The humpback whale calf had been trying to suckle from boats, which it apparently mistook for his parent.

The plight of the starving two-tonne animal, dubbed Colin, has captivated Australia since last weekend.

The whale was first given a sedative, then a lethal dose of anaesthetic, which took 10 minutes.

“It’s a tragic end to a programme that dozens of people have put their hearts and souls into,” National Parks and Wildlife Service official John Dengate told Australian radio.

Did you know that every time you breathe out, you are releasing the deadliest of greenhouse gasses… CO2?!?!? For the sake of the planet, and for the sake of the children, please stop breathing. If everyone would stop breathing, the planet could stop suffering our incessant CO2 emissions. Who cares that exhaling CO2 is a natural process, and that all plants NEED CO2 to survive and put out oxygen (you know, the stuff we breathe in so that we can survive)?

Scientists warn today that they are now one of the most dire environmental problems of the 21st century.

According to a report in Science Daily , the grass is being developed by Scientists at Gramina, a joint biotech venture by Australia’s Molecular Plant Breeding Cooperative Research Centre and New Zealand rural services group PGG Wrightson Genomics.

The grass will not only cut the amount of methane cows burp up when chewing the cud, but also grow in hotter climes.

This means that farmers should be able to maintain dairy herds’ productivity and profitability in the face of a changing climate, while cutting down their gaseous burps and reducing their contribution to global warming.

The loss of Arctic ice, which serves as a platform for resting and reproduction and provides a refuge from predators, would be particularly severe for species like the hooded seal.

The April special issue of Ecological Applications examines such potential effects and describes possible conservation measures to mitigate them.

The assessment reflects the latest thinking of experts representing multiple scientific disciplines.

Although Arctic marine mammals have survived past periods of extended warming and cooling, the rate and scale of current climate change are expected to dramatically different, said Sue Moore of Alaska Fisheries Science Centre.

Every area of the oceans is feeling the effects of fishing, pollution, or human-caused global warming, the study says, and some regions are being affected by all of these factors and more.

A team led by Ben Halpern of the University of California, Santa Barbara, created the first global map that shows the various kinds of damage being done to marine ecosystems.

2.Atmosphere is made of 4 layers: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere and thermosphere.

Troposphere is the thinnest layer (12 km or 7.5 mi), but comprises 80 % of the weight of the atmosphere, being its densest layer. Planes do not fly over 9-11 km (5.5-7 mi). It is the warmest layer, because the reflected sun rays heat up the air. As we go further up into the atmosphere, the temperature decreases with 6.5oC each km (0.6 mi), reaching -55o C at the upper limit of the troposphere (called tropopause).

3.Stratosphere goes up to 50 km (30 mi) over the Earth. At its upper edge, there is the maximum ozone concentration,
called the ozone belt. Here, the temperature is higher than in the troposphere, because the ozone absorbs a great amount of the ultraviolet rays. Pollution causes the destruction of the ozone belt, and, without it, the Earth would be exposed to the deadly UV light. Stratopause makes the connection between stratosphere and mesosphere.

Dieter Janecek, a Green Party member who lives near Munich’s central ring road, complained to the city authorities that the level of particles in the air linked to car exhaust had breached the legal limit on more than the 35 days allowed in a year.

But his request to the local authority to draw up an action plan with short-term measures such as traffic bans to curb pollution was turned down and he took his case to the European Court of Justice.

“Where there is a risk that the limit values for particulate matter may be exceeded, persons directly concerned can require the competent authorities to draw up an action plan,” the court said in a statement on Friday.

In the summer of 2007, the Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change was constituted on the eve of World Environment Day (6 June) to coordinate national action plans for assessment, adaptation and mitigation of climate change. In addition to advising the government on pro-active measures that can be taken to deal with the challenge of climate change, the Council will also facilitate inter-ministerial coordination and guide policy in relevant areas as well. The Council has official members – ministers and bureaucrats – from several ministries and other government bodies, and also includes non-official members representating industry, media and the social sector.

Four decades after the so-called Green Revolution enabled this vast nation to feed itself, some farmers are turning their backs on modern agricultural methods—the use of modified seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides—in favor of organic farming.

This is not a matter of producing gourmet food for environmentally attuned consumers but rather something of a life-and-death choice in villages like this one, where the benefits of the Green Revolution have been coupled with unanticipated harmful consequences from chemical pollution.

As driving their actions, the new organic farmers cite the rising costs of seed, fertilizer, and pesticides, and concerns that decades of chemical use is ruining the soil. But many are also revolting against what they see as the environmental degradation that has come with the new farming techniques, particularly the serious pollution of drinking water that village residents blame for causing cancer and other diseases.

Working for ‘Kudumbasree’, a project launched by the City Corporation in March 2004 under the Centre’s Development of Women and Children in Urban Areas Scheme, these women collect wastes daily from door-to-door for a meagre sum Re one.

Disregarding health hazards they face due to direct contact with stinking garbage, they carry on their job from six a.m. in the morning till the dirt from the last house earmarked for them is collected.

But in spite of the noble work they do, the women rue, they are often ill-treated by the people.

According to a report jointly conducted by WHO and UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), the next three most offending countries are Indonesia, Ethiopia and Pakistan.

While 66 million people in Indonesia have no access to toilets, in Ethiopia it is 52 million and 50 million in Pakistan. In China, a whopping 32 million people don’t have access to toilets.

There are very few urban design solutions that address housing the inevitable tide of displaced people that could arise as oceans swell under global warming. Certainly none are as spectacular as this one. The Lilypad, by Vincent Callebaut, is a concept for a completely self-sufficient floating city intended to provide shelter for future climate change refugees. The intent of the concept itself is laudable, but it is Callebaut’s phenomenal design that has captured our imagination.
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World Heritage Sites are named by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The sites, both cultural and natural, added to the list are deemed “of outstanding value to humanity” and deserve protection and preservation, according to the UNESCO Web site.

With the new additions, the World Heritage List now boasts 878 sites (679 cultural, 174 natural and 25 mixed) in 145 countries.

Spied while doing some testing around Stuttgart recently, the upcoming E-class estate will follow rather quickly on the heels of the 2009 launch of its sedan counterpart. Both cars ride on an all-new large car platform that affords the fitting of gas, diesel, and hybrid powertrains.

According to Santram Pradhan, president of the union representing the 8,000 Delhi Jal sewage workers, around 1,000 sewage workers have died in the past seven years. He says 200 have died from asphyxiating on the noxious gasses and drowning in excreta, and about 800 others have died from tuberculosis, hepatitis and other diseases. “Half die, half retire,” Pradhan says, ascribing many of the safety lapses to the lack of concern for low-caste Valmiki workers shown by Delhi Jal Board officials. Numerous requests to interview Delhi Jal Board officials in charge of sewer workers went unanswered.

The country already uses 70% renewable electricity, primarily hydro- and geothermal power and will continue to increase its use of renewables over the next 20 years.

Eventually, the Prime Minister would like to see the country carbon-neutral. “I have set out the challenge to our nation to become the first truly sustainable nation on earth…to dare to aspire to be carbon neutral,” Prime Minister Clarke said.

The Prime Minister also gave a brief outline of further goals, which included a 2040 target of reducing by half per capita emissions from transport and widely introducing electric vehicles. She also stated the goal of achieving a net increase in forest area of 250,000 hectares (617,000 acres) by 2020.

“Studying the dynamics that gave rise to the presence of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere deepens our appreciation of the complex interaction
between biology and geochemistry.”, said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, not involved in these researches.

The plants use mirrors arranged in a Fresnel configuration to heat tubes of liquid rather than solar cells that convert the sunlight directly into electricity. The steam produced by the heated liquids power turbines that create electricity. While not a new technique, Mills says the technology will allow liquids to hold heat and produce steam during the night also. The paper calculates that 92 square miles of solar thermal farm could power the entire country.

Despite the optimistic results of their calculations, they warn that a plan like this requires a complete revamping of the current electric infrastructure. The country’s AC grid would have to be converted to High Voltage DC in order to decrease transmission loss from 50% to around 3% while moving the power from the sunny Southwest to the power-hungry North East. Miles says this would be a huge undertaking that would help move the country from “capital-intensive fossil fuel plants that need to run 24/7” to “electricity created by people’s and the economy’s daily rhythm,” which solar and wind energy follows closely.

“It is perhaps the most important breakthrough in an international environment negotiation process for at least five or six years,” added Achim Steiner, a U.N. under-secretary general.

The agreement will fast-track reductions in the production of hydrochlorofluorocarbons, or HCFCs, and eventually eliminate any use of the gas.

During the 1990s, HCFCs replaced an earlier generation of gas, chloroflurocarbons, or CFCs, for use in air conditioning, refrigeration, fire-fighting foam and hairsprays.

Both are so-called “greenhouse gases” that raise the Earth’s temperature, although HCFCs are considered less damaging than CFCs.

Aside from cutting greenhouse-gas levels, the accord “may also assist in restoring the health of the ozone layer … by a few years,” U.N. officials said. They had recently forecast a return to pre-1980 ozone levels by 2075.

Ozone filters ultraviolet radiation, which is linked to skin cancer and other ailments.

“This is a critically important decision in terms of healing the ozone layer,” said Beatrice Olivastri with the environmental group, Friends of the Earth Canada

Our crime? It turns out one of the illustrations in the book was accidentally mislabeled. This has got the gang at the at the Science and Public Policy Instituted up in arms – or at least pretending to be — no doubt hoping to ride our coattails, create some controversy, and promote their own new book.

Why am I not surprised? These “skeptics” have grown so predictable.

Even so, I’d like to thank the SPPI for pointing out this minor error to us. However, we have checked with climate experts who confirmed that the text accompanying the mislabeled illustration, and our description of the close relationship between CO2 and temperature, is accurate and fairly represents the current state of scientific knowledge.

Apparently the climate change “skeptics” have grown so desperate in their attempts to hide the truth from the American people that they’ve taken to spending hours scrutinizing a children’s book, trying to marginalize the urgent information it contains about global warming. And through all their efforts, all they uncovered in a hundred pages was a single mislabeled illustration — an illustration accompanied by accurate text. Now they’ve launched a full ‘report’ attempting to discredit the entire book, even though they can’t find anything wrong with it besides the flipping of two colors on a solitary illustration.

But do they? Take the plastic bags, for example. We are pestered to re-use them or use designer “bags for life” instead. People get very worked up about this topic. There are eight online petitions on the No 10 website calling for them to be banned or taxed, Ireland has imposed a special bag tax, and a town in Devon has banned them outright.

This is a geographic accident located in the desert sands of the Kalahari (Botswana) like the mouth of a large river: a lot of streams and small lakes forming a wet labyrinth where you can see herds of buffaloes and elephants and lions stalking their prey.

But the peculiarity of the Okavango is the way it dies. The river springs from the central Angola and after running 1,400 km (880 mi), it literally evaporates in the Kalahari desert, its mouth turning into the world’s largest inner delta (15,000 square km, about five times larger than Danube Delta, for instance) and an exceptional place for seeing the most representative species of the African fauna. To the south, Okavango Delta fuels Lake Ngami.

During the rainy season, the volume of flow of its numerous arms and thousands of channels in which the river is divided while approaching its final increases significantly, receiving 11 cubic kilometers of water annually. The arrival of the water in a country representing the paradigm of the dryness is an event, that’s why ‘pula’, Botswana’s national currency means “water”.

10,000 years ago, Okavango still flowed into the area of Makgadkgadi Pan, southern Botswana. The pan is an ancient lake turned today into vast plains of drought and gray land which only harbor water rarely, in years with extremely abundant rainfall.

These impacts could have scoured life from the young Earth—but they might have also planted the ingredients for life as well, scientists said today at a European conference.

The researchers focused on giant basins on the moon believed to be wounds from the “lunar cataclysm,” a time 3.8 billion to 4.2 billion years ago when the moon suffered heavy bombardment from asteroids or comets. There are roughly 50 recognizable lunar basins more than 186 miles (300 kilometers) wide, most of which are thought to date from then.

“I don’t want to cause a panic. There is no reason anything like this would happen soon,” said author Phill Cummins, of Geoscience Australia.

The agency projects that polar bears during that time will lose 42 percent of the Arctic range they need to live in during summer in the Polar Basin when they hunt and breed.

Polar bears depend on sea ice as a platform for hunting seals, their primary food. But the sea ice is decreasing due to climate change.

“It’s that declining sea ice that appears to be driving the results in our models,” said U.S. Geological Survey scientist Steven Amstrup, the lead author of the new studies. “As the sea ice goes, so goes the polar bear.”

A Right to Information (RTI) application filed by green activist Sunita Godbole has revealed that around 200 trees have been axed between January 1, 2005, and July 1, 2007 in Malabar Hill area.

Fourteen permissions were given for cutting trees to make way for proposed development of plots during this period. The bottom line: Mumbai’s posh and green area is now under threat from non-stop construction activity.

Rohan Developers, which is constructing a building on Napean Sea road, has been allowed to chop off five trees, out of which two are already pronounced dead by the Tree Authority.

“We won’t reach agreement nor do we imagine for a moment that we could reach agreement on binding targets amongst the member countries of APEC,” said Prime Minister John Howard, as official-level talks began at the start of a week of meetings of the 21-nation Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum.

APEC leaders including U.S. President George W. Bush converge on the city for a summit on Sept 8-9.

Howard said developing nations, such as China, were opposed to setting binding targets and each nation should set its own greenhouse gas reduction programme. Howard opposes setting binding targets, preferring what he calls “aspirational targets”.

Malaysian Trade Minister Rafidah Aziz, who will attend APEC, said last week that the failure of Australia and the United States to ratify the Kyoto Protocol meant they lacked the credentials to lead climate change talks in Sydney.

Australian police arrested 12 Greenpeace activists on Sunday after an APEC protest at Newcastle, the world’s biggest coal export port north of Sydney, called for binding cuts to greenhouse gases.

Green groups and Australia’s Labor opposition said the APEC summit would be a failure if it did not set greenhouse reduction targets.

Authorities expect violent protests at APEC, as thousands rally against the Iraq war and global warming, and are staging Australia’s biggest ever security operation for APEC

Was 1998 the hottest year in United States history, as most reporting on climate change has presumed? Or was that record set back in 1934 before “global warming” became a scary household phrase
A corrective tweak to National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s formulation shows that the hottest year on record in the United States indeed was back during the Dust Bowl days.

But does this mean that all the concern about global warming being a relatively recent phenomenon tied to carbon-belching power plants and hulking SUVs is a bunch of Al Gore hooey

The bases are not just there to house the extraterrestrial UFOs; they are also being used by the Military of several nations.

The reverse engineering started decades back. After the major military powers understood the existence of some of these bases for the extraterrestrial UFOs. The need for hiding sophisticated technologies gave rise to the use of these bases by the major military powers.

Scientists are worried about the weakening crusts because of these innumerable terrestrial and extraterrestrial UFO bases. The manifestation of weakened crust under the ocean as well as surface of the earth can be catastrophic. Massive earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis can engulf the whole world in 2012

The behaviour of one ring in particular – the G ring – has baffled experts.

Its dust particles should ebb away because there are no nearby moons to hold them in place or replenish them.