World is ‘one poor harvest’ from chaos, new book warns
Like many environmentalists, Lester Brown is worried. In his new book “World on the Edge,” released this week, Brown says mankind has pushed civilization to the brink of collapse by bleeding aquifers dry and overplowing land to feed an ever-growing population, while overloading the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.
If we continue to sap Earth’s natural resources, “civilizational collapse is no longer a matter of whether but when,” Brown, the founder of Worldwatch and the Earth Policy Institute, which both seek to create a sustainable society, told AFP.
What distinguishes “World on the Edge” from his dozens of other books is “the sense of urgency,” Brown told AFP. “Things could start unraveling at any time now and it’s likely to start on the food front.
“We’ve got to get our act together quickly. We don’t have generations or even decades — we’re one poor harvest away from chaos,” he said.
“We have been talking for decades about saving the planet, but the question now is, can we save civilization?”
In “World on the Edge”, Brown points to warning signs and lays out arguments for why he believes the cause of the chaos will be the unsustainable way that mankind is going about producing more and more food. Read more…
Obama’s Push for China Currency Changes Could Cost U.S. Consumers
When President Obama meets with Chinese President Hu Jintao this week, one of the top items on the agenda will be resolving a dispute over how China sets the value of its currency. If Obama gets his way, it could spur U.S. exports, but it could also mean higher prices for American consumers.
For over a decade, China has held down the value of its currency, the Yuan, in relation to the dollar. That helps keep the cost of the goods Americans buy from China low and the price of American goods sold in China high. The cheap Chinese currency has helped open a wide trade imbalance between the two countries. In 2010, China’s trade advantage with the U.S. was more than $252 billion.
The Obama administration has made stopping China’s currency manipulation a central focus of the president’s push to increase American exports.
“China still closely manages the level of its exchange rate and restricts the ability of capital to move in and out of the country,” Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said is a speech last week. “As the [International Monetary Fund] has said consistently, these policies have the effect of keeping the Chinese currency substantially undervalued.”
On the surface, it’s a positive for Read more…
WikiLeaks: Iran developing nuclear bomb with help of more than 30 countries
The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten quotes U.S. diplomatic cables as saying that Iran is racing to achieve nuclear bomb before its economy collapses due to sanctions.
Iran has been developing contacts in more than 30 countries to acquire technology, equipment and raw materials needed to build a nuclear bomb, a Norwegian newspaper said on Sunday, citing U.S. diplomatic cables.
Aftenposten said that according to the cables, obtained by WikiLeaks, more than 350 Iranian companies and organizations were involved in the pursuit of nuclear and missile technology between 2006 and 2010.
 Technicians measuring parts of Iran's Bushehr nuclear power plant in this undated photo. |
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| Photo by: AP |
Iran says its nuclear program has purely peaceful aims but the West suspects is designed to develop a weapons capability.
“For years, Iran has been working systematically to acquire the parts, equipment and technology needed for developing such weapons, in violation of UN sanctions against the country Read more…
The sun rises two days early in Greenland, sparking fears that climate change is accelerating
The sun over Greenland has risen two days early, baffling scientists and sparking fears that Arctic icecaps are melting faster than previously thought.
Experts say the sun should have risen over the Arctic nation’s most westerly town, Ilulissat, yesterday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness.
But for the first time in history light began creeping over the horizon at around 1pm on Tuesday – 48 hours ahead of the usual date of 13 January.
The mysterious sunrise has confused scientists, although it is believed the most likely explanation is that it is down to the lower height of melting icecaps allowing the sun’s light to penetrate through earlier.
Climate change? The sun rose in Ilulissat, Greenland, two days early on Tuesday, ending a month-and-a-half of winter darkness. One theory is that melting ice caps have lowered the horizon allowing the sun to shine Read more…It Really Is a Small World
There is a flood in Australia of biblical proportions though it must be said there is little news of it in the U.S. media. Much of Queensland is under water which would be comparable to saying that much of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and a large portion of New York is under water. Australia is very big.
If that news was not disturbing enough, on Tuesday, Krakatau volcano in Indonesia erupted, forcing the evacuation of tens of thousands in its vicinity as ash rained down on two large provinces. Meanwhile, the Kizimen volcano on Kamchatka is erupting as well.
England is passing through the worst winter in the last hundred years of recorded history. Its heavy investment in clean energy, specifically wind turbines, has turned out to be a bad idea since they tend not to turn much when the weather turns cold. Having shut down most of its coal mines, England is experiencing a lack of electrical power that is killing some folks.
No, it is not the Apocalypse, but it might as well be for people fleeing or trapped by these huge events.
No doubt some people are trying to organize efforts to save the kangaroos and koala bears in Australia while others are worrying about indigenous animals in Indonesia. If this sounds like they have idiotic priorities, they do. The same indifference Nature shows to these critters applies to you as well.
The anniversary of the Haiti earthquake, January 13, will occasion a flurry of articles and analysis of what has happened since (not much) but will fade by the weekend. Haiti hasn’t had a good day for centuries.
Meanwhile, snow has fallen in 49 of the U.S. States including Hawaii! It covered 69% of the lower 48. The northeast just experienced its second blizzard since Christmas.
Time to panic? Hardly.
So when should we panic? I would suggest a good time would be when we in America wake up and discover that the current administration has forced enough coal-burning utilities to shut down and there’s no electricity or just not enough to go around. Coal provides fifty percent of all of the electricity we use in the U.S.
We might begin to panic when we realize that the government remains steadfastly in the way of building more nuclear plants to generate electricity, despite its rhetoric stating the opposite.
Most Americans will begin to get angry when a gallon of gasoline hits $4 or more and will wonder why without wondering what happens when the U.S. government shuts down much of the drilling in the Gulf of Mexico by simply not issuing permits and forbids exploration or drilling off the long East and West coasts where billions of barrels of oil are believed to exist. Brazil is doing it. Why not us?
Oil is a global commodity which means that its price is determined by supply and demand. Right now, as China’s economy continues to surge and ours continues to stagnate, China is buying up as much oil as it can get its hands on. It is drilling for it off the coast of Cuba, a mere 90 miles from the tip of Florida.
Due to the floods in Australia, a major producer of coal, China is looking to purchase coal dug out of the mines in Appalachia, precisely where the Obama administration has done its best to shut down mines.
So, you see, it really is a small world after all.
The last great eruption of Krakatau actually lowered the temperature worldwide by throwing so much “schmutz” into the atmosphere it interfered with the Sun’s warming rays.
No matter where you live, it helps if the government doesn’t behave in a totally irrational and stupid way in the name of some bogus notion like global warming.
By the way, where is Al Gore these days? I hear China is experiencing some monster snow storms and it wouldn’t surprise me to hear he’s over there.
© Alan Caruba,
Year of Extremes, Strongest La Nina: What It Means for Coming Months
2010 was a year of extreme weather events with epic flooding, snowstorms, drought, heat waves and severe cold unfolding across the U.S. and the globe. It tied 2005 as the warmest year on record, and was also a year in which one of the strongest December La Niñas in recorded history was observed.
La Niñas, which occur when sea surface temperatures across the equatorial central and eastern Pacific Ocean are below normal, play a significant role in the overall weather pattern across the globe. The current La Niña has been influential in 2010’s extreme events. Details on those events and their connection to La Niña can be found in this AccuWeather.com news story.
While some of the extremes have fallen in line with overall weather conditions typically expected during a La Niña, other events have been the complete opposite. Disastrous flooding in Southern California during December and recent extreme cold, snow and ice in the Southeast are examples of events in contrast with what is typically expected during Read more…
Oklahoma budgets could be cut up to 10 percent
OKLAHOMA CITY — The head of the Senate committee overseeing the state budget is warning agency heads to prepare for funding cuts of up to 10 percent and directed them to produce plans on how to make the reductions.
Sen. David Myers, the new head of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, said Thursday he has begun giving agency heads the bad news as legislative leaders consider ways of filling a deficit estimated at nearly $600 million, or 10 percent of the overall state budget.
Some agency officials were shaken by the magnitude of the potential cuts, he said. “They’re giving us those responses, which in some cases are pretty painful,” Myers, R-Ponca City, said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We’re going to have to look at those and evaluate how much pain do we want to put here or there. We’re going to be looking at that very steadily over the next few months.”
Although lawmakers have known the size of the estimated deficit for months, Myers’ comments are the first to specify the potential cutbacks envisioned in state programs.
Alex Weintz, spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin, said the extent of the reductions needed won’t be known Read more…
Huge ring appears over Australia, is HAARP involved?
After receiving an urgent e-mail from a contact in Australia informing me of bizarre weather on the weather satellite imagery, I checked out the data and just hours later more strangeness. I am waiting to hear from the Australian Government’s weather bureau for their own explanation.
“There is very strange weather happening here – please check”
Written at 2230 Hrs (US Eastern) 15th January 2010.
A contact in Australia just alerted me to what he describes as “very strange weather taking place over the south west of Australia”. He told me to go to the national weather satellite images if I could not open the images he attached (See left). By the time I had discovered the e-mail and checked, the large clearly defined ring had mostly dissipated but still was just visible on a time loop which was spiraling counter clockwise (Low Pressure system). Read more…
Green Blob in Space
The Hubble Space Telescope got its first peek at a mysterious giant green blob in outer space and found that it’s strangely alive. The bizarre glowing blob is giving birth to new stars, some only a couple million years old, in remote areas of the universe where stars don’t normally form.
The blob of gas was first discovered by a Dutch school teacher in 2007 and is named Hanny’s Voorwerp (HAN’-nee’s-FOR’-vehrp). Voorwerp is Dutch for object.
NASA released the new Hubble photo Monday at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Seattle.
Parts of the green blob are collapsing and the resulting pressure from that is creating the stars. The stellar nurseries are outside of a normal galaxy, which is usually where stars live.
That makes these “very lonely newborn stars” that are “in the middle of nowhere,” said Bill Keel, the University of Alabama astronomer who examined the blob.
The blob is the size of our own Milky Way galaxy and it is 650 million light years away. Each light year is about 6 trillion miles.
The blob is mostly hydrogen gas swirling from a close encounter of two galaxies and it glows because it is illuminated by a quasar in one of the galaxies. A quasar is a bright object full of energy powered by a black hole. Read more…
Court Rules Government Can Keep Naked Body Scanner Images Secret
Admission that images can be stored, transmitted proves TSA lied
Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Friday, Jan 14th, 2011
A federal judge has ruled that the Department of Homeland Security can keep images produced by x-ray body scanners out of the public domain, in a blow to privacy group The Electronic Privacy Information Center’ s (EPIC) efforts to release more than 2000 of the images that show intimate details of airport travelers’ bodies.
Judge Ricardo Urbina ruled that the DHS does not have to comply with the Freedom of Information Act request to disclose the naked images of those who were screened at airport checkpoints, nor does the government have to release any other related materials.
The judge granted the government’s motion to conclude the lawsuit, issuing a 15-page explanation noting Read more…
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