . Mixed with farmed salmon, the wild fish could lose its ability to travel up to 7,000 km (4,300 miles) a year to return to the same river where it was born in order to breed.
. . 'Frankenfish' salmon could prove the final nail in the coffin.
June 5, 01: The Great Barrier Reef's inshore coral and
seagrass meadows are choking under a blanket of mud laced with
toxic pesticides being washed off farmlands and many reefs are
unlikely to survive the next five to 10 years.
. . A World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) report on Australia's
Great Barrier Reef released says increasing land-based
pollution, coupled with bleaching due to global warming, was
seriously threatening the world's largest coral reef formation.
. . "That spells catastrophe for the reef", said the report,
released on World Environment Day.
. . WWF said 28 million tons of sediment flowed into the waters of the Great Barrier Reef each year, the equivalent of 3.5
million dump trucks emptying soil onto the reef.
. . e.g. in 1994, an estimated 8,800 tons of nitrogen and 1,300 tons of phosphorous was washed into the sea around the reef. Plus pesticides": diuron, atrazine and ametryn.
. . Up to 80 percent of freshwater wetlands,
which act as filters protecting the reef from pollution run-off,
have been lost due to cane growing and coastal development.
The Netherlands is a role model: Some 28 percent of all passenger transport trips are made by bicycle.
India's elephant population numbers around 25,000 with at least half in the southern states. Conservationists say elephants are being forced out of jungle habitats by rapid deforestation, leading to attacks on villages and towns.
. . Rampaging elephants lured by the smell of homemade liquor have forced nearly two dozen tribespeople to sleep in treetops in the eastern Indian state of Orissa.
May, 01: The number of seals and sea lions in the North Pacific has plunged since the 1970 --probably because of commercial fishing and perhaps global warming. Deprived of their normal diet, the killer whales began dining on sea otters instead, according to new research by James Estes of the University of California at Santa Cruz and three colleagues.
. . As few as three killer whales may be eating the otters, but the effect is so severe that the animals' numbers have dropped 90 percent in Aleutian waters. Otters protect kelp beds, an important fish habitat, so the consequences of this ecological disruption could be far ranging.
Philosopher Loyal Rue defines religion simply as "an integrated understanding of how things are (cosmology) and what things matter (morality)."
Connie Barlow: "The ecoreligious revolution is unfolding along five distinct -—but not mutually exclusive—- paths. These five may be called the way of reform, the way of the ancients, the way of transcendence, the way of immersion, and the way of science."
4-18, 01: Australia's Great Barrier Reef risks choking to death on fertilizer-soaked silt, thanks to the clearance of wetlands and rainforests along the neighboring Queensland coast, scientists said.
. . Much of the wetlands and rainforests along the tropical Queensland coast had been cleared for sugar cane farming, releasing a stream of fertilizer-loaded sediment.
. . The report said dugong populations had declined by 50 to 80 percent in the last 10 years, and loggerhead turtle breeding had collapsed by up to 80 percent in eastern Australia since the 1970s.
1/3 of the world's fish catch, and 1/3 of the world's grain... is fed to livestock! (including chickens.) We get back only a fraction of that as meat & other foods. In the U.S., 80% of our corn, & 95% of our oats are fed to livestock! We now (well, '99) produce 27% less food per capita than in 1964. We lose 9 square miles a day to development --mostly good arable land, too.
Small green trucks are a familiar sight darting about the streets of Beijing on their way to the suburbs, where their human waste is spread on cabbage patches. Good recycling and composting, but very bad health-wise!
May, 00: - More than 130 of the world's 600 primate species are endangered, from mountain gorillas of war-torn central Africa killed for their mythical powers to orphaned orangutans from Sumatra sold into the pet trade, experts said.
. Among the threatened primates are the bonobos, or pygmy chimpanzees, which live only in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), said Gay Reinartz of the Milwaukee Zoological
Society, who has done years of field research in the country.
. "The bonobos are caught right in the middle of what some are calling Africa's first world war," she said. "The fighting is splitting their range in half," and some are killed and eaten by hungry refugees driven into the forest by the war.
. Primate populations can be very slow to recover, as ape species have only three to four offspring over a (short) lifetime. Habitat fragmentation can isolate small groups of animals, leaving
them vulnerable to extinction due to a loss of genetic diversity.
11-8-99: A team has cooked up a method to mass produce meat without causing suffering to animals, through industrial-scale cell cultures. Small samples of cells are taken from an animal and cultivated in nutrients on a spongy matrix of collagen.
They'll even be able to say, "No animal was killed or injured in the making of this meat."
April 1st, 01: Lakes, streams, soil and trees continue to suffer despite the emissions cuts mandated by the 1990 Clean Air Act, according to a study by the New Hampshire-based Hubbard Brook Research Foundation.
. . Only deeper reductions in nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide emissions - the pollutants which cause acid rain - are likely to help the Northeast recover, scientists said in the report.
There are more than 30,000 alien species in the U.S., including weeds, insects, animals and disease-causing organisms, which cost us $123 billion a year.
BirdLife International, representing 2.2 million people in 105 countries, (Queen Noor of Jordan, honorary BirdLife president) released a report that said 1,200 bird species (1 in 8) could become extinct in the next 100 years, with 600 to 900 more on the verge of joining the list.
Countries with the most birds at risk are Brazil with 111 species, Indonesia (92), China (82), Colombia (81), Peru (79) and India (70), it said. The highest densities of threatened species occur in the Philippines, where 69 face extinction.
Older but still good data:
CO2: /During the ice ages, CO2 was 70% of current level or less. It's very correlated w temp. / CO2: 96% is from fossil fuel from N hemi. North pole reading is 3ppm higher'n south's. CH4 (methane) is rising 1%/yr.
Burning natural-gas emits 1/2 the CO2 as coal. CFC's are 10K times as efficient as a heat-trap. Methane: 30-40X. CFC's absorb radiation in a near-IR band that'd otherwise be a window for radiation to escape the atmosphere. /NOx are g-house gasses, too.
Low clouds cool the Earth; high clouds heat it. A low-cloud increase of 4% would compensate for a doubling of CO2. Or space parasols, equal to about 2% of Earth's surface.
//S,2-89 There's as much Carbon in forests as in the atmosphere, over 2 times as much is in soil necromass (dead stuff). Much is trapped under tundra... so far --but it's melting, releasing it! Fossil-fuels alone could multiply CO2 5-10 times!
. . Net CO2 to atmo, so far: 3B tons. Warming itself has injected 1-6B tons. NASA's Hanson says CO2: 57% of effect, CFC's are 25%. Methane: 12, NOx: 6. Methane is 20X as good a infrared-reflector as CO2.
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