submitted by Luis Kun

Lawmakers need to ensure their new regulations do not run counter to the humanitarian imperative.
Photograph: CorePhil/DSI

Drones are already a game-changer for disaster response

theguardian.com - by Patrick Meier - June 6, 2014

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) capture images faster, cheaper, and at a far higher resolution than satellite imagery. And as John DeRiggi speculates in "Drones for Development?" these attributes will likely lead to a host of applications in development work. In the humanitarian field that future is already upon us — so we need to take a rights-based approach to advance the discussion, improve coordination of UAV flights, and to promote regulation that will ensure safety while supporting innovation.

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“The models that predicted the arrival of radioactive seawater stated that the seawater could come anytime from late March or early April to the end of year . . ."  Photo: KAI VETTER

ecowatch.com - by Harvey Wasserman - June 3, 2014

The corporate media silence on Fukushima has been deafening . . .

Ever more radioactive water continues to pour into the Pacific. . .

Hundreds more tons are backed up on site, with Tepco apologists advocating they be dumped directly into the ocean without decontamination.

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L'Organisation mondiale de la santé (OMS) a indiqué mercredi que, en moins de six mois, l'épidémie de fièvre Ebola a déjà fait 208 morts parmi 328 cas suspects en Guinée. Un bilan revu à la hausse par rapport au précédent qui faisait état d'un peu moins de 200 personnes décédées.

LISEZ ICI...

earthpolicy.org - by Lester R. Brown

World agriculture is now facing challenges unlike any before. Producing enough grain to make it to the next harvest has challenged farmers ever since agriculture began, but now the challenge is deepening as new trends—falling water tables, plateauing grain yields, and rising temperatures—join soil erosion to make it difficult to expand production fast enough. As a result, world grain carryover stocks have dropped from an average of 107 days of consumption a decade or so ago to 74 days in recent years.

World food prices have more than doubled over the last decade.

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( Also see - http://www.earth-policy.org/books/fpep/fpepch5

( ALSO SEE - http://resiliencesystem.org/full-planet-empty-plates-new-geopolitics-food-scarcity

New evidence links rapid sea level rise 14,500 years ago to icebergs breaking off Antarctica. 
Credit: Frank Roedel, Alfred Wegener Institute

Some 14,600 years ago, sea levels rose 6.5 feet in just a century, thanks to Antarctica's melting glaciers. It could happen again, say researchers.

livescience.com - by Becky Oskin - May 28, 2014

Antarctica's melting glaciers launched so many icebergs into the ocean 14,600 years ago that sea level rose 6.5 feet (2 meters) in just 100 years, a new study reports. The results are the first direct evidence for dramatic melting in Antarctica's past — the same as predictions for its future.

"The Antarctic Ice Sheet had been considered to be fairly stable and kind of boring in how it retreated," said study co-author Peter Clark, a climate scientist at Oregon State University. "This shows the ice sheet is much more dynamic and episodic, and contributes to rapid sea-level rise."

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The UN today elected Cuban Health Minister Roberto Tomas Morales Ojeda to chair its 2014 World Health Assembly.

Cuban media hails decision; UN Watch condemns "UN handing propaganda victory to a dictatorship"

unwatch.org

GENEVA, May 19 – The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch criticized the UN's election today of Cuba to chair the 67th World Health Assembly, with executive director Hillel Neuer saying the decision "wrongly hands a coveted propaganda victory to a dictatorship that imprisons journalists and brutalizes human rights defenders," and that it "enables Cuba to further perpetuate myths about a health system that is in fact crumbling, with desperate citizens reduced to asking tourists to bring them Aspirin and other basic medicines."

The consensus election today by 194 WHO member states chose the sole candidate, Cuban Health Minister Roberto Tomas Morales Ojeda.

Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the IMF, presents her address to the Inclusive Capitalism Conference. Photograph: John Stillwell/AP

Christine Lagarde tells London conference banking sector is still resisting reform and taking excessive risks

theguardian.com - by Angela Monaghan - May 27, 2014

The head of the International Monetary Fund has warned that a persistent violation of ethics among bankers and rising inequality pose a major threat to growth and financial stability.

Christine Lagarde told an audience in London that six years on from the deep financial crisis that engulfed the global economy, banks were resisting reform and still too focused on excessive risk taking to secure their bonuses at the expense of public trust.

She said: "The behaviour of the financial sector has not changed fundamentally in a number of dimensions since the crisis.

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Image: Wind Share of Electricity Generation in Leading Countries, 2013

earthpolicy.org - May 27th 2014 - J. Matthew Roney

Denmark produced one third of its electricity from the wind in 2013. In no other country has wind’s share of annual electricity generation yet topped 30 percent. But the Danes are not stopping there—they are eyeing a goal of 50 percent wind by 2020, with most of the needed expansion coming from offshore wind farms.

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nature.com

Growing population and increasing demand for higher living standards have led to the overuse of water resources.

More recently, the management of watersheds has been threatened by the impacts of climate change on the water cycle.

In the face of these challenges, water companies and agribusinesses need to seek solutions.

In this focus, Nature Climate Change presents four opinion pieces that discuss the risks and opportunities posed to private companies by water scarcity, highlight the steps some companies have already taken and, overall, the actions still required.

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Credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's warns that climate change will have a negative effect on credit ratings. | Fotosearch Value via Getty Images

huffingtonpost.com - by Sara Gates - May 17, 2014

Add credit ratings to the list of things climate change might ruin.

According to a recent report released by Standard & Poor's Ratings Services, rising global temperatures will put downward pressure on sovereign credit ratings. The international credit-rating firm warns that poorer countries and nations with already low ratings will be hit the hardest by the effects of climate change.

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ossfoundation.us

The idea that Global Warming is a natural cycle is well understood from paleo data covering the past 1 million years. Is there a difference between current climate, and the natural cycle? For the past million years the natural climate has oscillated between warm periods and ice ages. This shifting in and out of warm periods and ice ages is correlated strongly with Milankovitch cycles. In order to understand the difference between natural cycle and human-caused global warming, one needs to consider changes in radiative forcing and how this affects systems on earth such as the atmosphere, vegetation, ice and snow, ocean cycles and related effects. The current radiative forcing levels are clearly outside of the natural cycle range.

Is global warming a natural cycle? Or is global warming affected by human influence? What does the science say? Both are true. In the natural cycle, the world can warm, and cool, without any human interference. For the past million years this has occurred over and over again at approximately 100,000 year intervals. About 80-90,000 years of ice age with about 10-20,000 years of warm period, give or take some thousands of years.

priceofoil.org - by Andy Rowell - April 1, 2014

In a landmark report to Alberta’s energy regulator, a panel of experts has concluded that odours from a controversial tar sands processing plant are linked to human health impacts.

The report, which was published [March 31, 2014], examined the emissions from Baytex Energy’s Peace River plant, which has been the subject of a number of health complaints from local residents over the last few years.

The situation has been so bad that seven families have been forced to leave.

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Regulator says Peace River area emissions potential cause of health problems
http://www.edmontonjournal.com/Regulator+says+Peace+River+area+emissions+potential+cause+health+problems/9682279/story.html

Although the Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the region contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 4 feet (1.2 meters).  Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/SVS

(CNN) -- New research shows a major section of west Antarctica's ice sheet will completely melt in coming centuries and probably raise sea levels higher than previously predicted, revealing another impact from the world's changing climate.

According to a study released Monday, warm ocean currents and geographic peculiarities have helped kick off a chain reaction at the Amundsen Sea-area glaciers, melting them faster than previously realized and pushing them "past the point of no return," NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot told reporters.

The glacial retreat there "appears unstoppable," said Rignot, lead author of a joint NASA-University of California Irvine paper that used 40 years of satellite data and aircraft studies.

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Image: The tin-based perovskite layer acts as an efficient sunlight absorber that is sandwiched between two electric charge transport layers for conducting electricity to the outside world.

economictimes.indiatimes.com - May 5th, 2014 - Mercouri G. Kanatzidis

In a breakthrough, scientists have developed a new low cost, efficient and environment-friendly solar cell that uses tin instead of the hazardous lead.

Researchers from Northwestern University are among the first to create a solar cell that uses a structure called perovskite, with tin as the light-absorbing material instead of lead.

"Exculding the use of lead is a quantum leap in the process of creating a very promising type of solar cell called a perovskite," said Mercouri G Kanatzidis, an inorganic chemist with expertise in dealing with tin.