Archivo categoría «Naturaleza»
Por Joel E. Cohen, profesor de Demografía de la Universidad Rockefeller y la Universidad de Columbia. Traducción de Kena Nequiz (Project Syndicate, 02/02/12):
Pocas personas fuera de Italia saben que seis sismólogos y un funcionario público están siendo enjuiciados en la pequeña ciudad de L’Aquila. Sin embargo, la cuestión tiene implicaciones para los científicos, ingenieros, administradores y sistemas jurídicos de mucho más allá de las fronteras italianas.
Los terremotos de 1461 y 1703 destruyeron en gran parte L’Aquila. La ciudad fue reconstruida y su población creció a más de 73,000 habitantes, y permaneció estable durante más de 300 años … Seguir leyendo
By Dennis Byrne, a Chicago writer who blogs in The Barbershop chicagonow.com (CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 31/01/12):
It’s bad enough when politicians and true believers distort scientific findings for their own purposes. But when scientists do it, we’ve reached a dangerous point in intellectual discourse.
Such is the case with the widespread belief that evidence of global warming is incontrovertible. Thankfully, some scientists courageously have decided to publicly challenge this numbing, politically correct dogma.
Among them isNobel Prize-winningphysicist Ivar Giaever, who recently resigned from the American Physical Society because he couldn’t accept the group’s policy statement that the “evidence is … Seguir leyendo
By James S. Miller, the dean and vice president for science at the New York Botanical Garden (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 23/01/12):
Botanists long thought the tallest trees on Madagascar all belonged to only three species of the genus Canarium, but two scientists have now determined that there are actually 35 species of the genus there, of which 29 are new to science.
To make this startling discovery, Douglas Daly of the New York Botanical Garden and his Malagasy colleague Jeannie Raharimampionona hiked through rainforests for months in 2006 and then toiled in scientific collections to sort out all … Seguir leyendo
By Justin Yifu Lin, Senior Vice President and Chief Economist of the World Bank, and Apurva Sanghi, World Bank senior economist and team leader of the report Natural Hazards, UnNatural Disasters: the Economics of Effective Prevention (Project Syndicate, 13/01/12):
Despite all of the gloomy economic news nowadays, if we thought that things couldn’t get much worse, we had a grim reminder this month that that no country is immune to the forces of nature and the havoc they wreak. Two years ago, on January 12, 2010, Haiti was struck by a devastating earthquake that killed more than 220,000 … Seguir leyendo
Por Peter Singer, profesor de bioética en la Universidad de Princeton y profesor laureado en la Universidad de Melbourne. Algunos de sus libros son Animal Liberation (“Liberación animal”), Practical Ethics (“Ética práctica”), The Expanding Circle (“El círculo en expansión”) y The Life You Can Save (“La vida que podéis salvar”). Traducido del inglés por Carlos Manzano (Project Syndicate, 12/01/12):
Hace cuarenta años, me encontraba, junto con unos cuantos estudiantes más, en una calle bulliciosa de Oxford repartiendo octavillas a fin de protestar por la utilización de jaulas para gallinas en granjas de avicultura intensiva. La mayoría de quienes cogían … Seguir leyendo
By Bjørn Lomborg the author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Cool It, head of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and adjunct professor at Copenhagen Business School (Project Syndicate, 10/01/12):
Dressing up failure as victory has been integral to climate-change negotiations since they started 20 years ago. The latest round of talks in Durban, South Africa, in December was no exception.
Climate negotiations have been in virtual limbo ever since the catastrophic and humiliating Copenhagen summit in 2009, where vertiginous expectations collided with hard political reality. So as negotiators – and a handful of government ministers – arrived in Durban, expectations could … Seguir leyendo
Por Lindiwe Mazibuko, Parliamentary Leader of South Africa’s Democratic Alliance (Project Syndicate, 26/12/11):
The United Nations’ recent 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) in Durban, South Africa succeeded in renewing the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to reduce global greenhouse-gas emissions. But the meeting also highlighted the two major problems that plague international environmental negotiations. The first, unscientific skepticism, has an impact on the second, collective-action failure. Ultimately, only legislative bodies have the power to overcome this failure.
Skepticism regarding the need for environmental action arises from the relationship between environmental degradation and per capita income. According to the environmental … Seguir leyendo
By Justina C. Ray, a wildlife biologist, executive director and senior scientist at the Wildlife Conservation Society Canada (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/12/11):
Christmas is tied to the magical north and to the reindeer — creatures of mythical power that fly through the night across the world, helping to distribute happiness and good will. But reindeer do exist — we call them caribou in North America — and these animals and their home in the boreal woodlands and on the barren-ground tundra are in trouble.
For the past decade, I have been conducting aerial surveys of caribou herds. As … Seguir leyendo
By Paul Greenberg, the author of Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/12/11):
As the first chill of winter descends on the Northeast and the traditional cold-weather codfish run starts in earnest, fishermen and scientists are again at odds, debating whether the once fantastically abundant North Atlantic codfish populations are finally rebuilding — or hurtling inextricably toward collapse.
But even as regulators parse a recent gloomy assessment of Gulf of Maine codfish populations, the entire question of the commercial future of cod may soon become moot. Cod and other wild-caught whitefish, for … Seguir leyendo
Por Bjørn Lomborg, autor de The Skeptical Environmentalist y Cool It, director del Centro para el Consenso de Copenhague y profesor adjunto de la Copenhagen Business School (Project Syndicate, 13/12/11):
Muchas veces se dice que el tiempo extremo es una de las principales razones para tomar medidas firmes respecto del calentamiento global. Hoy en día, ningún huracán ni ola de calor pasa sin que un político o activista lo presente como evidencia de la necesidad de un acuerdo sobre el clima global, como el que se acaba de posponer hasta fines de la década en Durban, Sudáfrica.
Estas afirmaciones … Seguir leyendo
By Michael Jacobs, a special adviser to Gordon Brown from 2004-10, is a visiting professor on climate change at the London School of Economics (THE GUARDIAN, 11/12/11):
UN climate change conferences don’t of themselves cut greenhouse gas emissions. Negotiations about targets and texts cannot do that; only government policies that incentivise and require business investment in low carbon technologies and other emission-reducing activities can.
So the standard by which UN talks should be judged is whether or not they make such policy and investment more likely or less. And from that perspective the conference that has ended in Durban… Seguir leyendo
By Emma Marris, the author of Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World; Peter Kareiva, the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy; Joseph Mascaro, a postdoctoral associate at the Carnegie Institution for Science and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Erle C. Ellis, an associate professor of geography and environmental systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 08/12/11):
Scientists interested in drawing attention to the human transformation of planet Earth have begun calling the current geological epoch the Anthropocene — the age of man. Naming an epoch is serious … Seguir leyendo
By Rachel Marsden, a columnist, political strategist and former Fox News host. She is the author of American Bombshell: A Tale of Domestic and International Invasion (CHICAGO TRIBUNE, 30/11/11):
Global leaders are meeting in Durban, South Africa, in an attempt to figure out how to continue their fight against “climate change” when the first Kyoto Protocol commitment period ends in 2012. Since I’m sitting here in the dark with the heat off, perhaps they’d grant me the temporary moral authority to offer a few suggestions for their agenda.
•Don’t waste any time fiddling with the planet’s thermostat. So the … Seguir leyendo
By Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland and President of the Mary Robinson Foundation for Climate Justice., and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Emeritus of Cape Town and a Nobel Peace Laureate (Project Syndicate, 30/11/11):
Before the Copenhagen climate-change summit two years ago, the two of us sat together in Cape Town to listen to five African farmers from different countries, four of whom were women, tell us how climate change was undermining their livelihoods. Each explained how floods and drought, and the lack of regular seasons to sow and reap, were outside their normal experience. Their fears are … Seguir leyendo
By Jagdish Bhagwati, professor of Economics and Law at Columbia University and Senior Fellow in International Economics at the Council on Foreign Relations (Project Syndicate, 30/11/11):
The 17th conference of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, popularly known as COP-17, is taking place in Durban, South Africa, at a critical moment, as the historic 1997 Kyoto Protocol is set to expire next year. But, like the climate-change conferences in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Cancún in 2010, COP-17 can be expected to spend much and produce little.
Indeed, the extravagance of these conferences seems to grow, rather than … Seguir leyendo