Navigator
Facebook
Search
Ads & Recent Photos
Recent Images
Random images
Welcome To Roj Bash Kurdistan 

Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate change

This is where you can talk about every subject (previously it was called shout room)

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu Jan 21, 2021 12:46 pm

What is the Paris climate agreement

One of US President Joe Biden's first acts in office was to start the process of rejoining the Paris climate deal - reversing Donald Trump's decision to withdraw

The historic agreement, which came into force in 2016, united nearly 200 countries in a global pact to tackle climate change.

What are the key elements of the Paris deal?

    The Paris climate deal pledged to keep global temperatures "well below" 2.0C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times and preferably to 1.5C

    Under the agreement, each country sets its own emission-reduction targets, known as national determined contributions (NDCs), which are reviewed every five years to raise ambition

    Rich countries are required to help poorer nations adapt to climate change and switch to renewable energy

    UN scientists say limiting the rise to 1.5C could prevent small island states from sinking beneath the waves, help millions of people avoid the impacts of extreme weather and limit the chances of an ice-free Arctic summer
Why did the US leave?

President Trump announced his intention to leave the deal, in 2017, saying letting countries such as India and China use fossil fuels while the US had to curb its carbon was unfair.

The withdrawal became official on 4 November 2020 - by chance, the day after he lost the presidential election.

The US, which has historically released more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, is the only one to have withdrawn.

How will the US rejoin?

The new administration has signed a statement accepting the terms of the agreement. It was sent to the United Nations, and the US is now set to formally re-enter the agreement in 30 days.

President Biden has pledged to make the fight against climate change a top priority of his administration and rejoin the agreement.

His special envoy on climate change, John Kerry, tweeted that Biden was "restoring America's credibility and commitment" and that the world "must and will raise ambition" to tackle global warming.

How important is the US to the Paris deal?

US engagement is seen as critical to the success of key global climate talks in Glasgow in November.

The 2021 annual conference of the parties (CoP) is expected to finalise the rules of how the Paris agreement will operate in future.

And countries are expected to update their national carbon-cutting plans with tougher targets than they submitted in 2015.

The US will have to rebuild trust after being out of the climate fold for so long, observers say.

And much depends on action being taken to roll back changes made by the Trump administration

What are Joe Biden's plans on climate change?

    put the US on a path to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, which scientists say could have significant implications for the 1.5C target

    restore the US as a world leader in climate action
He has appointed former Secretary of State John Kerry as special climate envoy.

He has also cancelled the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would have carried oil 1,200 miles from Alberta, in Canada, to Nebraska, in the US

John Kerry signs the Paris accord in 2016image copyrightGetty Images
image captionJohn Kerry signs the Paris accord, in 2016 - the former secretary of state will now be the US special climate envoy

How are Biden's actions being greeted internationally?

With the US re-entering the Paris agreement, there were reasons for optimism, former EU Commissioner for Climate Action Connie Hedegaard, who chairs the KR Foundation, said.

"There is a real possibility of having a real restart of the whole global climate agenda now," she said.

Republic of the Marshall Islands climate envoy Tina Eonemto Stege said the world was looking to the Biden administration to reinvigorate commitment to the agreement.

But she warned only 45 countries had submitted their emission targets within the 2020 deadline.

"We are playing catch-up," she said.

"As it did in 2016, the US is really central to driving ambition and action, not just by re-joining the Paris agreement but also by submitting an enhanced NDC that is aligned with the 1.5C temperature goal as soon as possible."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-35073297
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

Sponsor

Sponsor
 

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Fri Jan 22, 2021 10:25 am

British invention liquid-air-fuelled electricity

A ‘mad-man’ from Bishop’s Stortford isn’t always taken seriously, says Peter Dearman, but now his idea is becoming reality

In 25 years of reporting on the environment, I’ve become unshakably convinced in the seriousness and urgency of tackling climate change, but also rather dismayed that our successes in reducing greenhouse gases and promising scientific breakthroughs go largely unreported.

I’ve seen super plants that improve photo-synthesis, cows that belch less methane and next-gen solar panels. But there is one individual who deserves to be as famous in green-tech as Elon Musk for how his invention could help stop global warming.

His name is Peter Dearman and he lives in a semi-detached house in Bishops Stortford. Here, in his garage, he invented a motor that runs on air.

Meeting Dearman for my new BBC Radio 4 series, 39 Ways To Save The Planet, he tells me: “It all started when I was a teenager in the 60s looking at cars and realised that petrol was going to run out, so I started looking for an alternative.”

‘Nobody is going to pay any attention to someone in a shed’

The “fuel” for the Dearman Engine is nitrogen, the gas that makes up 80 per cent of air. If it’s compressed into a liquid, opening a valve leads it to expand rapidly – by 700 times. This can drive a piston, just like exploding petrol vapour, but nothing is burned so no CO2 is emitted. It’s not powerful enough to drive a competitive car, but can generate electricity and more besides.

“I sat on this idea for 20 to 30 years, not being able to do anything with it, because nobody is going to pay any attention to someone in a shed,” Dearman admits. “A ‘mad-man’ from Bishop’s Stortford isn’t always taken seriously”.

Image

But the market for low-carbon technology has changed that perception. The first use is replacing so-called transport refrigeration units, the diesel-powered engines which currently run nearly all the chillers on our refrigerated trucks.

These engines don’t help the lorry move but can still demand 20 per cent of the fuel, are subject to much weaker air-quality regulations and can sit running outside shops for hours. The great thing about the Dearman Engine is that the expanding nitrogen is super cold, so both the engine and the exhaust help chill the big cold wagon.

To take an even bigger bite out of climate change, we need to deploy these low-carbon chillers in poorer countries, where around one third of food is wasted because it rots between the farm and the shop due to a lack of refrigerated transport network. Prevent this with a climate-friendly technology like the Dearman Engine and the prize is huge: approaching 10 per cent of human-induced climate change comes from food being grown and wasted.

The world’s first major liquid air-energy plant

By now, smart readers will be asking where the energy comes from to compress the nitrogen in the first place. If that isn’t climate friendly then it’s a false carbon economy.

Currently, nitrogen is a waste by-product of the much bigger liquid oxygen market, but if it takes off another low carbon source would be required: compression with renewable energy. But far from being a problem, this opens up another application.

The Dearman Engine is behind Highview Power’s 250MWh energy storage facility being built in Manchester. It will use excess electricity from the grid – say on a windy night with the turbines spinning – to compress air in giant tanks. These will then act as energy storage “batteries” and when electricity demand peaks they can open the valve, drive a Dearman engine and produce electricity.

Energy storage technologies are vital on a grid ever more reliant on the vagaries of the sun and the wind and there’s strong interest in this technology based on the Dearman Engine from elsewhere in the UK, North and South America.

As we leave his garage, I ask Peter if he thinks his technology might help save the world and he replies with honesty yet somehow without hubris. “That genuinely was the plan, I could see as a teenager that this had huge potential.” He may soon be moving up from his Hertfordshire semi.

https://inews.co.uk/inews-lifestyle/peo ... obal-en-GB
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Mon Jan 25, 2021 5:46 pm

Source of 95 percent of
food in serious trouble?


Headlines warn the state of our soil is now a serious threat to the environment and crops

But they also say good-quality soil can help save the planet. “No country can withstand the loss of its soil and fertility”, said Michael Gove in 2017, raising fears there are just decades of UK farming left. What are the powers and dangers of this dark material, and how worried should we be?

Why is soil crucial to us?

Soil plays a major part of supporting life on earth

Soil is everywhere, in our parks, gardens, farmland, beneath our feet and under our pavements. But this extraordinary and valuable substance is often overlooked and dismissed as ‘dirt’.

We fundamentally rely on soil. It produces 95 percent of our food, be it the crops we eat, or grasses and other plants to feed animals for meat. And this is just one aspect of the goodness of the ground.

“Soil is one of the most underrated and little understood wonders on our fragile planet”, says Professor Bridget Emmett of the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, in The Miracle of Soil, a short animation to explain the power of soil and the need to care for its health.

To grow, plants need not only minerals from soil, but also carbon dioxide from air in order to make food by photosynthesis – and some of this carbon goes into the ground. Soil stores an extraordinary amount of carbon – three times the amount in the atmosphere and twice the amount in trees and forests. While soil can store or ‘sequester’ carbon, it can also lose it when degraded. The loss of the carbon in poor soils contributes to the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, one of the gases that causes climate change.

In just one gram of soil, it’s estimated there could be 50 thousand species of micro-organisms, and in a single teaspoon there are more individual micro-organisms than the world’s entire human population. This biologically and chemically-rich substance has produced some of the antibiotic compounds that fight disease. “We literally make medicine from our soil”, says Professor Emmett.

Crucially, this rich ‘soil-web’ of underground life creates an open structure. This allows rainwater to seep into the ground, storing moisture for plants to make crops grow well, even in times of drought. It also prevents flooding, an important function as global warming makes extreme and uncertain rainfall more prevalent in the UK and around the world.

Food and farming are part of soil health

The issues of soil relate directly to our food because around 70 percent of the UK’s soils are managed by farming. Soil experts strongly criticise the idea we have a finite number of harvests left, but say there is still an urgent need to look after the ground better.

Modern agriculture has a number of practices that can damage soil health and lock farmers into a cycle of adding more to get less. Ploughing up the ground and other uses of heavy machinery when soil is wet damage its rich biology and vital structure. Monocropping (growing a single crop year after year) arable crops such as wheat and barley extracts nutrition from the soil and encourages weeds and pests.

All this creates the need for chemical inputs of artificial fertilisers, with a heavy carbon footprint, and pesticides and herbicides to help plants grow, further destroying the complex nature of our land. Sugar beet, for example, is estimated to cause 10 percent of UK annual topsoil loss, according to a report by the food and environment campaigning group Feedback.

Poor soil affects us all

Good soil can store water for plants, but bad soil is linked to floods and pollution

Despite its importance, a third of the world’s soils are degraded, says the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organisation. This is leading to a number of problems and costs money – an estimated £1.2bn a year in England and Wales.

Degraded soil is more easily washed away by rain, losing high-quality topsoil important for crop growth. Globally we’re losing soil 10 to 40 times faster than it can be replenished. The UK has relatively deep soils and a mild climate compared to other countries, but in some erosion hotspots we’re still losing up to 2cm of soil a year.

One way soil can become degraded is by being compacted by farm machinery. Heavy rainfall can shoot off the surface of such soil, taking slurry and chemicals into the water system and affecting the ecology of our rivers and coastal waters, says Professor Emmett, putting up costs of our water bills to sort out the problem.

Soil affects the nutritional quality of food, although how this relates to farming is as yet little understood. The Bionutrient Food Association in the US has developed a hand-held monitor that can measure micronutrients in fruit and vegetables. Initial findings show that, for example, in a survey of 650 carrots, some had up to 200 times more polyphenols and up to 90 times antioxidants (both protective substances found in plants) than the least nutritious samples. Its conclusion: “A carrot is not a carrot is not a carrot”. This international project is now getting more eaters and growers to use the monitor to connect nutrition to soils and growing practices.

How do farmers build good soil?

Nature-friendly farming creates diversity above and below the ground

Hertfordshire farmer John Cherry has spent the past 12 years converting his arable and livestock farm to methods that put good soil at the centre of his business. He sows seeds without ploughing up the land and grows a rotation of crops to keep the ground covered year-round. This keeps roots and organic matter in the ground to feed it, maintain its soil-web and stop erosion. Because he no longer needs to rely on chemical inputs, the farm has a richer diversity of birds and insects and stronger plants from stronger soils, both of which take care of pests and plant diseases.

Five years ago, Cherry founded Groundswell, a popular annual show to promote what is termed ‘regenerative farming’. He defines this as “making your soil better at the same time as growing decent food at a decent price”. His output may be slightly lower, but his costs are lower too and his diverse farm is less vulnerable to problems such as flooding and drought, making his business more resilient. Harnessing and nurturing the complexity of soil makes sense to him. “Nature has several hundred million years head-start on us and has got good at producing food and not buying in nutrients”, he says.

Such soil management practices are becoming more mainstream, as can be seen through the Nature Farming Network, and the growth of organic farming, certified in the UK by the appositely-named Soil Association.

Livestock are part of the soil equation. Their manure, with careful management, helps to build fertility. More farmers are going back to the traditions of mixed farming and crop rotations rather than having to buy in fertiliser. Pasture-fed animals don’t rely on feeds made of intensively-farmed cereal crops such as soya.

How does soil fit into our fight against climate change?

Degraded soil doesn’t cope with the heavy and uncertain rainfall of climate change. Reversing soil degradation and restoring fertility by 2030 is an aim of the government’s 25-year Environmental Plan

Something of a ‘Cinderella Superpower’, soil’s status is also changing as the UK finds ways to meet pressing targets for fighting climate change.

The NFU has committed to a Net Zero policy to combat climate change, which includes soil. “It’s going to be really important”, says NFU environment forum chair Phil Jarvis.

To better harness the benefits of soil and to prevent the situation getting worse, soil experts think regular testing is vital. There are 747 different types of soil in the UK and conditions vary from field to field. Through tests, farmers can know the health of their soil and what’s needed. More precise farming means less environmental damage and potentially lower financial costs.

There’s also a need to monitor the situation as a whole. The Sustainable Soils Alliance (SSA), set up to raise the awareness of the importance of soils and lobby for their protection, revealed that at the time of writing (March 2020) soil had been receiving 0.4 percent of what the government spent annually to monitor water, air and soil in England (Scotland and Wales have their own monitoring systems).

Air and water both have a legal framework in place, leading to more active scrutiny. “Soil is crucial to the health of everything else”, says Ellen Fay, SSA co-founder. “We can’t deliver on any of our environmental targets if we don’t deliver for soil, and we’re still a long way from doing that.”

How you can get involved

Good soil produces good food with plenty of nourishment

Because soil is seriously undervalued, to know more is to care more – not only in terms of food but also by recognising soil as a common good that matters to us all. A powerful new documentary Kiss the Ground, available on Netflix and other channels, shows how soil and regenerative farming can help save the planet, and how all of us can get involved in different ways.

An online community hub uksoils has been set up to signpost resources, including home and school activities for children and guidance for cooks, gardeners and farmers.

Award-winning podcast Farmerama shares the voices and ideas of the regenerative farming movement. Its co-creator Abby Rose says its urban audience increasingly appreciates how “because they eat food, they are linked to the farming system and, looking through the climate lens, how much farming and our impact on the world is linked to climate and biodiversity.”

As a simple home exercise, The Slake Test enables you to see how well a small clump of soil holds together in a water over 24 hours. Microbially-strong soil will hold together; more inert soil will collapse, as it did, notoriously, in Dust Bowl America – an iconic example of what can happen when soil goes wrong. In contrast, engaging in the power of soil is to see the positive potential in a substance that is just beyond the door “It’s a message of hope”, says Rose.

It isn’t easy to see the detail of how your food is farmed at the checkout, but you can look out for labels such as organic, biodynamic and LEAF as examples of certification schemes that are centred on the environmental aspects of food. Farmers’ markets and farm shops may display details about sustainability, including soil, and you can talk directly to the producer.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/food/articles/soil
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Wed Jan 27, 2021 11:41 pm

Biden signs orders on climate change

US President Joe Biden has signed a series of executive orders designed to address climate change, including a new ban on some energy drilling

The orders aim to freeze new oil and gas leases on public lands and double offshore wind-produced energy by 2030.

They are expected to meet stiff resistance from the energy industry and come as a sea change from Donald Trump, who cut environmental protections.

"Today is climate day at the White House," said Mr Biden on Wednesday.

"We have already waited too long," Mr Biden told reporters at the White House. "And we can't wait any longer."

Mr Biden said the US "must lead" a global response to the climate change crisis.

"Just like we need a unified national response to Covid-19, we desperately need a unified national response to the climate crisis because there is a climate crisis," he said.

He added that neither challenge could be met by the US alone.

The series of executive orders that Mr Biden signed on Wednesday establishes a White House office of domestic climate policy and announces a summit of leaders to be held in April on Earth Day.

Climate change, under Mr Biden's plan, will become both a "national security" and "foreign policy" priority, officials say.

Mr Biden is also calling upon the US director of national intelligence to prepare an intelligence report on the security implications of climate change.

What do the orders do?

Mr Biden is using his presidential powers to make climate change a central issue of his administration.

The executive orders and memorandum - which cannot go as far as congressional legislation in combating climate change - can be undone by future presidents, as he is currently doing to Mr Trump.

According to a White House statement, Mr Biden is directing the Department of the Interior to pause oil and gas drilling leases on federal lands and water "to the extent possible" and to launch a review of existing energy leases.

Mr Biden aims to conserve at least 30% of federal lands and oceans by 2030.

According to the New York Times, fossil fuel extraction on public lands accounts for almost a quarter of all US carbon dioxide emissions.

Mr Biden's order does not specifically address private property owners or state-held public lands.

He has signed more than three dozen executive orders in his first week in office, more than any of his predecessors.

Critics note he told ABC News while campaigning last October that only a "dictator" would use executive orders excessively. "We're a democracy," said Mr Biden, whose fellow Democrats now control all of Congress. "We need consensus."

What other climate measures is he taking?

Mr Biden's "whole-of-government" approach, the White House says, creates the position National Climate Advisor who will lead the office of Domestic Climate Policy at the White House.

The presidential climate envoy, former Secretary of State John Kerry, conceded to reporters on Wednesday that it would make little difference in the global climate change fight if the US reduced its emissions to zero.

Mr Biden knows Paris [climate accord] alone is not enough, Mr Kerry said. Not when almost 90% of all of the planet's global emissions come from outside of US borders. We could go to zero tomorrow and the problem isn't solved.

The orders also direct federal agencies to prepare for the impact of climate change on their operations and improve access to information on the issue.

Mr Biden also directed agencies to only make evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data.

Pausing the extraction of oil and gas from federal lands is the Biden administration's tremulous first step onto the toes of the US oil and gas industry.

Federal drilling is a key part of their output - providing around 22% of US oil production and 12% of gas, according to the American Petroleum Institute (API).

The API is unhappy with the move, suggesting that any ban will lead to greater reliance on imports as the US economy recovers and needs more energy.

But experts reject that argument, pointing out that drilling on public lands is likely to continue to expand even if a moratorium becomes a ban.

That's because only half of applications for extraction approved between 2014 and 2019 have actually been used.

Moving towards a ban on federal leases fulfils a campaign pledge and will reassure environmentalists that Joe Biden is the real deal when it comes to climate change. But making significant inroads into US carbon output will probably require legislation to be put before Congress.

That will be the true test of the Biden climate commitment.

What do the orders say about jobs?

Mr Biden's critics say his climate initiatives will cut jobs as the US already suffers from record unemployment numbers because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

He received a storm of criticism for last week's executive order halting construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, that would have transported oil from Canada through the US.

But the Biden White House is trying to get ahead of more criticism by addressing job creation.

"When I think of climate change, I think of jobs," Mr Biden said, arguing that "millions" of Americans will be able to get jobs "modernising our water systems, transportation, our energy infrastructure - to withstand the impacts of extreme climate".

His plan directs federal agencies to "identify new opportunities to spur innovation, commercialisation, and deployment of clean energy technologies and infrastructure".

It calls for the creation of a "Civilian Climate Corps Initiative" - an initiative Biden officials say will "put a new generation of Americans to work conserving and restoring public lands and waters".

How does it differ from Trump?

During his four years in office, Mr Trump expanded the number of energy leases on environmentally sensitive national lands.

The US achieved a level of energy independence in his term, becoming a net petroleum exporter, a milestone for which he claimed credit.

Mr Trump also rolled back dozens of rules designed to ensure access to clean air and water, protections for wildlife, and the containment of dangerous chemicals and pollutants.

Some of the changes, including one that sought to relax pollution rules affecting coal and gas-burning power plants, were overturned by federal courts.

Mr Trump - who once called climate change a hoax - also took the US out of the Paris climate accords, whereas Mr Biden made moves to re-join the global agreement on his first day in office.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-55829189
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu Jan 28, 2021 2:31 pm

Bahamas Bans Single Use Plastic

Kristal and her students are fighting to eradicate ocean plastic

Image

Kristal Ambrose founded The Bahamas Plastic Movement in 2013 and aims to tackle the serious problem of plastic pollution in The Bahamas.

The 29-year-old started tuition-free youth camps in order to educate the country's children and also drafted a bill which she took to the environment minister.

Her work meant that The Bahamas introduced a nationwide ban on single-use plastic in 2020.

Link To Video:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-lat ... a-55834814
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu Jan 28, 2021 4:38 pm

Sulaimani's Trees Under Threat

Treasured trees of Sulaimani's Mama Yara hill under threat

Image

Mama Yara hill, located north of the city of Sulaimani, is remembered fondly by locals for decades of Newroz celebrations. In recent times, many of the cultural site’s trees have burned or been cut down.

For Sarwar Ahmed, a resident of the Mama Yara neighbourhood, these trees are a big part of his childhood memories.

“When I see this area, I feel very uncomfortable. I feel like my childhood memories are going to disappear,” Ahmed told Rudaw on Monday.

Abdullah Qadir, 60, is also worried about the fate of his beloved trees.

“I have been living in this area for years. I am full of sorrow because of these trees being cut down. It is actually a very unfortunate scene,” said Qadir, another long-time resident of the area, on Monday.

Once housing an abundance of trees, Mama Yara hill used to be run by Sulaimani’s forest directorate. It had rangers overseeing the property until two years ago.

Now under the supervision of the Sulaimani municipality, the hill has been left with no employees looking after it.

“We hope that the city’s folklore site will be preserved by all of us. Every single person in Sulaimani is responsible for preserving Mama Yara hill,” Sardasht Rafiq, head of Sulaimani municipality’s media office, told Rudaw, noting that they have confiscated the saws of people cutting down the hill’s trees.

The tomb of many famous Kurdish figures is located on Mama Yara hill, among them is the great Kurdish poet Piramerd.

During his lifetime, he would set a fire on Mama Yara hill during Newroz celebrations.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/lifestyle/28012021
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Sun Jan 31, 2021 3:06 am

Japan whale hunting

A video showing the final, brutal 20 minutes of a minke whale's life at the hands of Japanese fishermen sent a ripple of shock through international media

But activists says the footage of the whale being slowly drowned, after becoming trapped in their nets, has merely highlighted an entirely legal loophole which is used to kill dozens of whales each year.

"This is neither an exceptional nor unexpected occurrence," Mark Simmonds, senior marine scientist at Humane Society International (HSI), said in a release after the whale's death.

"But what is exceptional is that this whole process was witnessed and filmed for the world to see."

Indeed, the young mammal's death once again has exposed the gaping chasm between Japan and the wider world when it comes to whale hunting: activists see a cruel and avoidable death, but the fishermen see a gift from the sea.

It took 20 minutes for the whale to die

Japan - like a number of other nations around the world - has a centuries-long tradition of whale hunting. After the Second World War, as the country struggled to feed its population, whale meat became a staple of the Japanese table.

But for those who support whale hunting, it goes further than simply food on the plate: it is a source of national pride.

Yet for more than 30 years, fishermen were not allowed to hunt whales off the coast of Japan. The country had signed up to the International Whaling Commission (IWC) following a decades of overfishing which had pushed whale populations to the brink of extinction.

In July 2019, the whaling boats set off once more, despite demand for the meat having dropped. Supporters spoke to the BBC at the time of their relief that "the culture and way of life will be passed on to the next generation".

    There were strict quotas in place, allowing for responsible hunting. The first year, the quota allowed for some 52 minke, which are not endangered, as well as 150 Bryde's and 25 sei whales, to be caught over the course of the season - a total of 227. In 2020 and 2021, that total rose to 383
The numbers are split between the official whalers, the government and a third category, known as "by-catch". This year, 37 whales can be butchered and sold by fisherman under this heading.

The minke whose death was caught on camera was one of the 37 considered "by-catch" - a whale which no one set out to catch, but which just happened to swim into the wrong place, at the wrong time.

Ren Yabuki, the head of Japanese animal rights NGO Life Investigation Agency (LIA), first spotted the whale trapped in the permanent net off Taiji - the same town made famous for its annual dolphin hunt in The Cove - on 24 December.

Initially, he hoped the fishermen would raise the nets and release the whale. He watched as "one guy tried for 10 minutes".

"But they stopped trying," he recalls. He suspected the fishermen "did not want to open the net because inside there were too many fish".

Over the course of the next 20 days, he lobbied the association which owns the net to work to release the whale. He also began to upload the videos his drone filmed each day, allowing people around the world to watch as the whale became more desperate, at times attacking the net, at times just spinning in the confined space.

But then, on 11 January, he watched helplessly as two boats manoeuvred the whale so it was trapped between them. He then watched as they caught and held the whale's thrashing tail, forcing its head underwater for 20 minutes, until it finally drowned.

By this time, the boat was already covered in the whales blood, lost as it injured itself trying to get free.

Days after the minke's death, undercover footage recorded neatly packaged whale meat, priced at 398 yen ($3.80; £2.77) per 100g, in the local supermarket. Of course, it may not have been the whale which died off Taiji.

For supporters of whale hunting, there was nothing amiss with what the drone captured that day.

"A number of Japanese people feel sympathy to such [an] animal... trapped in a set net and wish it [to] be released, if possible," acknowledged Hideki Moronuki, director for fisheries negotiations at the Fisheries Agency, in an email to the BBC.

"However, at the same time, there are many people who consider that such an animal is a bounty from the ocean and has to be fully used with a great gratitude."

For the fishermen, the whale getting trapped in the net was a bonus. Under usual circumstances, they don't have the right licence to catch and sell whales.

But this, say activists, is where the quota system falls down, as it disincentives fishermen from releasing the mammals. Mr Simmonds, of the HSI, suggests it goes further than that even.

"The term 'bycatch' relates to accidental or incidental capture of non-target animals in all fishing operations," he tells the BBC. "The capture of whales in traps in Japan is not bycatch."

In fact, he argues that catches like this are both "predictable and deliberate".

But just because they end up in the net doesn't mean they will be killed.

In this net alone three whales have been caught in six weeks, including the minke. The first, another minke whale caught in late November, was released the next day. The third, a humpback whale, was found dead floating tangled in the nets the day after the second minke was killed.

Taiji Fisheries Association has argued that it was left with no choice but to kill the second whale. "The tide is fast and it is difficult to let go of the whale," it said in a statement at the time.

And Mr Moronuki, director for fisheries negotiations at the Fisheries Agency, adds in his email that there was no other way to kill the animal when they finally decided to act.

"When it was decided to kill the animal the sea condition was too harsh to take other killing method," he wrote in his email.

"I believe that, for those reasons, most of Japanese people considered that a sole realistic and pragmatic method had been chosen and did not take any emotional nor commotional action."

But for Mr Yabuki and Mr Simmonds, it is the brutality of the animals death which lingers on.

"My hand was shaking with upset - it was so, so sad. I had so much anger," Mr Yabuki told the BBC. "I want to rescue the whale, to release. But I could not."

"Forcing underwater the head of a mammal evolved to hold its breath for long periods, so that it slowly runs out of oxygen, is an acutely cruel killing method by any standards," Mr Simmonds added.

Activists hope that videos like the one of the minke's death will inspire change in Japan. But there is little will from the government to roll back on a policy which has proved popular among Japan's fishing communities, meaning this video is unlikely to be the last one the world sees.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-55714815
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Mon Feb 01, 2021 1:53 am

Nineveh vets kill 400 stray dogs

Around 400 dogs were poisoned and killed in three days by officials and veterinarians in the town of Sinune, Nineveh province, the chief veterinarian told Rudaw on Saturday, claiming the dogs had “disturbed” the people

“In the past three days, we started putting out poison in coordination with Shingal police so that the stray dogs eat it and die. This is because they had disturbed people in the region,” said Khalaf Haidar, head of veterinarians in Sinune.

Sinune is located in the province’s northern Shingal district.

After three days of setting out poison, “400 dogs have died,” said Haidar.

Head of veterinaries in Mosul, Dr. Oday al-Abadi, said the problem of stray dogs had worsened in the wake of the war with the Islamic State (ISIS).

“In Nineveh, after the liberation of the city from Daesh [ISIS], the stray dogs increased in large numbers and they started eating corpses of Daesh, so they became unbelievably aggressive,” he said.

Stray dogs are frequently attacking people, even killing a child, he added.

Activists in the Kurdistan Region condemned the poisoning of dogs and instead urged authorities to neuter the animals

“Yes, we do think that stray dogs have increased in numbers, and yes we see that in some places they have created problems and danger. But what the head of the municipalities and the mayors and even the people don’t know is that this is not a solution.

This is the worst type of solution for this problem,” said Jutyar Zhahlayi, a professor and founding member of Sulaimani-based PAK organization for animal protection.

“We have started a project called TNR (trap–neuter–release), meaning catching those dogs, neutering them, then sending them back to their environment,” said Zhazhlayi

PAK organization has neutered around 100 dogs in the past two and a half months in Sulaimani.

“Killing stray dogs is a huge disaster,” said Sleman Tamar, head of Kurdistan Organization for Protecting Animal Rights in Duhok. “In this age and time, killing dogs in this way and manner is against every principle and law on animal rights internationally.”

Iraqi law allows the killing of stray animals X(

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/31012021
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Wed Feb 03, 2021 5:01 pm

Court convicts French state for
failure to address climate crisis


A Paris court has convicted the French state of failing to address the climate crisis and not keeping its promises to tackle greenhouse gas emissions

In what has been hailed as a historic ruling, the court found the state guilty of “non-respect of its engagements” aimed at combating global warming.

Billed the “affair of the century”, the legal case was brought by four French environmental groups after a petition signed by 2.3 million people.

“This is an historic win for climate justice. The decision not only takes into consideration what scientists say and what people want from French public policies, but it should also inspire people all over the world to hold their governments accountable for climate change in their courts,” said Jean-François Julliard, the executive director of Greenpeace France, one of the plaintiffs.

He said the judgment would be used to push the French state to act against the climate emergency. “No more blah blah,” he added.

Cécilia Rinaudo, the director of Notre Affaire à Tous (It’s Everyone’s Business), another plaintiff, said it was an “immense victory” for climate activists around the world.

“It’s a victory for all the people who are already facing the devastating impact of the climate crisis that our leaders fail to tackle. The time has come for justice,” Rinaudo said.

“This legal action has brought millions of people together in a common fight: the fight for our future. The judge’s landmark decision proves that France’s climate inaction is no longer tolerable, it is illegal. But the fight is not over. Recognising the state’s inaction is only a first step towards the implementation of concrete and efficient measures to combat climate change.”

The court ruled that compensation for “ecological damage” was admissible, and declared the state “should be held liable for part of this damage if it had failed to meet its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions”.

It did not uphold a claim for symbolic compensation, saying compensation should be made “in kind”, with damages awarded “only if the reparation measures were impossible or insufficient”.

However, the court ruled that the applicants were entitled to seek compensation in kind for the “ecological damage caused by France’s failure to comply with the targets it had set for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It said this needed further investigation and gave the state two months to respond.

It awarded each organisation a symbolic €1 for “moral prejudice”, saying the state’s failure to honour its climate commitments was “detrimental to the collective interest”.

Wednesday’s judgment was hailed as “revolutionary” by the four NGOs – including Greenpeace France and Oxfam France – that lodged the formal complaint with the French prime minister’s office in December 2018. When they received what they considered an inadequate response, they filed a legal case in March 2019.

The Paris agreement signed five years ago aimed to limit global warming to less than 2C above pre-industrial levels. Donald Trump pulled the US out of the deal in 2017, though Joe Biden plans to rejoin. Environmental experts say governments, including the French administration, have failed to meet their commitments.

The French government has pledged to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 40% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050.

NGOs say the state is exceeding its carbon budgets and is not moving quickly enough to renovate buildings to make them energy efficient, or to develop renewable energy. They claim this is having a serious impact on the daily quality of life and health of people in France.

In a report last July, France’s High Council for the Climate severely criticised government policies. “Climate action is not up to the challenges and objectives,” it said.

France’s greenhouse gas emission dropped by 0.9% in 2018-19, when the annual drop needed to reach its targets is 1.5% until 2025 and 3.2% afterwards.

In a written defence, the French government rejected accusations of inaction and asked the court to throw out any claim for compensation. It argued that the state could not be held uniquely responsible for climate change when it was not responsible for all global emissions.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment ... ate-crisis
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Thu Feb 04, 2021 2:46 pm

Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Imagine

Peter Kalmus, out of his mind, stumbled back toward the car. It was all happening. All the stuff he’d been trying to get others to see, and failing to get others to see — it was all here

The day before, when his family started their Labor Day backpacking trip along the oak-lined dry creek bed in Romero Canyon, in the mountains east of Santa Barbara, the temperature had been 105 degrees. Now it was 110 degrees, and under his backpack, his “large mammalian self,” as Peter called his body, was more than just overheating. He was melting down. Everything felt wrong. His brain felt wrong and the planet felt wrong, and everything that lived on the planet felt wrong, off-kilter, in the wrong place.

Nearing the trailhead, Peter’s mind death-spiralled: What’s next summer going to bring? How hot will it be in 10 years? Yes, the data showed that the temperature would only rise per decade by a few tenths of a degree Celsius. But those tenths would add up and the extreme temperatures would rise even faster, and while Peter’s big mammal body could handle 100 degrees, sort of, 110 drove him crazy. That was just not a friendly climate for a human. 110 degrees was hostile, an alien planet.

Lizards fried, right there on the rocks. Elsewhere, songbirds fell out of the sky. There was more human conflict, just as the researchers promised. Not outright violence, not here, not yet. But Peter’s kids were pissed and his wife was pissed and the salience that he’d so desperately wanted others to feel — “salience” being the term of choice in the climate community for the gut-level understanding that climate change isn’t going to be a problem in the future, it is a crisis now — that salience was here. The full catastrophe was here (both in the planetary and the Zorba the Greek sense: “Wife. Children. House. Everything. The full catastrophe”). To cool down, Peter, a climate scientist who studied coral reefs, had stood in a stream for an hour, like a man might stand at a morgue waiting to identify a loved one’s body, irritated by his powerlessness, massively depressed. He found no thrill in the fact that he’d been right.

Sharon Kunde, Peter’s wife, found no thrill in the situation either, though her body felt fine. It was just hot … OK, very hot. Her husband was decompensating. The trip sucked.

“I was losing it,” Peter later recalled as we sat on their front porch on a far-too-warm November afternoon in Altadena, California, just below the San Gabriel Mountains.

“Yeah,” Sharon said.

“Losing my grip.”

“Yeah.”

“Poor Sharon is the closest person to me, and I share everything with her.”

Sometimes everything is both too much and not enough. George Marshall opened his book, “Don’t Even Think About It: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Ignore Climate Change,” with the parable of Jan Karski, a young Polish resistance fighter who, in 1943, met in person with Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, who was both a Jew and widely regarded as one of the great minds of his generation. Karski briefed the justice on what he’d seen firsthand: the pillage of the Warsaw Ghetto, the Belzec death camp. Afterward, Frankfurter said, “I do not believe you.”

The Polish ambassador, who had arranged the meeting on the recommendation of President Franklin Roosevelt, interrupted to defend Karski’s account.

“I did not say that he is lying,” Frankfurter explained. “I said that I didn’t believe him. It’s a different thing. My mind, my heart — they are made in such a way that I cannot accept. No no no.”

Sharon, too, possessed a self-protective mind and heart. A high school English teacher and practiced stoic from her Midwestern German Lutheran childhood, she didn’t believe in saying things you were not yet prepared to act upon. “We find it difficult to understand each other on this topic,” Sharon, 46, said of her husband’s climate fixation.

Yet while Sharon was preternaturally contained, Peter was a yard sale, whole self out in the open. At 47, he worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab, studying which reefs might survive the longest as the oceans warm. He had more twinkle in his eye that one might expect for a man possessed by planetary demise. But he often held his head in his hands like a 50-pound kettlebell. Every time he heard a plane fly overhead, he muttered, “Fossil fuel noise.”

For years, in articles in Yes! magazine, in op-eds in the Los Angeles Times, in his book “Being the Change: Live Well and Spark a Climate Revolution,” on social media, Peter had been pleading, begging for people to pay attention to the global emergency. “Is this my personal hell?” he tweeted this past fall. “That I have to spend my entire life desperately trying to convince everyone NOT TO DESTROY THE FUCKING EARTH?”

His pain was transfixing, a case study in a fundamental climate riddle: How do you confront the truth of climate change when the very act of letting it in risked toppling your sanity? There is too much grief, too much suffering to bear. So we intellectualize. We rationalize. And too often, without even allowing ourselves to know we’re doing it, we turn away. At virtually every level — personal, political, policy, corporate — we repeat this pattern. We fail, or don’t even try, to rise to the challenge.

Yes, there are the behemoth forces of power and money reinforcing the status quo. But even those of us who firmly believe we care very often fail to translate that caring into much action. We make polite, perhaps even impassioned conversation. We say smart climate things in the boardroom or classroom or kitchen or on the campaign trail. And then … there’s a gap, a great nothingness and inertia. What happens if a human — or to be precise, a climate scientist, both privileged and cursed to understand the depth of the problem — lets the full catastrophe in?

Once Peter, Sharon and their 12- and 14-year-old sons set their packs down at the car on that infernal Labor Day weekend, they blasted the air conditioning, then stopped for Gatorade and Flamin’ Hot Doritos to try to recover from their trip. But the heat had descended not just on Peter’s big mammal body but on millions of acres of dry cheatgrass and oak chaparral.

That same afternoon, around 1 p.m., the Bobcat fire started five miles from their house in the Los Angeles hills.

Peter’s climate obsession started, as many obsessions do, with the cross-wiring of exuberance and fear. In late 2005, Sharon got pregnant with their first child, and in the throes of joy and panic that accompanied impending fatherhood, Peter attended the weekly physics colloquium at Columbia University, where he was working on an astrophysics Ph.D. The topic that day was the energy imbalance in the planet — how more energy was coming into earth’s atmosphere from the sun than our atmosphere was radiating back out into space. Peter was rapt.

He’d grown up a nerdy Catholic Boy Scout in suburban Chicago, and had always been, as his sister Audrey Kalmus said, someone who “jumped into things he believed in with three feet.” He’d met Sharon at Harvard. They’d moved to New York so she could earn a teaching degree. For a while, before returning to school, Peter had made good money on Wall Street writing code. Now here he was hearing, really hearing for the first time, that the planet, his son’s future home, was going to roast. Full stop.

This was a catastrophe — a physical, physics catastrophe, and here he was, a physicist about to have a son. He exited the lecture hall in a daze. “I was kind of like, ‘Are we just going to pretend this is like a normal scientific talk?’” he told me, recalling his thoughts. “We’re talking about the end of life on Earth as we know it.”

For the next eight months, Peter walked around Manhattan, “freaking out in my brain,” he said, like “one of those end-is-near people with the sandwich boards.” He tried converting Columbia’s undergraduate green groups to his cause. Did they care about the environment? Yes. Did they care about the planetary catastrophe? Well, yes, of course they did, but they were going to stick with their project of getting plastic bags out of dining halls, OK?

He tried lobbying the university administrators to switch to wind power. Couldn’t even get a meeting. Nothing made sense. Why was Al Gore spending a fortune to make a climate movie only to flinch at the end of “An Inconvenient Truth” and say, essentially, Just buy more efficient light bulbs? Almost nobody saw it — really saw it. WE ARE HAVING AN EMERGENCY. There was only one possible endgame here if humans didn’t stop burning fossil fuels, fast: global chaos, mass violence, miserable deaths.

Peter and Sharon’s friends came over to meet and bless their baby, Braird, shortly after he was born in June 2006. All the guests went around the room offering wishes for the unborn child. When Peter’s turn came, he said he hoped that his son didn’t get shot at in climate-induced barbarity and that he did not starve.
Andrew White, special to ProPublica

Peter and Sharon rented a house with a big avocado tree when they moved to California, in 2008, for Peter’s dream postdoc studying gravitational waves at Caltech. Braird was 2 and Sharon was nursing newborn Zane. Peter and Sharon had both come from families with four kids, and they didn’t want Braird to be an only child — and having a child when you want one is also immeasurably wonderful, too wonderful, in this case, to give up. (They did later decide to forgo a third.)

In Peter’s first run at grassroots activism, he organized a climate protest with a friend. Only two people showed up. Peter joined Transition Pasadena, a community group dedicated to producing “a more resilient city and for living lighter on our Earth.” He also said he tried pushing “to focus the group around global heating and climate breakdown,” but the members, he said, wanted to talk about “gardening and city council meetings,” not the apocalypse, so Peter and Transition Pasadena parted ways.

Four years into climate awakening and action, Peter felt he had accomplished nearly zero. One night, frustrated with inaction and disgusted with fossil fuel use, he sat at his computer and calculated the sources of all his own emissions so he could go about reducing them.

In the morning he presented Sharon with a pie chart.

This was one of those moments that both distorted and crystalized the scale problems inherent in addressing climate change, the personal and the planetary, the insignificant and the enormous, warping and reverberating as if modulated by a wah-wah pedal. Peter himself believed that you can’t fix climate change with individual virtue any more than you can fix systemic racism that way. But he also knew, at some point, “You have to burn your ships on the beach,” as Richard Reiss, a climate educator and fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Cities at Hunter College, put it. You need to commit, perhaps even create drama, and make real changes in your life.

By far the biggest wedge of the pie chart was Peter flying to scientific meetings and conferences. For the family, if Peter quit flying, it meant he’d be home more to help with the kids. Sharon reserved the right to keep flying if she wanted. Win-win.

Peter’s second-largest source of emissions was food. So he started growing artichokes, eggplant, kale and squash, plus tending fruit trees, and that was great. Then he started composting — OK, that’s great, too. He also started keeping bees and raising chickens, and soon raccoons and possums discovered the chickens and Peter began running outside in his underwear in the middle of the night when he heard the chickens scream. Baby chicks lived in the house, which the boys loved. Braird got stung by bees while Sharon was at a meditation retreat and it turned out Braird was allergic and he went into shock.

Next came dumpster diving (which eventually — and thankfully — morphed into an arrangement with Trader Joe’s to pick up their unsellable food every other Sunday night). Peter’s haul — “seven or eight boxes,” according to Sharon; “three boxes,” according to Peter — included dozens of eggs with only one broken. Flats of (mostly not moldy) strawberries. Bread past its sell-by date. Peter did his best to put things away before he fell asleep because waking up to the mess drove Sharon nuts. But … it was a lot. Low-carbon living was a lot.
Andrew White, special to ProPublica

They stopped using the gas dryer. They stopped shitting in the flush toilet and started practicing “humanure,” composting their own crap. Sharon had lived with an outhouse in Mongolia, “so that was something I was used to,” she said. Plus, to be honest, she liked the local, organic anti-capitalist politics of it. “Marx writes about this in ‘Capital, Volume 1’ that one of the reasons Europeans started to use chemical fertilizers is because people started to move into the cities and off of the land, … and people stopped pooping out in the countryside, so it became less fertile.”

The main problem, for Sharon, was that their bathroom was small and the composting toilet was inside. They used eucalyptus leaves to try to cover up the smell, but then little bits of leaves got all over the bathroom, too. After a while Peter moved the composting toilet outdoors. He also built an outdoor shower that Sharon found quite lovely, “rustic and California.”

Sharon commiserated with a friend who was married to a priest. How do you have an equal marriage with a man who’s trying to save the world? The priest’s wife, too, found “it impossible for her to have any space for herself,” Sharon said. “Because he was called by God to minister to people. When she tried to do her own thing, it wasn’t as important as his.” Motherhood was hard enough. Sharon wanted to write a novel. She wanted to write poetry. She wanted to go for a run, or even a walk, in peace. “His dreams were so much more heroic and important that I had to sort of, I don’t know,” she said. “I had to go along with it.”

The most trying component of the low-carbon experiment for Sharon was the 1985 Mercedes that Peter converted to biodiesel. Maeby, as Sharon hate-named the car — as in Maeby we’ll get there, Maeby we won’t — arrived in their lives in 2011, just as Sharon was starting an English Ph.D. at UC Irvine and commuting 50 miles each way.

Yes, they took family summer road trips to go camping and visit friends. But on the winter trips to visit their families in the Midwest, the grease coagulated in the cold, which made Maeby break down more. Some nights Sharon cried in the motel room, but “when it’s daytime it all seemed better,” she said. She talked about renting a car or even flying home but never did. Still, late one night on a very cold, dark and lonely Utah highway when Peter was under the broken-down car, and Braird and Zane were in the back seat, screaming, and Sharon was revving the engine at Peter’s request — she started to wonder if she had Stockholm syndrome.

Sometimes, Sharon thought of Peter as being like “John the Baptist, a voice in the wilderness, crying out, ‘Repent, repent!’” This was said with love but also annoyance. As Larissa MacFarquhar explored in her book “Strangers Drowning,” extreme do-gooders often provoke us. We find them ridiculous, self-righteous, sometimes even perverse or narcissistic moralists for whom, MacFarquhar writes, “It is always wartime.”

Just figuring out how to raise children on the Earth, right now, presented so many existential questions. Peter often indulged in a half-joking zombie apocalypse mentality. He wanted to teach his boys to grow crops, to defend themselves, to fix things. “I do think we need to be talking about the collapse of civilization and the deaths of billions of people,” he said.

When she was at her gloomiest, Sharon, too, felt scared to leave her sons on this planet, but she also called on her tight-lipped German upbringing to create a bubble of denialist peace. “Things you don’t want to confront, just ignore it. Pretend it’s not there,” she said. Her “ethics of care,” as she called it, involved encouraging the boys to take music lessons, read books and even meditate when she could persuade them to join her. She wanted to prepare her sons to be creative and resilient. If the planet was crumbling, they’d need rich interior lives.

Did Sharon want the boys to worry? “I don’t know, I don’t know,” she said. That was the never-ending, urgent, timeless question. How much do we want our children to understand about the horrors of the world?

In 2012, Peter switched fields, from astrophysics to earth science, because he just couldn’t stop obsessing. This meant backpedaling in his career, quitting the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) experiment, three founding members of which would go on to win the 2017 Nobel Prize in physics. Still, even his new job was a strange fit. Science itself — with its cultural terror of appearing biased — was a strange fit.

Peter had given up expecting emotional comfort. He’d given up on decorum. He had nightmares about being on planes. “The emissions, you know,” he said. “It feels like the plane is flying on ground-up babies to me.” Even the simplest decisions led him into deep philosophical rifts. The boys’ music lessons, to Peter, seemed woefully, almost willfully anachronistic, a literal fiddling while Rome or Los Angeles burned.

Peter kept trying to figure out ways to make his voice heard. He organized climate cafes, modeled on death cafes, places for people to gather to share grief (Sharon did not attend). He started No Fly Climate Sci, a grassroots group of academic institutions and individual scientists committed to flying less. He kept writing, posting, organizing, talking. This was not always well received. Before the pandemic, Peter stood on the sidelines of Braird’s soccer games when it was 113 degrees. “And I’d be telling the other parents: This is climate change,” he said. “And, you know, they don’t want to hear that during a soccer game. But I can’t not do it. I can’t.”

WE ARE HAVING AN EMERGENCY — Peter thought that all day, every day. “Here I am with a retirement account,” Peter said. Did he need a retirement account? What was the world going to be like in 2060, when he was an old man? He’d been careful with himself not to become a doomer. Doomers, in his mind, were selfish.

They’d given up on the greater good and retreated to their own bunkers, leaving the rest of us to burn. Still, despite Peter’s commitment to keep working toward global change, Sharon found Peter’s florid negativity distasteful at times. “There’s almost like a pornographic fascination with ‘Oh, I’m going to imagine just how bad everything is going to be,’” she said.

Sharon staged minor rebellions to maintain a sense of self — little stuff, like using lots of hot water when she did the dishes, and bigger stuff, like she stopped talking sometimes. Braird and Zane, too, each absorbed and reacted to Peter’s passionate cri de coeur in their own ways. Zane, the younger one, started doing his own regular,

Greta Thunberg-style climate strikes in front of city hall. Braird, the older, meanwhile, was entering his teens, differentiating and waxing nihilistic. When asked what he wanted to do with his future, Braird said, “What future?” When asked what he thought about climate change, he sunk a dagger into his father’s heart like only a child can. Braird said, “I don’t really think about it.”

On the Tuesday evening after Labor Day, two days after the family returned from their infernal backpacking, Peter, still recovering from heat exhaustion, stood at the sink doing dishes. Braird played League of Legends on his bed. Sharon sat meditating, as she did from 7-8 p.m. each night. Then the emergency alerts blew up their phones. An evacuation warning, the Bobcat fire.

The day before, in the ongoing horrible heat, they’d taped their windows shut against the smoke but they hadn’t packed go bags. They never really believed their house would burn. The state was a climate warzone. Military helicopters had rescued 200 people trapped in a Sierra lake by the Creek fire, which had thrown up a plume of flames 50,000 feet. Cal Fire was predicting the Bobcat fire would not be contained for six weeks.

Sharon finished meditating. Then she started photographing all their stuff, including the insides of closets and drawers, because that’s what insurance adjusters tell you to do: Document your property so you can make a stronger claim. Peter snapped. He didn’t care about the pictures or the insurance. He just wanted to let the house incinerate. He felt done pretending that anything was normal, and he decided that now would be a good time to tell Sharon that he’d felt frustrated and gaslit by her all these years.

WE NEVER EVEN TALK ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE! DO YOU EVEN CARE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE?” he said. This did not go well.

She threw a laundry basket. “YOU HAVE GOT TO BE FUCKING KIDDING ME,” she shouted. “Our entire lives are about climate change.”

There it was, that gap we build around knowing and integrating, to protect our own lives and minds. Yet after the fight, after finally saying aloud what he’d been thinking for almost 15 years, Peter felt better. Not because anything was different. Nothing was different. The situation remained unshakably, cosmically wrong.

The only reason to care about insurance, books, paintings, the house, was if you believed that there would be a stable planet on which to enjoy those things in 20 or 40 or 80 years. If you believe there’d be a “planet with seasons, where you can grow food and have water, and you can go outside without dying from heatstroke,” Peter said. “I don’t have that anymore, that sense of stability.”

But he also knew, deep down, that Sharon could not, and should not, give that up. She was a more anxious person than he was. They both knew that. “For me to stay sane, there’s only so much I can take,” Sharon said. Earlier on the night of their big fight they’d watched “The Handmaid’s Tale,” as they did each Tuesday. Sharon often thought about the main character, June.

“You have to moderate how you think. You have to think in little chunks, so you can endure, just like June does,” she told me. “You have to make sacrifices so you can survive. If you can survive to fight another day, then maybe the right opportunity will present itself. You can’t kill yourself — well, you can. But that’s not the option I want to take.”

Maeby is now gone. Peter drives an electric car. The composting toilet remains outside, though Peter admits, “The other three family members are not interested in contributing at all.” Peter’s current project is making climate ads. Is this how he can tell the story of what is happening to the world in a way that will make people not just hear and retreat but act? He thinks about this all the time. How do you describe an intolerable problem in a way that listeners — even you, dear reader — will truly let in?

All through October and November, the Bobcat fire continued to burn. It grew to 115,000 acres. Its 300-foot-high flames licked up against Mount Wilson Observatory, where scientists first proved the existence of a universe outside the Milky Way. The fire continued to burn well into December, when UN Secretary-General António Guterres urged, with middling effect, the nations of the world to declare a climate emergency. So far, 38 have done so. The United States is not one of them.

In January, a team of 19 climate scientists published a paper, “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” that said, “The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms — including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts.” The language of this sentence could not be more dire. It makes the mind go numb.

So how, with our limited human minds, do we attend enough to make real progress? How do we not flinch and look away? The truth of what is happening shakes the foundations of our sense of self. It asserts a distorting gravity, bending our priorities and warping our whole lives. The overt denialists are easy villains, the monsters who look like monsters. But the rest of us, much of the time, wear pretty green masks over our self-interest and denial, and then go about our days. Then each morning we wake to a new headline like: “The planet is dying faster than we thought.”

While I was trying (and failing) to process it all, Peter called to make sure I understood the importance of a comment he’d made: He’s no longer embarrassed to tell people he would die to keep the planet from overheating. He’s left behind the solace of denial. He’s well aware of the cost. “What a luxury to feel that the ground we walk on and this planet that is rotating around the sun is in some sense OK.”

Correction, Jan. 25, 2021: This story originally misstated the title of a paper published by a team of 19 climate scientists. It is “Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future,” not “Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future.”

Correction, Jan. 26, 2021: This story originally misstated the rate of the rise in temperature caused by global warming. The temperature will rise by a few tenths of a degree Celsius per decade, not by year.

https://www.propublica.org/article/the- ... obal-en-GB
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue Feb 16, 2021 12:26 pm

Indian activist jailed

In India's southern city of Bangalore, Disha Ravi was a cheerful, familiar figure among local climate activists

Image

The sprightly 22-year-old helped clean up lakes, plant trees and campaigned against plastic. She attended workshops, walked the streets demanding climate action, loved animals and spoke out against sexism and capital punishment. A vegan and the sole-earning member in her family, she worked with a local company that makes plant-based food.

Ms Ravi is also one of the founders of the local wing of Fridays For Future, a global movement begun by climate change activist Greta Thunberg. Here, she participated in campaigns to preserve the lion-tailed macaque in an Indian bio-diversity spot, and stall a hydro power plant, among other causes.

Living in a low-lying neighbourhood in a city which would get easily flooded during rains, she worried about climate change. Bangalore, she said, was experiencing severe rainfall and flooding these days. She had lived in the family home for 13 years, and found that the city had never experienced such heavy rains as it had in recent years.

Ms Ravi did not mince her words. "People of colour are suffering from the climate crisis first-hand - a lot of people don't give us attention that we need. The fact that you would choose to listen to a white person on the same issue rather than a person of colour, to me, is environmental racism," she told Vogue magazine last year.

The 21-year-old has helped clean up lakes, plant trees and campaigned against plastic

Friends and fellow campaigners say she is a law-abiding activist. During a recent campaign to save trees in her city, Ms Ravi went to the police and sought permission. "We have interacted during many campaigns to protect the environment. I always noticed she never transgressed the law," said Tara Krishnaswamy, a veteran activist.

At the weekend, Ms Ravi was arrested after sharing a document intended to help farmers protest against new agriculture reform laws. The police say she was a "key conspirator" in the formulation and dissemination" of the document. The so-called "toolkit", which suggested ways of helping the farmers, was tweeted by Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg. "The call was to wage economic, social, cultural and regional war against India," the police said.

They say Ms Ravi "collaborated" with separatist groups to "spread disaffection against the Indian state".

In court, Ms Ravi, accused of sedition and conspiracy, broke down and told the judge she had merely edited two lines of the document. But police believe she shared the document with Ms Thunberg, and then asked her to remove it after it was "accidentally" leaked. The court remanded her to police custody.

Ms Ravi's arrest has sparked a firestorm of protest and shocked many Indians. The chief minister of Delhi, run by an opposition party, has called the arrest "an unprecedented attack on democracy". A journalist wondered how "editing publicly available documents that help people coordinate views disagreeing with those of the government can be an act of sedition". Yet another journalist tweeted: "The message is clear: lock up your children, stop them protesting, or we will".

A demonstrator holds a placard during a protest against the arrest of 22-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi, outside the police headquarters in New Delhi, India, February 16, 2021.image copyrightReuters
image captionThere have been protests against Ms Ravi's arrest

Last July, the Delhi police temporarily blocked the website of Fridays For Future India, describing its content as "objectionable" and depicting an "unlawful or terrorist act". Members said all that it had done was swamp the environment ministry with thousands of emails in protest against an environmental law.

"In India, people continue to suffer because of laws that are anti-people. We live in a country where dissent is suppressed. We in Fridays For Future India were labelled terrorists for objecting to the law]. Only a government that puts profit over people would consider asking for clean air, clean water and a liveable planet, an act of terrorism," Ms Ravi told an interviewer at the time.

In September, she told The Guardian: "Countries like India are already experiencing a climate crisis. We are just not fighting for our future, we are fighting for our present. We, the people from the most affected [regions], are going to change the conversation in climate negotiations and lead a just recovery plan that benefits people and not the pockets of our government".

Image

In a video interview, the feisty and outspoken young campaigner made it clear that she is no fan of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

"Mr Modi has convinced everybody that everything he is doing is good. There are so many questionable things about his governance. Not just in terms of equal rights but environmental rights or human rights."

"My parents support him, I know."

Her friends describe Ms Ravi as a bright student, who won debates in college, where she graduated in business administration with a specialisation in finance. Like many young people of her generation, she loves Bollywood songs, binge-watches Netflix shows, loves cooking and pampers her dog. She plans on doing a masters in conservation: her role model is the world-famous conservation activist, Jane Goodall.

Ms Ravi's friends and co-workers say she is a "funny, goofy girl" who is often late to events. "We get irritated but we never say anything to her because she is so passionate about what she does," a friend said.

The website of the Bangalore-based food company where she works mentions her as the "youngest member" who joined as an intern and then came on "full time to work her magic on our customers by leading the company's direct-to-consumer efforts".

On social media, Ms Ravi has posted about Olive Ridley turtles, doing away with plastic and posed for pictures with her kitten and her dog. A Harry Potter fan, she has also shared pictures of Evanna Lynch. On Facebook, she calls herself a "carrot enthusiast". On Instagram, she describes herself as "climate worried."

Her profile says: "People united will never be defeated."

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-56068522
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Wed Feb 17, 2021 1:21 am

Fields turning into deserts?

Driving south through Sulaimani province, the snow-capped Zagros Mountains recede in the rear view mirror and the hills subside into undulating rolls, lush green with winter crops. Keep going and you reach Kalar, where the colour begins to fade; go further, to Kifri, and green is replaced by brown, barren fields and stones fill wide, dry riverbeds that flow with water only during a heavy rain

Image

This is the Garmiyan area. Garma, the root of the name, means hot in Kurdish, and even on a February day, when the temperature is a pleasant 20 degrees Celsius, you can feel the intensity of the sun, burning through layers of clothing and skin, hinting at the blistering days of summer when the mercury soars over 50 and hot, dry winds whip up sand and dust storms.

Garmiyan is on the brink of an environmental disaster, desert eating away at what was once a rich agricultural region.

“We have no water,” said Haji Sirwan Sadiq Salah, a farmer of land on the outskirts of Kifri.

He walks me out to see his fields. His crop of barley would normally be at least a metre tall at this time of year, but the ribbed earth is patchy with tufts of green no more than five centimetres tall. Because of a lack of rain, Salah will have no crop to harvest and will lose the main source of income for his large, multi-generation family of 30.

Salah is not alone. “Look at any field around here, you’ll see the same thing,” he said.

Iraq is among the most vulnerable nations in the world to the effects of climate change, including extreme temperatures and water shortages. Bogged down by insecurity, political maneuvering, and corruption, the enormity of the environmental challenge has remained largely off the radar in Baghdad. There is hope, however, that things may change, after the parliament voted on September 22, 2020 to join the Paris climate accord.

The legally binding 2015 Paris agreement has set a goal of limiting global warming to below two degrees Celsius, compared to pre-industrial levels. The 196 countries that have signed on to the accord must reduce their greenhouse gas emissions and build resilience to the impacts of rising temperatures. Financial assistance for countries who need it is built into the accord.

“Iraq is heading into a new era, planning on a paradigm shift toward more economic diversity. This includes support for renewable energies and access to environmentally friendly technologies,” President Barham Salih told the UN’s Climate Ambition Summit on December 12.

Without a developed economy or industrial sector, Iraq is not a major emitter of greenhouse gases, Salih said, so its environmental strategy will focus on helping the most vulnerable segments of society and mitigating the effects of climate change.

The Garmiyan area is traditionally water-rich. The Sirwan River flows the length of the region, there is good groundwater, and regular precipitation means the agriculture is rainfed, not irrigated. But all of those resources are failing. Iran has damned the Sirwan River, and the rains that feed the fields are less reliable.

“It rains less and less every year… It’s okay to have a drought once every 10 years, but if we look at the last 20 years, we have a drought once every two or three years,” said Abdulmutalib Raafat Sarhat, a civil and environmental engineer specializing in water management at the University of Garmian.

As those water sources dry up, people are drilling more wells and groundwater levels are dropping.

“We have a problem with desertification. It was a little before, but now it’s a lot,” said Sarhat.

Farmer Haji Sirwan Sadiq Salah (centre) smiles as his children play with a goat on their farm in Sakhiya village, Garmiyan region on February 8, 2021. Photo: Hannah Lynch / Rudaw

Sustainable, large-scale agriculture began thousands of years ago in present-day Iraq, helped by the unique environment and climate. Annual floods in the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers would sweep rich soil from the Zagros Mountains to the southern plains and wash away salt into the sea. But those floods have stopped, and today Iraq’s water is threatened on all fronts.

Less water is flowing into the country as Turkey and Iran build dams on the rivers Iraq relies on for the majority of its water, while in the south, a salt wedge is moving up from the Gulf, contaminating drinking water and forcing families off their farmlands. Chronic mismanagement, waste, and unchecked pollution make the matter worse.

While Iraq’s water resources are threatened, it does have something else in ample supply – sunlight. And one man thinks Iraq should seize the opportunity of joining the Paris agreement to use the sun to secure the water, and maybe even help salvage the economy in the process.

“Iraq joining the climate club, or the climate treaty, means that there’s going to be a lot of investments in Iraq from the Green Climate Fund,” said Azzam Alwash, founder of Nature Iraq and Goldman Environmental Prize laureate. “Iraq will receive, one hopes, if it plays its cards right, a lot of help in helping its economy adjust as income decreases from oil…, investments in technologies that will help it change its economy.”

He suggests Iraq should become an exporter of solar energy. “One of the ideas is putting photovoltaic cells in southern Iraq,” he explained. It can then “export photovoltaic electric energy to Turkey, and from Turkey of course to Europe.”

Supplying Turkey with electricity would give Iraq leverage, which it does not have right now, in its dealings with its northern neighbour, especially over water. If Ankara cuts the water, Baghdad can cut the power.

“This is grand, this is big, but it’s essentially based on the idea of creating mutual interests through the management of sustainable and renewable energy between Turkey and Iraq, and hopefully Iran,” Alwash explained.

Morocco is a possible example. It has made massive investments in solar energy and is one of the few countries that may meet its targets under the Paris accord.

The complication, as is all too frequent in Iraq, is political will.

“Here is what is missing from the recipe: political will on this point,” said Alwash. “Yes, we are behind the 8 ball as they say in billiards, but it’s not impossible... we need to have Iraqis wake up.”

The government is currently drafting its Paris climate plan – called nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – and hopes to have it completed by April. It is working off an intended NDCs plan drafted in 2015 with the assistance of the UN Development Programme (UNDP) that set a target of 14 percent reduction in emissions by 2035. One percent to be done on a national level and 13 percent dependent on international support.

“One of the most important sectors is the Ministry of Electricity,” said Jassim al-Falahi, technical deputy of Iraq’s environment ministry who is involved in preparing the climate change strategy. Measures range from switching to LED lightbulbs in government buildings to investments in solar energy projects.

The government has set a goal of producing 20 gigawatts from solar by 2030. Falahi said they are also drafting a law to regulate renewable energy, a sector that has been overlooked in Iraq, where oil is king. The law should be completed in about six months.

Iraq’s accession to the Paris accord is also binding on the Kurdistan Region.

“The Kurdistan Regional Government is committed to the environmental protection of the region and is generally committed to the international environmental agreements signed and ratified by the Republic of Iraq,” said Abdulrahman Sadiq, head of the Kurdistan Region’s Environment Board. He called for better coordination between Erbil and Baghdad on environmental policy.

Baghdad and Erbil need to act fast, as fields are already drying up and salting over.

“In Iraq's case, a lot of climate-related damage is already locked in, and no manner of reining in emissions now can prevent an awful lot of human suffering. For these people, adaptive efforts will be required to help them cope with the trauma of disappearing livelihoods and of a deteriorating quality of life,” said Peter Schwartzstein, an independent environmental journalist and fellow at the Center for Climate and Security.

Back on the farm outside of Kifri, the family gathers for lunch. Women lay out plastic sheets and cushions on the concrete courtyard, calling in playing children to sit where, minutes earlier, the family patriarch had said his prayers. As we spoon white bean soup and chunks of tender meat onto rice, a chicken strays into the yard looking for a snack, but it’s chased out by one of the children and the family shares a laugh.

I ask Salah what kind of future he envisions for the children as his fields turn to dust. “Our only hope is God,” he replies.

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iraq/16022021
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Fri Feb 19, 2021 2:10 am

End suicidal war on nature

A new scientific blueprint for tackling climate change, pollution and the accelerating loss of plant and animal species shows how to end the world’s “suicidal” war on nature, UN chief Antonio Guterres has said

“Humanity is waging war on nature. This is senseless and suicidal,” Guterres wrote in the preface of the United Nations Environment Programme report published on Thursday.

“The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth,” he said.

Guterres also said that the climate emergency, the biodiversity crisis and the pollution kill millions of people every year and have left the planet broken.

“But [the report] also guides us to a safer place by providing a peace plan and a post-war rebuilding programme.”

The recommendations

Among the recommendations was that more than $5 trillion in annual subsidies to sectors such as fossil fuels and industrial agriculture, fishing and mining should be redirected to accelerate a shift to a low-carbon future and restore nature.

Governments should also look beyond economic growth as an indicator of performance and take account of the value of preserving ecosystems, the report said.

It aimed to encourage governments to take more ambitious steps at a UN climate conference in Glasgow in November and during parallel talks to agree upon a new global pact on preserving biodiversity.

With countries launching economic recovery packages in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the authors hoped their policy prescriptions would encourage more coordinated action to rapidly transform destructive industrial and financial systems.

Robert Watson, lead author of the report, told Al Jazeera that there were “vested interests” that were stopping action.

“We have subsidies for agriculture, for energy, for fossil fuels that are perverse. They encourage the use of fossil fuels. They encourage the use of bad agricultural practices,” he said.

“If we can get the business community to work with governments around the world, I’m optimistic we can start to move in the right direction,” Watson said.

“I think that most governments do realise that climate change is adversely affecting food security, water security, human health and poverty alleviation.”

The report highlighted what report co-author Rachel Warren of the University of East Anglia called “a litany of frightening statistics that hasn’t really been brought together”:

    • Earth is on the way to an additional 1.9C (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit) warming from now, far more than the internationally agreed-upon goals in the Paris accord.

    • About nine million people a year die from pollution.

    • About one million of Earth’s eight million species of plants and animals are threatened with extinction.

    • Up to 400 million tonnes of heavy metals, toxic sludge and other industrial waste are dumped into the world’s waters every year.

    • More than three billion people are affected by land degradation, and only 15 percent of Earth’s wetlands remain intact.

    • About 60 percent of fish stocks are fished at the maximum levels. There are more than 400 oxygen-depleted “dead zones” and marine plastics pollution has increased tenfold since 1980.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/2/1 ... -on-nature
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Sun Feb 21, 2021 11:20 pm

How vulnerable is the world?

One way of looking at human creativity is as a process of pulling balls out of a giant urn. The balls represent ideas, discoveries and inventions. Over the course of history, we have extracted many balls. Most have been beneficial to humanity. The rest have been various shades of grey: a mix of good and bad, whose net effect is difficult to estimate

What we haven’t pulled out yet is a black ball: a technology that invariably destroys the civilisation that invents it. That’s not because we’ve been particularly careful or wise when it comes to innovation. We’ve just been lucky. But what if there’s a black ball somewhere in the urn? If scientific and technological research continues, we’ll eventually pull it out, and we won’t be able to put it back in.

We can invent but we can’t un-invent. Our strategy seems to be to hope that there is no black ball

Thankfully for us, humans’ most destructive technology to date – nuclear weapons – is exceedingly difficult to master. But one way to think about the possible effects of a black ball is to consider what would happen if nuclear reactions were easier.

In 1933, the physicist Leo Szilard got the idea of a nuclear chain reaction. Later investigations showed that making an atomic weapon would require several kilos of plutonium or highly enriched uranium, both of which are very difficult and expensive to produce.

However, imagine a counterfactual history in which Szilard realised that a nuclear bomb could be made in some easy way – over the kitchen sink, say, using a piece of glass, a metal object and a battery.

Close-up footage from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the Operation Teapot nuclear bomb tests at the Nevada Test Site on 7 March 1955

Szilard would have faced a dilemma. If he didn’t tell anyone about his discovery, he would be unable to stop other scientists from stumbling upon it. But if he did reveal his discovery, he would guarantee the further spread of dangerous knowledge. Imagine that Szilard confided in his friend Albert Einstein, and they decided to write a letter to the president of the United States, Franklin D Roosevelt, whose administration then banned all research into nuclear physics outside of high-security government facilities.

Speculation would swirl around the reason for the heavy-handed measures. Groups of scientists would wonder about the secret danger; some of them would figure it out. Careless or disgruntled employees at government labs would let slip information, and spies would carry the secret to foreign capitals. Even if by some miracle the secret never leaked, scientists in other countries would discover it on their own.

Or perhaps the US government would move to eliminate all glass, metal and sources of electrical current outside of a few highly guarded military depots? Such extreme measures would meet with stiff opposition. However, after mushroom clouds had risen over a few cities, public opinion would shift.

Glass, batteries and magnets could be seized, and their production banned; yet pieces would remain scattered across the landscape, and eventually they would find their way into the hands of nihilists, extortionists or people who just want ‘to see what would happen’ if they set off a nuclear device. In the end, many places would be destroyed or abandoned.

Possession of the proscribed materials would have to be harshly punished. Communities would be subject to strict surveillance: informant networks, security raids, indefinite detentions. We would be left to try to somehow reconstitute civilisation without electricity and other essentials that are deemed too risky.

That’s the optimistic scenario. In a more pessimistic scenario, law and order would break down entirely, and societies would split into factions waging nuclear wars. The disintegration would end only when the world had been ruined to the point where it was impossible to make any more bombs. Even then, the dangerous insight would be remembered and passed down.

If civilisation arose from the ashes, the knowledge would lie in wait, ready to pounce once people started again to produce glass, electrical currents and metal. And, even if the knowledge were forgotten, it would be rediscovered when nuclear physics research resumed.

In short: we’re lucky that making nuclear weapons turned out to be hard. We pulled out a grey ball that time. Yet with each act of invention, humanity reaches anew into the urn.

Suppose that the urn of creativity contains at least one black ball

We call this ‘the vulnerable world hypothesis’. The intuitive idea is that there’s some level of technology at which civilisation almost certainly gets destroyed, unless quite extraordinary and historically unprecedented degrees of preventive policing and/or global governance are implemented.

Our primary purpose isn’t to argue that the hypothesis is true – we regard that as an open question, though it would seem unreasonable, given the available evidence, to be confident that it’s false. Instead, the point is that the hypothesis is useful in helping us to bring to the surface important considerations about humanity’s macrostrategic situation.

The above scenario – call it ‘easy nukes’ – represents one kind of potential black ball, where it becomes easy for individuals or small groups to cause mass destruction. Given the diversity of human character and circumstance, for any imprudent, immoral or self-defeating action, there will always be some fraction of humans (‘the apocalyptic residual’) who would choose to take that action – whether motivated by ideological hatred, nihilistic destructiveness or revenge for perceived injustices, as part of some extortion plot, or because of delusions.

The existence of this apocalyptic residual means that any sufficiently easy tool of mass destruction is virtually certain to lead to the devastation of civilisation.

This is one of several types of possible black balls. A second type would be a technology that creates strong incentives for powerful actors to cause mass destruction. Again, we can turn to nuclear history: after the invention of the atomic bomb, an arms race ensued between the US and the Soviet Union. The two countries amassed staggering arsenals; by 1986, together they held more than 60,000 nuclear warheads – more than enough to devastate civilisation.

If a ‘safe first strike’ option existed, mutual fear could easily trigger a dash to all-out war

Fortunately, during the Cold War, the world’s nuclear superpowers didn’t face strong incentives to unleash nuclear Armageddon. They did face some incentives to do so, however. Notably, there were incentives for engaging in brinkmanship; and, in a crisis situation, there was some incentive to strike first to pre-empt a potentially disarming strike by the adversary.

Many political scientists believe that an important factor in explaining why the Cold War didn’t lead to a nuclear holocaust was the development, by the mid-1960s, of more secure ‘second strike’ capabilities by both superpowers. The ability of both countries’ arsenals to survive a nuclear strike by the other and then launch a retaliatory assault reduced the incentive to launch an attack in the first place.

But now consider a counterfactual scenario – a ‘safe first strike’ – in which some technology made it possible to completely destroy an adversary before they could respond, leaving them unable to retaliate. If such a ‘safe first strike’ option existed, mutual fear could easily trigger a dash to all-out war.

Even if neither power desired the destruction of the other side, one of them might nevertheless feel compelled to strike first to avert the risk that the other side’s fear might lead it to carry out such a first strike. We can make the counterfactual even worse by supposing that the weapons involved are easy to hide; that would make it unfeasible for the parties to design a trustworthy verification scheme for arms reduction that might resolve their security dilemma.

Climate change can illustrate a third type of black ball; let’s call this scenario ‘worse global warming’. In the real world, human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases are likely to result in an average temperature rise of between 3.0 and 4.5 degrees Celsius by 2100.

But imagine that the Earth’s climate sensitivity parameter had been different than it is, such that the same carbon emissions would cause far more warming than scientists currently predict – a rise of 20 degrees, say. To make the scenario worse, imagine that fossil fuels were even more abundant, and clean energy alternatives more expensive and technologically challenging, than they actually are.

Unlike the ‘safe first strike’ scenario, where there’s a powerful actor who faces strong incentives to take some difficult and enormously destructive action, the ‘worse global warming’ scenario requires no such actor. All that’s required is a large number of individually insignificant actors – electricity users, drivers – who all have incentives to do things that contribute very slightly to what cumulatively becomes a civilisation-devastating problem.

What the two scenarios have in common is that incentives exist that would encourage a wide range of normally motivated actors to pursue actions that devastate civilisation.

It would be bad news if the vulnerable world hypothesis were correct. In principle, however, there are several responses that could save civilisation from a technological black ball. One would be to stop pulling balls from the urn altogether, ceasing all technological development. That’s hardly realistic though; and, even if it could be done, it would be extremely costly, to the point of constituting a catastrophe in its own right.

Another theoretically possible response would be to fundamentally reengineer human nature to eliminate the apocalyptic residual; we might also do away with any tendency among powerful actors to risk civilisational devastation even when vital national security interests are served by doing so, as well as any tendency among the masses to prioritise personal convenience when this contributes an imperceptible amount of harm to some important global good. Such global preference reengineering seems very difficult to pull off, and it would come with risks of its own.

It’s also worth noting that partial success in such preference reengineering wouldn’t necessarily bring a proportional reduction in civilisational vulnerability. For example, reducing the apocalyptic residual by 50 per cent wouldn’t cut the risks from the ‘easy nukes’ scenarios in half, since in many cases any lone individual could single-handedly devastate civilisation. We could only significantly reduce the risk, then, if the apocalyptic residual were virtually entirely eliminated worldwide.

That leaves two options for making the world safe against the possibility that the urn contains a black ball: extremely reliable policing that could prevent any individual or small group from carrying out highly dangerous illegal actions; and two, strong global governance that could solve the most serious collective action problems, and ensure robust cooperation between states – even when they have strong incentives to defect from agreements, or refuse to sign on in the first place.

The governance gaps addressed by these measures are the two Achilles’ heels of the contemporary world order. So long as they remain unprotected, civilisation remains vulnerable to a technological black ball. Unless and until such a discovery emerges from the urn, however, it’s easy to overlook how exposed we are.

Let’s consider what would be required to protect against these vulnerabilities

Imagine that the world finds itself in a scenario akin to ‘easy nukes’. Say somebody discovers a very simple way to cause mass destruction, information about the discovery spreads, and the materials are ubiquitously available and cannot quickly be removed from circulation.

To prevent devastation, states would need to monitor their citizens closely enough to let them intercept anyone who begins preparing an act of mass destruction. If the black ball technology is sufficiently destructive and easy to use, even a single person evading the surveillance network would be completely unacceptable.

Resistance to a ‘freedom tag’ might subside once a few major cities had been wiped out

For a picture of what a really intensive level of surveillance could look like, consider the following sketch of a ‘high-tech panopticon’. Every citizen would be fitted with a ‘freedom tag’ (the Orwellian overtones being of course intentional, to remind us of the full range of ways in which such a system could be applied).

A freedom tag might be worn around the neck and equipped with multidirectional cameras and microphones that would continuously upload encrypted video and audio to computers that interpret the feeds in real time. If signs of suspicious activity were detected, the feed would be relayed to one of several ‘patriot monitoring stations’, where a ‘freedom officer’ would review the feed and determine an appropriate action, such as contacting the tag-wearer via a speaker on the freedom tag – to demand an explanation or request a better view.

The freedom officer could dispatch a rapid response unit, or maybe a police drone, to investigate. If a wearer refused to desist from the proscribed activity after repeated warnings, authorities could arrest him or her. Citizens wouldn’t be permitted to remove the tag, except in places that had been fitted with adequate external sensors.

In principle, such a system could feature sophisticated privacy protections, and could redact identity-revealing data such as faces and names unless needed for an investigation. Artificial intelligence tools and human oversight could closely monitor freedom officers to prevent them from abusing their authority. Building a panopticon of this kind would require substantial investment. But thanks to the falling price of the relevant technologies, it could soon become technically feasible.

That’s not the same thing as being politically feasible. Resistance to such steps, however, might subside once a few major cities had been wiped out. There would likely be strong support for a policy which, for the sake of forestalling another attack, involved massive privacy invasions and civil rights violations such as incarcerating 100 innocent people for every genuine plotter. But when civilisational vulnerabilities aren’t preceded or accompanied by such incontrovertible evidence, the political will for such robust preventive action might never materialise.

Or consider again the ‘safe first strike’ scenario. Here, state actors confront a collective action problem, and failing to solve it means civilisation gets devastated by default. With a new black ball, the collective action problem will almost certainly present extreme and unprecedented challenges – yet states have frequently failed to solve much easier collective action problems, as attested by the pockmarks of war that cover human history from head to foot. By default, therefore, civilisation gets devastated.

With effective global governance, however, the solution is almost trivial: simply prohibit all states from wielding the black ball destructively. (By effective global governance, we mean a world order with one decision-making entity – a ‘singleton’. This is an abstract condition that could be satisfied through different arrangements: a world government; a sufficiently powerful hegemon; a highly robust system of inter-state cooperation. Each arrangement comes with its own difficulties, and we take no stand here on which is best.)

Some technological black balls could be addressed with preventive policing alone, while some would require only global governance. Some, however, would require both. Consider a biotechnological black ball that’s powerful enough that a single malicious use could cause a pandemic that would kill billions of people – an ‘easy nukes’ type situation. In this scenario, it would be unacceptable if even a single state failed to put in place the machinery necessary for continuous surveillance of its citizens to prevent malicious use with virtually perfect reliability.

A state that refused to implement the requisite safeguards would be a delinquent member of the international community, akin to a ‘failed state’. A similar argument applies to scenarios such as ‘worse global warming’, in which some states might be inclined to free-ride on the costly efforts of others. An effective global governance institution would then be needed to compel every state to do its part.

None of this seems very appealing. A system of total surveillance, or a global governance institution capable of imposing its will on every nation, could have very bad consequences. Improved means of social control could help protect despotic regimes from rebellion; and surveillance could enable a hegemonic ideology or an intolerant majority view to impose itself on all aspects of life.

Global governance, meanwhile, could reduce beneficial forms of inter-state competition and diversity, creating a world order with a single point of failure; and, being so far removed from individuals, such an institution might be perceived to lack legitimacy, and be more susceptible to bureaucratic sclerosis or political drift away from the public interest.

Yet as difficult as many of us find them to stomach, stronger surveillance and global governance could also have various good consequences, aside from stabilising civilisational vulnerabilities. More effective methods of social control could reduce crime and alleviate the need for harsh criminal penalties. They might foster a climate of trust that enables beneficial new forms of social interaction to flourish.

Global governance could prevent all kinds of interstate wars, solve many environmental and other commons problems, and over time perhaps foster an enlarged sense of cosmopolitan solidarity. Clearly, there are weighty arguments for and against moving in either direction, and we offer no judgment here about the balance of these arguments.

What about the question of timing? Even if we became seriously concerned that the urn of invention contained a black ball, we might not need to establish stronger surveillance or global governance right now. Perhaps we could take those steps later, if and when the hypothetical threat comes clearly into view.

We should, however, question the feasibility of a wait-and-see approach. As we’ve seen, throughout the Cold War, the two superpowers lived in continuous fear of nuclear annihilation, which could have been triggered at any time by accident or as the result of some spiralling crisis. This risk would have been substantially reduced simply by getting rid of all or most nuclear weapons.

Yet, after more than half a century, we’ve still seen only limited disarmament. So far, the world has proved unable to solve this most obvious of collective action problems. This doesn’t inspire confidence that humanity would quickly develop an effective global governance mechanism, even should a clear need for one present itself.

Developing a system for ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ means incurring a risk, even if the key isn’t turned

Even if one felt optimistic that an agreement could eventually be reached, international collective action problems can resist solution for a long time. It would take time to explain why such an arrangement was necessary, to negotiate a settlement and hammer out the details, and to set it up.

But the interval between a risk becoming clearly visible and the point when stabilisation measures must be in place could be short. So it might not be wise to rely on spontaneous international cooperation to save the day once a serious vulnerability comes into view.

The situation with preventive policing is similar in some respects. A highly sophisticated global panopticon can’t be conjured up overnight. It would take many years to implement such a system, not to mention the time required to build political support. Yet the vulnerabilities we face might not offer much advance warning.

Next week, a group of academic researchers could publish an article in Science explaining an innovative new technique in synthetic biology. Two days later, a popular blogger might write a post that explains how the new tool could be used by anybody to cause mass destruction. In such a scenario, intense social control might need to be switched on almost immediately. It would be too late to start developing a surveillance architecture when the specific vulnerability became clear.

Perhaps we could develop the capabilities for intrusive surveillance and real-time interception in advance, but not use those capabilities initially to anything like their maximal extent. By giving civilisation the capacity for extremely effective preventive policing, at least we would have moved closer to stability. But developing a system for ‘turnkey totalitarianism’ means incurring a risk, even if the key isn’t turned.

One could try to mitigate this by aiming for a system of ‘structured transparency’ that builds in protections against misuse. The system could operate only with permission from multiple independent stakeholders, and provide only the specific information that’s legitimately needed by some decision-maker. There might be no fundamental barrier to achieving a surveillance system that’s at once highly effective and resistant to being subverted. How likely this is to be achieved in practice is of course another matter.

Given the complexity of these potential general solutions to the risk of a technological black ball, it might make sense for leaders and policymakers to focus initially on partial solutions and low-hanging fruit – patching up particular domains where major risks seem most likely to appear, such as biotechnological research.

Governments could strengthen the Biological Weapons Convention by increasing its funding and granting it verification powers. Authorities could step up their oversight of biotechnology activities by developing better ways to monitor scientists and track potentially dangerous materials and equipment. To prevent do-it-yourself genetic engineering, for example, governments could impose licensing requirements and limit access to some cutting-edge instruments and information.

Rather than allowing anybody to buy their own DNA synthesis machine, such equipment could be limited to a small number of closely monitored providers. Authorities could also improve whistleblower systems, to encourage the reporting of potential abuse. They could admonish organisations that fund biological research to take a broader view of the potential consequences of such work.

Nevertheless, while pursuing such limited objectives, one should bear in mind that the protection they offer covers only special subsets of scenarios, and might be temporary. If you find yourself in a position to influence the macroparameters of preventive policing or global governance, you should consider that fundamental changes in those domains might be the only way to stabilise our civilisation against emerging technological vulnerabilities.

This article draws on the paper ‘The Vulnerable World Hypothesis’ (2019) published in the journal ‘Global Policy’.

https://aeon.co/essays/none-of-our-tech ... obal-en-GB
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

Re: Updates: polution; hunting; animal slaughter; climate ch

PostAuthor: Anthea » Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:18 am

Freshwater fish in catastrophic decline

A report has warned of a "catastrophic" decline in freshwater fish, with nearly a third threatened by extinction

Conservation groups said 80 species were known to have gone extinct, 16 in the last year alone.

Millions of people rely on freshwater fish for food and as a source of income through angling and the pet trade.

But numbers have plummeted due to pressures including pollution, unsustainable fishing, and the damming and draining of rivers and wetlands.

The report said populations of migratory fish have fallen by three-quarters in the last 50 years.

Over the same time period, populations of larger species, known as "megafish", have crashed by 94%.

The report, The World's Forgotten Fishes, is by 16 conservation groups, including WWF, the London Zoological Society (ZSL), Global Wildlife Conservation and The Nature Conservancy

In UK waters, the sturgeon and the burbot have vanished, salmon are disappearing and the European eel remains critically endangered.

According to the WWF, much of the decline is driven by the poor state of rivers, mostly as a result of pollution, dams and sewage.

It has called on the government to restore freshwater habitats to good health through proper enforcement of existing laws, strengthening protections in the Environment Bill and championing a strong set of global targets for the recovery of nature.

Dave Tickner, from WWF, said freshwater habitats are some of the most vibrant on earth, but - as this report shows - they are in catastrophic decline around the world.

"Nature is in freefall and the UK is no exception: wildlife struggles to survive, let alone thrive, in our polluted waters," said the organisation's chief adviser on freshwater.

"If we are to take this government's environmental promises seriously, it must get its act together, clean up our rivers and restore our freshwater habitats to good health. "

Carmen Revenga of The Nature Conservancy said freshwater fish are a diverse and unique group of species that are not only essential for the healthy functioning of our rivers, lakes and wetlands, but millions of people, particularly the poor, also depend on them for their food and income.

"It's now more urgent than ever that we find the collective political will and effective collaboration with private sector, governments, NGOs and communities, to implement nature-based solutions that protect freshwater species, while also ensuring human needs are met," she said.

Commenting, Dr Jeremy Biggs, of the Freshwater Habitats Trust, said to protect freshwater biodiversity, we need to consider both large and small waters, and to protect all our freshwaters: ponds, lakes, streams and rivers.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-56160756
Good Thoughts Good Words Good Deeds
User avatar
Anthea
Shaswar
Shaswar
Donator
Donator
 
Posts: 28352
Images: 1155
Joined: Thu Oct 18, 2012 2:13 pm
Location: Sitting in front of computer
Highscores: 3
Arcade winning challenges: 6
Has thanked: 6019 times
Been thanked: 729 times
Nationality: Kurd by heart

PreviousNext

Return to Roj Bash Cafe

Who is online

Registered users: Bing [Bot], Google [Bot]

x

#{title}

#{text}