GOOGLE GOES GREEN

No pictures of GROWING glaciers or GROWING North American forests and suchlike? How odd?

Satellite photographs revealing how the landscape has been altered by human activity have been made available online by Google Earth. The pictures show the changes that have been wrought at 100 locations around the globe. All but one have been selected to show the damage caused to the landscape. One of the most striking series of images depicts how Santa Cruz in Bolivia has had its dense forests cut down to make way for urbanisation and agriculture.

Google has teamed up with the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP) to allow the public access to the photographs. A spokesman said: “The intention is to show the damage being done to the environment and to increase public awareness. It’s usually difficult for the ordinary person in the street to get access to these images. We hope to bring them to a wider audience.”

Source





YOUNGIES REJECTING THE GREENIES

"An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie on global warming, is now the fourth-largest-grossing documentary of all time. But apparently it isn't young adults who are paying the price of the ticket -- or, more important, taking the truth about the environment to heart. In fact, the inconvenient truth today is that youths' willingness to conserve gas, heat and energy has taken a precipitous plunge since the 1980s.

According to data from Monitoring the Future, a federally funded national survey on trends in the attitudes, values and behavior of high school seniors since 1976, there has been a clear decline in conservation behavior among 18-year-olds over the past 27 years -- although we are not yet sure whether these attitudes follow youths into adulthood. This decline, interestingly, is coupled with a rise in materialistic values.

In fact, trends in materialism and conservation are highly related: At times when youths place higher value on material goods, they are also much less likely to say they would conserve resources. And when youths are more materially driven, they are also less likely to believe that natural resources will become scarce in the future. Since the 1990s, the trends in materialism seem to have topped out at a steady high level, while willingness to conserve keeps declining. These opposing values should raise a red flag about the consumer culture and its influence on youth.

Youths also consistently believe that government is more responsible for the environment than they are personally. Importantly, when they perceive that the government's role in solving environmental problems is declining, so does their belief that they, personally, must do their part to save the environment.

Conservation is a collective responsibility. Likewise, in the minds of youth, their own actions to preserve the environment are inextricably linked to their perception of the government's role in environmental conservation. Indeed, environmental attitudes of youth seem to mirror the opinions of those in the White House at the time. The highest levels of conservation occurred in the mid- to late 1970s, at the same time President Jimmy Carter was publicly petitioning citizens to take individual responsibility for conserving resources. The steepest decline in conservation occurred during the Reagan administration, which has been widely criticized for its environmental policies. Willingness to conserve enjoyed a slight surge around 1992-93, when Bill Clinton first took office, but this increase was short-lived. (Al Gore must not have been speaking up too loudly about the environment back then.)

The good news in these trends is that when government responds, so do youth. If our country's leaders follow the example of Al Gore and start to genuinely explore sustainable solutions, it's likely that young people will follow suit. Policymakers and elected officials might also want to note that when youths embrace conservation and pro-environmental attitudes, they are more likely to engage in conventional politics, from writing to officials to giving money to a political campaign, or working on a campaign. Gore argues that in America, "political will is a renewable resource." Perhaps one way to renew this resource is to start focusing more on young people and their understanding of, as well as contribution to, environmental problems.

Source





STILL NO SUCH THING AS A HAPPY GREENIE

Nature cures itself -- but it might go "too far" -- the answer? Government control, of course!

Scientists used to worry that San Francisco Bay didn't have enough phytoplankton, the tiny plants at the base of the food web that support aquatic life like clams and fish and on up to the diving ducks and harbor seals. But new studies from the U.S. Geological Survey show that phytoplankton has increased 75 percent since the early 1990s. From San Pablo Bay to the southern tip of the estuary, levels of the microscopic plants are at their highest since monitoring began 30 years ago, transforming the bay into a richer estuary for wildlife.

The reasons behind the increase remain a mystery. Some experts suspect a decline in the phytoplankton-grazing nonnative clams, a reduction in toxic chemicals and sediment, and a shift in ocean currents.

Yet there is a possibility of too much of a good thing. Some scientists worry that if the trend continues for another 10 years, San Francisco Bay could face the kind of problems from decaying phytoplankton that killed fish in the Chesapeake Bay, the northern Gulf of Mexico and the Baltic Sea. Dying plants suck oxygen out of the water as they decompose, robbing fish and other aquatic wildlife of oxygen.

"San Francisco Bay is a different place than it was 20 years ago,'' said Jim Cloern, a USGS aquatic ecologist in Menlo Park. "When we started studying the bay in the 1970s and 1980s, it had a low productivity of phytoplankton. In the last five years, the level has increased to what is comparable to the estuaries of North America and Europe,'' Cloern said. Cloern plans to present his findings today at the annual meeting of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, a nonprofit research group.

Meanwhile, ongoing studies are attempting to find out why the phytoplankton is doing well in the marine parts of the estuary, but isn't growing as fast in the fresher Suisun Bay and the delta of the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers. Michael Connor, executive director of the San Francisco Estuary Institute, which runs a regional monitoring program for the bay, called phytoplankton growth one of the most important environmental issues for the bay in the next two decades. "That's why looking at trends and understanding the bay is so important," he said.

In 1980, USGS experts and other scientists estimated that the phytoplankton production in the bay was about 200,000 tons of organic carbon a year, equivalent to the biomass of 5,500 humpback whales or the calories to feed 1.8 million people. Since the 75 percent increase of phytoplankton between 1993 and 2004, the tonnage has grown to between 300,000 and 400,000 tons a year, scientists say.

Source





CALIFORNIA'S URINAL OBSESSIONS

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger soon will decide if he wants to save millions of gallons of water annually by using even lower-flush home and public toilets, and a new military favorite that's reminiscent of portable potties -- waterless, no-flush urinals in public buildings. Legislation, which involved an 11th-hour deal between labor and manufacturers to clear the way for non-water urinals, slipped around the public spotlight during lawmakers' end-of-session rush.

Even so, the measure praised as "making California a national leader" in yet another area, drew a few chuckles from lawmakers and bystanders who are already coping with low-flush toilets and were trying to imagine waterless urinals. A Schwarzenegger spokeswoman said Wednesday: "The governor has not taken a position on the bill." He has until the end of the month to do so. AB2496 by Assemblyman John Laird, D-Santa Cruz, is aimed at further conserving water in California by reducing average toilet flushes in homes, schools, office buildings and other structures from 1.6 gallons to 1.3 gallons.

Under the bill, co-authored by Democratic Assembly members Loni Hancock of Berkeley and Gene Mullin of San Mateo, urinal flushes would have to be cut back from a gallon to a half-gallon. Various state regulatory agencies would phase-in the new rules for bathroom and restroom equipment installed beginning Jan. 1, 2009. California is now operating under flush standards adopted in 1992. "Upgrading flush-volume standards will save billions of gallons of water and make California a national leader in water conservation," Laird said.

Since toilets account for a third of indoor water use daily by Californians, the bill would save about 200 million gallons the first year alone -- enough to fill 300 Olympic-sized swimming pools. By the 10th year, savings would amount to more than 8 billion gallons annually. That's more than the total amount of bottled water Americans consumed last year.

Through 11th-hour amendments, the bill also "resolved a long-standing dispute between the California Pipe Trades Council and Falcon WaterFree Technologies, a manufacturer of waterless urinals," said Laird. The measure requires the state Building Standards Commission to ponder how to include the non-water urinals in the state's plumbing codes.

Falcon representatives say waterless urinals are better than the old flush models, where the combination of urine and water causes the smell of ammonia oxide. The Falcon fixture is nonporous so it "funnels virtually every drop of urine" down through a biodegradable liquid sealant layer in a cartridge and down the drain, the company says. The cartridge liquid is lighter than urine so it blocks smell. The military, in particular, has embraced the new technology. The Army Times reported last month that "waterless urinals are the wave of the future, and in the Defense Department, the Army is leading the way." The U.S. Senate Appropriations Committee, noting the Army's use of the urinals, has ordered the Defense Department to submit a report on how the military can more widely follow suit.

Source

***************************************

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.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

Comments? Email me here. My Home Page is here or here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there are mirrors of this site here and here.

*****************************************