Friday, September 24, 2004

EVEN THE SCANDINAVIANS SAY CELLPHONES ARE SAFE

"There is no scientific evidence that mobile phone use or exposure to base stations below internationally accepted levels pose a health risk, radiation authorities in the Nordic countries said on Tuesday. "The balance of evidence to date suggests that exposures to radiofrequency radiation below the ICNIRP (International Commission on Non-Ionizing Radiation Protection) guidelines do not cause adverse health effects to the general population," radiation authorities in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland and Iceland said in a joint statement.

The statement came as a conclusion to a meeting between the five Nordic countries on the subject earlier this year. "There are a number of groups here in Sweden and in other countries that think we've been lying when we say there is no scientific proof of risks, so we thought it would be a good idea to show that all the Nordic countries have reached the same conclusion," Lars Mjoenes, a program coordinator with the Swedish Radiation Protection Authority, said."

More here.




ECOSYSTEMS NOT FRAGILE AND EONS OLD AFTER ALL

"A Man-Made rainforest that should have taken millennia to evolve has baffled scientists by springing up in just 150 years. Rainforests should take millions of years to develop the highly complex, interactive ecosystems for which they are famed, in which every species fills an essential niche.

But the forest on Green Mountain, Ascension Island, in the mid-Atlantic sprung up chaotically from a mixed bag of botanical scrap brought in by the Royal Navy in 1843. And the introduced species have thrived at a rate that has stunned experts and could trigger a rethink of conventional ecological theory, New Scientist magazine reports today.

When Charles Darwin stopped off at Ascension Island in 1836 on the home stretch of his long journey on the Beagle, he described it then as "entirely destitute of trees". Lying 1,200 miles from the nearest continent, the volcanic island was almost barren because of its remoteness, with only about 20 plant species, mainly ferns.

But in 1843, an ambitious British scheme for revitalising the island began, with Royal Navy troops planting thousands of trees a year, using seedlings from Argentina, South Africa, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew.....

Now Green Mountain is a thriving tropical forest, yet it grew from species collected randomly. Conventional theory suggests complex ecosystems only emerge through a slow evolution in which different organisms develop in tandem to fill particular niches. But Green Mountain suggests that natural rainforests may be constructed more by chance than by evolution.

Dissident theorists call this "ecological fitting". It says species do not so much evolve to create ecosystems as make the best of what they have. "The Green Mountain system is a spectacular example of ecological fitting," David Wilkinson, from Liverpool John Moores University, told New Scientist. "It is a man-made system that has produced a tropical rainforest without any co-evolution between its constituent species."

More here or here

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

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