Global Warming Issues

But FYI is now home to the largest solar installation of any airport in the U.S.

Arriving passengers already notice the solar panels which power the airport a half-mile away. They cover an area the size of seven football fields. This old Ag land is now being used to farm the sun’s rays.

Alan Autry, Fresno Mayor: “So you take land that’s basically idle and useless and turning it into 11-million dollars worth of taxpayer’s savings, that’s a good day for Fresno.”

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“There is both a local component and a regional component to the pollutants that cause unhealthy air in Beijing, and the severity of their effects are driven by weather fronts and winds,” said Kenneth Rahn, a retired URI professor who travels to China several times a year to help scientists at Tsinghua University interpret their data. “Since it’s controlled by the weather, it will be a matter of luck whether the bad air periods correspond with days of outdoor Olympic events.”

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British Olympic chiefs have praised Chinese authorities for taking steps to ensure air pollution will not cause major problems at next month’s Beijing Olympics.

The potential damage to athletes from smog and algae in Beijing has been a concern since the International Olympic Committee awarded the Games to the Chinese capital.

But the British Olympic Association believe measures to reduce the smog by halving the number of cars on the city’s roads and shutting down factories will prove effective.The Chinese have also had to tackle the appearance of huge areas of green algae at the Qingdao sailing venue.

Britain’s Olympic mission chief Simon Clegg said: “We are increasingly confident that the arrangements the Chinese have put in place will address those issues.”The resources the Chinese threw at the algae problem was impressive and the reports from Qingdao are very positive indeed.

“Likewise with the smog, in the main things are improving and there are still some substantial changes to be implemented - the reduction of cars on the road and implementation of Olympic lanes.”In another pollution-cutting move, 267 companies near the capital shut down from yesterday until after the Games.Clegg also believes the IOC will allow a replacement for Paula Radcliffe if the marathon runner fails to recover in time from injury.

Replacements are not allowed automatically if athletes are suffering from an existing injury.But Clegg said: “Although she is carrying an existing injury we are confident she will make the team but if necessary to put in place a late-injury replacement.”We are confident that would be dealt with sympathetically by the IOC.”

Meanwhile, BOA chairman Colin Moynihan insists Britain’s athletes will not be prevented from expressing personal political opinions in Beijing.”Overwhelmingly, athletes will be going to win medals but should they have any opinion with regard to Chinese policy on Zimbabwe, Darfur or Tibet they are totally entitled to air their concerns within the realms of common sense and having listened to IOC advice,” Moynihan said.

“The IOC have asked that there is no propaganda and no demonstrations at the Olympic Games, many of the 205 countries are in conflict and the Games are not the right venue for these.” — AFP

While melting Arctic sea ice and glaciers have become a symbol of climate change, new research from the University of Massachusetts Amherst indicates that highland forests in Costa Rica could also be seriously affected by future changes in climate, reducing the number of species in a region famous for its biodiversity.

“Central America is a major, emerging “hot spot” in the tropics where climate change impacts on the environment will be pronounced, and the loss of species associated with climate has already been identified,” says doctoral candidate Ambarish Karmalkar of the UMass Amherst Climate System Research Center. He recently attended the first conference organized in Costa Rica to study this issue. “We have completed a regional climate model showing that many areas of Costa Rica will become warmer and drier as climate change accelerates, and these changes will be amplified at higher elevations.”

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Under the direction of the Helmholtz Zentrum München, a German research group studied in a longitudinal study, over six years, whether associations are identifiable between the onset of atopic diseases and exposure to air pollutants originating from traffic.

The scientists based their analysis, on the one hand, on the corresponding distance of the parental home to streets busy with traffic, and on the other hand, modeled values, for the respective residencial addresses of the children, of air pollution with fine dust, diesel soot and nitrogen dioxide.

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The clams, the world’s largest bivalve mollusks and the star of lurid but mostly imaginary literary and cinematic depictions of trapped divers, can live for over a century. They have been known to exceed 1.4 metres in length and weigh in at over 260 kilograms.

Once common throughout Philippine reefs, excessive hunting for the food, pet and curio trade all but depleted the wild giant clam population by the mid-1980s, prompting the IUCN to classify them as vulnerable.

An attempt to restore natural clam populations is now being spearheaded by Dr. Suzanne Mingoa-Licuanan of the University of the Philippines Marine Science Institute in partnership with WWF-Philippines.

“Several species of laboratory-raised giant clams have been re-seeded in over 50 reefs nationwide, significantly bolstering wild stocks and ensuring their survival for at least another generation,” said WWF Project Manager Paolo Pagaduan.

By way of example, a fresh batch of 40 true giant clams (Tridacna gigas) wrapped in watertight plastic bags made the journey last month from rearing laboratories in the west of the country down the coast to their new homes in Batangas province on Santelmo Reef, a prized snorkeling site being restored with the help of WWF and a nearby ecotourism development.

With an average length of 36 centimetres and weighing almost 10 kilograms, each of the 40 clams was painstakingly but successfully laid to rest – alive of course – in

pre-designated nooks and crannies. Some 102 clams were planted in the same area last November and another 35 are being grown for transplanting in coming months.

“When we planted the first batch last November, all clam mantles were pale ochre. Now, each clam shows off electric hues of blue and violet – an indicator that the area is conducive to clam growth,” said Pagaduan.

“It is hoped that baby clam recruits will eventually appear to seed outlying areas in Batangas.”

Giant clams are an integral part of the reef, serving as nurseries for a host of fish and invertebrate species including damsels, gobies and tiny commensal crustaceans such as shrimp.

Sedentary organisms like sponges, tunicates, corals and algae find giant clam shells perfect substrates for attachment. Giant clams also act as filter feeders, sifting planktonic debris from the water for food thereby improving overall water quality.

The Interior Department on Wednesday made 2.6 million acres of potentially oil-rich territory in northern Alaska available for energy exploration. At the same time, it deferred for a decade any decision to open 600,000 acres of land north of Teshekpuk Lake that is the summer home of thousands of migrating caribou and millions of waterfowl.

The decision will open up for drilling much of the northeast section of the Northeast National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, holding an estimated 3.7 billion barrels of oil, Tom Lonnie, Alaska state director for the Bureau of Land Management, said in a conference call with reporters.

The northeast and northwest portions of the reserve could yield eight billion barrels of oil, he said.

Mr. Lonnie said he expected the first oil production to begin in the easternmost part of the reserve, west of the Colville River, from 2010 to 2012. A fully developed oil complex exists on state lands on the eastern banks of the river.

The bureau has already leased out 965,000 acres of the petroleum reserve lands.

Stan Senner, executive director of Audubon Alaska, applauded the decision not to drill north of Teshekpuk, near Beaufort Sea, saying that it “acknowledges the international importance of the Teshekpuk wetlands, which have been protected by every federal administration since Jimmy Carter.” Ideally, he added, these areas will be permanently protected.

Aside from the prospect of expanding domestic oil supplies, the new production would help alleviate worries about the viability of the Alaska pipeline system.

The pipeline is transporting 700,000 barrels of oil daily, down from 2.1 million when the Prudhoe Bay fields were at peak production in 1988. If the amount of oil in the pipeline falls too low in the bitter Arctic climate, it is no longer able to flow south to the tankers that take it to California for processing.

Upon entering Congress in 1987, Representative Nancy Pelosi quickly became part of the solid California front against oil drilling along much of the nation’s coast.

The Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 and the steady push to tap the potential reserves off the state’s rugged coast had galvanized Californians and made opposition to offshore drilling part of the political DNA of up-and-coming figures like Ms. Pelosi.

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