This page opposes the building of a 1,700-mile pipeline called the Keystone XL, which would carry diluted bitumen — an acidic crude oil — from Canada’s Alberta tar sands to the Texas Gulf Coast. We have two main concerns: the risk of oil spills along the pipeline, which would traverse highly sensitive terrain, and the fact that the extraction of petroleum from the tar sands creates far more greenhouse emissions than conventional production does.
Archive | Climate & Environment RSS feed for this section
Tar Sands and the Carbon Numbers – NYTimes Opposes Keystone Pipeline
22 AugWill North America Be the New Middle East? | The Nation
10 AugThere’s an even bigger reason to oppose the pipeline, one that should be on the minds of even those of us who live thousands of miles away: Alberta’s tar sands are the continent’s biggest carbon bomb. Indeed, they’re the second largest pool of carbon on planet Earth, following only Saudi Arabia’s slowly dwindling oilfields.
If you could burn all the oil in those tar sands, you’d run the atmosphere’s concentration of carbon dioxide from its current 390 parts per million (enough to cause the climate havoc we’re currently seeing) to nearly 600 parts per million, which would mean if not hell, then at least a world with a similar temperature.
via Will North America Be the New Middle East? | The Nation.
Scientists map religious forests and sacred sites
1 AugThe Oxford researchers estimate that religious groups own about eight per cent of land across round the globe, much of it being covered in forest, and about 15 per cent of the world’s surface is ‘sacred land’ – land that has ‘sacred’ connotations rather than being necessarily owned by faith communities….
The Oxford research team is engaged, firstly, in investigating what legal or official data exists on boundary lines and the rights to the land. Once the status of the land and its boundaries are known, the geographical co-ordinates can be entered onto their database at the Biodiversity Institute.
The researchers will work with groups of many different faiths: those who manage the sacred groves in India, the Shinto shrines in Japan, and the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, which owns 300 fragments of forest including the last remnants of Afro-montane tropical forest containing rare and endangered insects. The religious sites appear to contain a high proportion of species that feature on the IUCN’s Red List (of threatened species).
The Root of the Problem | The Scientist
1 AugLove the microbes, they connect us all to the soil, water, and air.
In all the work being done to illuminate and quantify the importance of belowground dynamics in driving the carbon cycle, the central message is similar: to better understand ecosystem functioning and its response to global change, we must consider feedbacks among plants, microbes, and soil processes. It’s clear that root carbon transfer and resulting carbon cascades through the plant-microbial-soil system play a primary role in driving carbon-cycle feedbacks and in regulating ecosystem responses to climate change.
A Look Into the Ocean’s Future – NYTimes.com
17 JulA new report by an international coalition of marine scientists makes for grim reading. It concludes that the oceans are approaching irreversible, potentially catastrophic change.
The experts, convened by the International Program on the State of the Ocean and the International Union for Conservation of Nature, found that marine “degradation is now happening at a faster rate than predicted.” The oceans have warmed and become more acidic as they absorbed human-generated carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. They are also more oxygen-deprived, because of agricultural runoff and other anthropogenic causes.
State Of The Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress
22 JunIf the current actions contributing to a multifaceted degradation of the world’s oceans aren’t curbed, a mass extinction unlike anything human history has ever seen is coming, an expert panel of scientists warns in an alarming new report.
via State Of The Ocean: ‘Shocking’ Report Warns Of Mass Extinction From Current Rate Of Marine Distress.
What Trees are Appropriate for Your Area?
16 JunThe Arbor Day Foundation has recently completed an extensive updating of U.S. Hardiness Zones based upon data from 5,000 National Climatic Data Center cooperative stations across the continental United States.
* See a map highlighting changes between 1990 and 2006.
* Find your hardiness zone.
* See a map of Alaska and Hawaii.
* See suggested trees for your region.
Geo-Engineering Can Help Save the Planet – NYTimes.com
11 JunA significant amount of CO2 can be withdrawn by ecosystem restoration on a planetary scale. That means reforestation, restoring degraded grasslands and pasturelands and practicing agriculture in ways that restore carbon to the soil. There are additional benefits: forests benefit watersheds, better grasslands provide better grazing and agricultural soils become more fertile.
Truth and Traditions 