If you register as a "user" of this site, you can leave comments on its content. You cannot create content unless you are a member of the HCEC.
How this site worksUser loginThe HCECNavigationNews from the HCECReceive news, including upcoming events, things you can do and progress made, direct to your email inbox: create an account here, then subscribe here. Who's onlineThere are currently 0 users and 3 guests online.
|
News aggregatorDeforestation conference to turn plans to actionAssociated Press: French President Nicolas Sarkozy will open a daylong conference Thursday of some 40 nations to start turning plans into action to save the world's forests and help rein in the noxious gases blamed for climate change. Ministers from countries of the Amazon and Congo river basins and Indonesia -- whose massive forests, most at risk, are at the heart of efforts to end deforestation -- were among those attending the one-day conference. A follow-up meeting is scheduled for May in Oslo, ...
Solar power could provide 10% of US energy: reportAgence France-Presse: The United States could source 10 percent of its electricity from solar power by 2030, a report said Tuesday, winning support from a US lawmaker who wants to boost the number of US solar panels. The report, produced by the independent environmental group Environment America, was presented to Congress with backing from Senator Bernie Sanders who in February introduced legislation to install 10 million solar panels across the United States within a decade. Sanders praised the ...
World's top scientists to review climate panelAssociated Press: At a tumultuous time in U.N.-led climate negotiations, one of the world's most credible scientific groups agreed Wednesday to plug the recent cracks in the authoritative reports of the United Nations' Nobel Prize-winning global warming panel. "We enter this process with no preconceived conclusions," said Robbert Dijkgraaf, a Dutch mathematical physicist who co-chairs the group, the InterAcademy Council of 15 nations' national academies of science. U.N. Secretary-General Ban ...
Ecuador: Avatar Downfall a Blow for Indigenous CommunitiesInter Press Service: Science fiction blockbuster Avatar was the big loser in the Oscar awards ceremony - not only a blow for director James Cameron but also seen as a symbolic reverse in the struggle to recover Amazon rainforest areas in Ecuador from the effects of oil pollution. Several environmental organisations, like the Rainforest Action Network (RAN) and the Amazon Defence Coalition, had asked Cameron to "let his legions of fans know that while Pandora is fictional, what is happening to (indigenous) ...
United Kingdom: Starling flock 'falls from sky'BBC: The deaths of 75 starlings which appeared to fall from the sky and crash land on to a driveway in Somerset has mystified the RSPCA animal charity. The birds were spotted falling onto the entrance of a house in Coxley in Somerset on Sunday 7 March. Animal welfare officer Alison Sparkes, who was called by police, said: "It was a remarkable sight, I've never seen anything like it." There is no evidence the birds were ill or poisoned before they hit the ...
EU confirms support for bluefin tuna trade banReuters: European Union ambassadors agreed to propose protecting bluefin tuna as an endangered species on Wednesday, the EU presidency said, a move that would effectively ban international trade in the species. A meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) will take place from March 13 to consider a number of species, including bluefin tuna, populations of which have been decimated by overfishing. The European Commission proposed last month that ...
EU set to ban bluefin tuna tradeBBC: The EU has decided to support a ban on international trade in Atlantic bluefin tuna, reports indicate. The bloc is reported to have agreed to push for a ban at next week's meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). The US has already backed such a move, but Japan - where most bluefin is eaten - may opt out of CITES controls. The EU is likely to back exemptions for traditional fishers, and defer the ban pending scientific ...
Scientists to review climate bodyBBC: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked the world's science academies to review work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Work will be co-ordinated by the Inter-Academy Council, which brings together bodies such as the UK's Royal Society. The IPCC has been under pressure over small errors in its last major assessment of climate science in 2007. Mr Ban said the overall concept of man-made climate change was robust, and action to curb emissions badly ...
Are new biofuels the ethical answer?SciDev.Net: New biofuels offer a sustainable source of energy but we must consider the ethical and social implications, say Joyce Tait and Banji Oyelaran-Oyeyinka. Biofuels were first pioneered in the early days of car manufacturing. Cheap fossil fuels soon overtook them as our fuel of choice, but concerns about climate change have revived interest in them -- global biofuel production doubled between 2000 and 2007, and is expected to double again by 2011. 'First generation' biofuels, ...
China to stick to climate change stand, expects India to follow suitTimes of India: China said it will not deviate from its stand on climate change even after it gave qualified approval to the Copenhagen climate accord on Tuesday. It expects India to stick to its stand as well, a senior Chinese official said on Wednesday. "In future negotiations and cooperation on climate change, we will continue to be good partners. The government of India and China have signed an MOU enhancing our climate partnership," Xie Zhenhua, vice minister of the National Development and ...
Orangutans use calls for a variety of reasonsMongabay: Mature male orangutans produce what scientist's call 'long calls', which can be heard for one kilometer in all directions even in dense forests. New research in Ethology has uncovered that these calls are employed for a number of reasons and provide information about who is calling and why. "Orangutans have a rich repertoire of calls, however only sexually mature, flanged males emit long-distance calls with a series of long booming pulses and grumbles," explains co-author Dr Brigitte ...
Conservation group supports call for bluefin tuna trade banPress Association: The future of the bluefin tuna could be decided within days, along with two other endangered fish, the spiny dogfish and porbeagle, according to a national conservation charity. The Marine Conservation Society (MCS) said the northern Atlantic bluefin tuna, Thunnus thynnus, considered to be one of the most majestic species living in European waters, has been fished for centuries, and the effects have taken their toll. Northern bluefin, which can reach more than 3m in length, is ...
'Famine marriages' just one byproduct of climate changeInter Press Service: The negative fallout from climate change is having a devastatingly lopsided impact on women compared to men, from higher death rates during natural disasters to heavier household and care burdens. In the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were reportedly women; in the 2004 Asian Tsunami, an estimated 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women. And following the 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women, ...
UK academy aids study to regain climate data trustReuters: Britain's science academy said on Wednesday it would take part in a review of U.N. climate science intended to restore trust after a 2007 report was found to have exaggerated evidence for global warming. "I can confirm that we are one of the parties (on the review panel)," Bill Hartnett, a spokesman for The Royal Society, said. The independent review will be launched at the United Nations headquarters late on Wednesday in New York. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on ...
Feed-in tariff 'killing off' burgeoning UK small turbine industryGuardian: UK small wind turbine manufacturers say they will lose out to foreign solar panel manufacturers in the race to cash in on the UK government's new feed-in tariff scheme. They claim their products will be penalised because solar panel owners will receive higher government subsidies than wind turbine buyers. As the arrangement stands, a wind turbine would qualify for 26.7-34.5p per KWh in government subsidies, while solar panels would typically bring in 41p per KWh. Turbine ...
China unsure on warming cause, to stick with CO2 cutsReuters: China's top climate negotiator said on Wednesday that the cause of global warming was still not clear but the problems it was creating were so serious that the world must anyway act to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Xie Zhenhua, vice-chairman of the powerful National Development and Reform Commission, also warned the United States it should not use domestic divisions over climate change as an excuse to pass its responsibilities off onto other countries. "There are still two ...
Greens protest genetically modified potato go-aheadAgence France-Presse: Green members of the European parliament stood en masse and held up placards Tuesday in protest against the EU Commission approval of the cultivation of genetically modified potatoes. The deputies help up placards that read "For a GMO free Europe" as one of their number, Rebecca Harms, berated European Commission chief Jose Manuel Barroso for last week's decision. German MEP Harms called it a "risky strategy that will not find support" among EU citizens. "There is no ...
Global warming skepticism rising in the GOPLA Times: It wasn't long ago that Marco Rubio and Tim Pawlenty -- two rising Republican stars -- supported legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions. But in recent weeks, both have begun to express doubts about whether cars, factories and power plants have anything to do with global warming. The shift by Rubio and Pawlenty -- as well as other prominent Republicans -- reflects the rising power of climate change skeptics in the GOP, where global warming is becoming a litmus test for ...
UN to review errors made by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate ChangeTimes (UK): The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility. A team of the world's leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming. The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from ...
China and India Join Climate AgreementNew York Times: China and India formally agreed Tuesday to join the international climate change agreemen reached last December in Copenhagen, the last two major economies to sign up. The two countries, among the largest and fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gas emissions in the world, submitted letters to the United Nations agreeing to be included on a list of countries covered by the so-called Copenhagen Accord, a three-page nonbinding statement reached at the end of the contentious and chaotic ...
|
SearchRandom image Upcoming events
 Popular contentRandom Quote"The fact is that the last time we had high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 100 million years ago and the Sun was a little bit cooler at that time. Now if we push it up...this is not something that most climatologists will talk about but I think that there is a small chance, maybe a 1% chance, that if we really hit the planet too hard we may push it into a runaway system in which the temperature simply goes up and up until the oceans boil into the atmosphere, and that would extinguish all life on Earth." |
