• Need Clean Drinking Water? Make Your Own DIY Clay Filter

    Updated: 2010-06-30 18:26:52
    It’s a sad fact that most of the water in the world needs filtering before it can be safely drunk. It’s the result of many years of industrialization and the resulting pollution in the air, soil, and water. However, most water filters are a fairly expensive and technology-dependent solution to the problem, and it’s not [...]

  • The Population-Poverty Connection

    Updated: 2010-06-30 17:47:49
    By Lester R. Brown The 21st century began on an inspiring note: the United Nations set a goal of reducing the share of the world’s population living in extreme poverty by half by 2015. By early 2007 the world looked to be on track to meet this goal, but as the economic crisis unfolds and the [...]

  • Learning From Soap Operas

    Updated: 2010-06-30 16:06:57
    This New York Times OpEd covered PMC-Ethiopia’s soap operas, Yeken Kignit and Dhimbibba. ————————– A friend of mine, a physician who works the longest hours of anybody I know, makes only one exception from her demanding schedule in New York. Once a week, she returns home early to watch a new episode of her favorite soap opera. [...]

  • Senate oil savings’ greatest hits

    Updated: 2010-06-29 21:31:31
    Daniel J. Weiss, a Senior Fellow and Susan Lyon, Special Assistant for Energy Policy at American Progress give a recap of the best policy proposals for oil savings of 2010 in this repost. Oil, oil, everywhere, but not a drop for fuel. This is the stark view of Gulf Coast residents [...]

  • Mammoth iceberg could alter ocean circulation: study

    Updated: 2010-06-29 18:09:35
    Thanks to Edmund Levering for this chilling news. ———————— An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday. While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water [...]

  • Ever See Flammable Tap Water?: Gasland Film Investigates Natural Gas Industry

    Updated: 2010-06-29 18:03:42
    Dang. Ever see water that ignites upon leaving the tap? If not, then you might be interested in seeing Gasland, a recent film by Josh Fox that dives into the corruption of the US natural gas industry. In the film, Josh Fox exposes the impact that modern natural gas extraction, which uses a technology called [...]

  • Green Business Blog Carnival #3 up at The Inspired Economist

    Updated: 2010-06-28 21:03:02
    Been on the road most of the weekend, so getting to the most recent edition of the Green Business Blog Carnival kind of late… but it’s still there. Our friends at The Inspired Economist served as our first non-founder host, and did a bang-up job: from green marketing, to solar for small business, to green [...]

  • World on course for catastrophic 6° rise, reveal scientists

    Updated: 2010-06-28 14:54:08
    Thanks to Andrew Glikson for this article from the Independent. ———————– The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the [...]

  • Carbon Dioxide May Have Greater Effect on Temperature

    Updated: 2010-06-28 14:52:58
    The increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide taking place today could have a significantly larger effect on global temperatures than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale University geologists. The team demonstrated that only a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was associated with a period of substantial warming between three to [...]

  • Overpopulation and Climate Change

    Updated: 2010-06-27 14:50:14
    Thanks to Joe Bish for sending me this editorial by Arthur Westing of Vermont. ————————- With the continuing failure of governments to reach agreements on combating climate change, the outlook for both humans and nature remains bleak. And nowhere is the failure more conspicuous than in the avoidance of the subject of population growth. Population is a [...]

  • China right to link population to climate

    Updated: 2010-06-27 14:49:01
    Many thanks to Mark O’Connor for this article. ———————- ALL but the crankiest conspiracy theorists now accept that the world is warming and humans are causing it. But the baffling, illogical and scary thing is that political leaders seem blind to a critical element of the human causation – the more humans we have the more carbon [...]

  • Faraway fettered fish fluctuate frequently

    Updated: 2010-06-27 01:05:07
    Hello! I am Little Fish Swimming in the Sea. I have lots of fishy friends. Come along with me. (apologies to Lucy Cousins and Walker Books) I have to thank my 3-year old daughter and one of her favourite books for that intro. Now to the serious stuff. I am very proud to announce a [...]

  • Chinese exec calls for limiting population, consumption

    Updated: 2010-06-26 14:42:12
    Thanks to Doug La Follette for this article. ———————– BUSINESS: Chinese exec calls for limiting population, consumption (10/23/2009) Debra Kahn, E&E reporter SAN FRANCISCO — A leading Chinese industrialist called yesterday for worldwide population constraints and an end to government-sponsored consumerism as solutions to climate change and other environmental issues. Speaking at a conference put on by Business for Social [...]

  • There really is only one kind of sustainability

    Updated: 2010-06-25 16:26:32
    Thanks to Tim Murray for this essay. ———————– Despite our best efforts, there are persistent and common misunderstandings about the rudiments of overshoot and sustainability. Four come to mind: 1. The exponential function. Albert Bartlett is right about that. I can’t get people alarmed by lets say, a 2-3% annual growth rate. Like the magic of compound interest, [...]

  • The Imminent Collapse Of Industrial Society

    Updated: 2010-06-24 15:48:17
    Thanks to Jack Alpert for this article by Peter Goodchild. http://www.countercurrents.org/goodchild090510.htm ————————— The collapse of modern industrial society has 14 parts, each with a somewhat causal relationship to the next. (1) Fossil fuels, (2) metals, and (3) electricity are a tightly-knit group, and no industrial civilization can have one without the others. The decline in fossil-fuel production is [...]

  • Raising Water Productivity to Increase Food Security

    Updated: 2010-06-23 23:24:18
    By Lester R. Brown With water shortages constraining food production growth, the world needs an effort to raise water productivity similar to the one that nearly tripled land productivity over the last half-century. Since it takes 1,000 tons of water to produce 1 ton of grain, it is not surprising that 70 percent of world [...]

  • Goldilocks and the Three Fuels:

    Updated: 2010-06-23 19:24:45
    Where are oil prices headed in 2010? Forecasts for the end of the year are all over the map, from over $100 a barrel to under $50. The difference hinges mostly on assumptions about whether the economy will recover or relapse. But it may be that price volatility has become an inherent feature of the [...]

  • ISI 2009 Impact Factors now out

    Updated: 2010-06-18 02:35:55
    Last year I reported the 2008 ISI Impact Factors for some prominent conservation journals and a few other journals occasionally publishing conservation-related material. ISI just released the 2009 Impact Factors, so I’ll do the same again this year, and add some general ecology journals as well. For all you Australians, I also recently reported the [...]

  • Biodiversity SNAFU in Australia’s Jewel

    Updated: 2010-06-16 03:45:04
    I’ve covered this sad state of affairs and one of Australia’s more notable biodiversity embarrassments over the last year (see Shocking continued loss of Australian mammals and Can we solve Australia’s mammal extinction crisis?), and now the most empirical demonstration of this is now published. The biodiversity guru of Australia’s tropical north, John Woinarksi, has [...]

  • Structural Causes of Increasing Life Expectancy

    Updated: 2010-06-12 02:31:42
    We are on the verge of a revolution in medicine : understanding , treating , and ultimately preventing the causes of degenerative aging . But medical revolutions only happen if we all stand up in support of funding and research . We did it for cancer . We're doing it for Alzheimer's . We can do it for aging and create an era of longer , healthier lives Email Contact reason at- fightaging dot- org Search The Causes of Aging Accumulating AGEs Buildup of Amyloid Between Cells The Failing Adaptive Immune System The Failing Innate Immune System Declining Lysosomal Function Mitochondrial DNA Damage Senescent Cells Other Causes of Aging Required Reading Calorie Restriction The Community , Visualized Cryonics Engineered Negligible Senescence Envisaging a World Without the FDA Healthy Life

  • There Will Be Ten Thousand Subtle Gene Variants of Human Longevity

    Updated: 2010-06-10 02:58:18
    We are on the verge of a revolution in medicine : understanding , treating , and ultimately preventing the causes of degenerative aging . But medical revolutions only happen if we all stand up in support of funding and research . We did it for cancer . We're doing it for Alzheimer's . We can do it for aging and create an era of longer , healthier lives Email Contact reason at- fightaging dot- org Search The Causes of Aging Accumulating AGEs Buildup of Amyloid Between Cells The Failing Adaptive Immune System The Failing Innate Immune System Declining Lysosomal Function Mitochondrial DNA Damage Senescent Cells Other Causes of Aging Required Reading Calorie Restriction The Community , Visualized Cryonics Engineered Negligible Senescence Envisaging a World Without the FDA Healthy Life

  • June 2010 Issue of Conservation Letters

    Updated: 2010-06-09 00:51:39
    The third issue of Conservation Letters Volume 3 is now out. A good line-up of papers, indeed. Note that we’ve gone up to 9 papers in this issue, so keep the good submissions coming. Conservation Letters will most likely be listed on ISI Web of Science this year, and receive its first Impact Factor in [...]

  • Australian Ecology Research Award

    Updated: 2010-06-07 05:29:00
    I had the immense pleasure of receiving a telephone call a few weeks back from the Ecological Society of Australia telling me that I had been awarded the 2010 Australian Ecology Research Award (AERA). They’ve just announced it, so I’m now allowed to boast a bit on Conservation Bytes. If you’re going to the 50th [...]

  • Addressing biodiversity loss

    Updated: 2010-06-06 23:17:00
    Global Issues Social , Political , Economic and Environmental Issues That Affect Us All Main : menu Home About Issues World News Site Updates Support Contact You are : here Home Issues Articles Addressing Biodiversity Loss Addressing Biodiversity Loss Author and Page information by Anup Shah This Page Created Sunday , June 06, 2010 This page : http : www.globalissues.org article 787 addressing-biodiversity-loss To print all information e.g . expanded side notes , shows alternative links , use the print : version http : www.globalissues.org print article 787 At the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development the Earth Summit” the Convention on Biological Diversity CBD was . born 192 countries , plus the EU , are now Parties to that convention . In April 2002, the Parties to the

  • Climate change and biodiversity

    Updated: 2010-06-06 22:58:00
    It has long been recognized that rapid climate change can have a severe impact on biodiversity and on the ability for ecosystems to naturally adapt. This page was quite old and had barely any content, so has been completely rewritten to look at the impact climate change will have on biodiversity in the arctic as well as the implications of increasing ocean acidification and more. Read full article: Climate Change Affects Biodiversity

  • How many species are there?

    Updated: 2010-06-04 03:46:30
    An interesting research note just came out in the American Naturalist by Hamilton and colleagues entitled Quantifying uncertainty in estimation of tropical arthropod species richness. I retweeted a Science Daily twitter feed on this that had a terribly misleading opening line: “New calculations reveal that the number of species on Earth is likely to be [...]

  • Most accessed Conservation Letters articles

    Updated: 2010-06-03 14:48:04
    Not a big post, but I thought Conservation Bytes readers would appreciate knowing the most accessed papers in the journal Conservation Letters in 2008 and 2009: 2009 Critical need for new definitions of “forest” and “forest degradation” in global climate change agreements Nophea Sasaki & Francis E. Putz Global priority areas for incorporating land–sea connections [...]

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