Archivo categoría «Naturaleza»
Por Pedro Arrojo Agudo, director de la exposición Agua, ríos y pueblos (LA VANGUARDIA, 16/05/10):
Según las Naciones Unidas, más de mil millones de personas no tienen acceso garantizado al agua potable y unas 10.000 mueren cada día por ello, en su mayoría niños. En estas estimaciones no se contabilizan los procesos de envenenamiento progresivo que producen miles de abortos, malformaciones congénitas y muertes por beber agua contaminada con metales pesados, cianuros y otros tóxicos procedentes de vertidos como los de la minería a cielo abierto o determinadas industrias.
Ante estos datos, a menudo se oye hablar de escasez … Seguir leyendo
By Tony Brenton, a British diplomat from 1975 to 2009, most recently serving as Ambassador to Moscow (THE TIMES, 05/05/10):
One unadvertised consequence of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption will be a very slight delay in global climate change. The much bigger eruption of Krakatoa in 1883 threw up a cloud of ash that cut sunlight reaching the Earth by 1 per cent, produced half a decade of exceptionally cold winters worldwide and had a cooling effect on the oceans that was still apparent a century later.
All of which underlines that there are things other than reducing greenhouse gas emissions … Seguir leyendo
By Simon Winchester, the author of Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded and the forthcoming Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 16/04/10):
In planetary terms, it was just a tiny pinprick that opened up last month underneath the Eyjafjalla Glacier in southern Iceland, when a long-forgotten volcano started to erupt again after a quiescence of nearly 200 years. But insignificant though the rent in the planet’s fabric may have been, uncounted millions have been suddenly affected by it.
The North Atlantic winds shifted by just a few degrees, and all of a sudden commercial catastrophe … Seguir leyendo
Signataires : Jean-Louis Fellous, ancien responsable des programmes d’observation de la Terre du CNES et ancien directeur des recherches océaniques de l’Ifremer ; Jean-Charles Hourcade, économiste, directeur de recherche au CNRS, directeur d’études à l’EHESS ; Sylvie Joussaume, climatologue, directeur de recherche au CNRS ; Olivier Godard, économiste, directeur de recherche au CNRS, école Polytechnique ; Catherine Gautier, géographe, professeur à l’Université de Californie à Santa Barbara ; Stéphane Hallegatte, chercheur, Météo-France (LE MONDE, 06/04/10):
On savait que le changement climatique se traduirait par des modifications du cycle hydrologique. On n’avait pas prévu qu’en plus des … Seguir leyendo
Par Dominique Lecourt, secrétaire général de l’Institut Diderot, fonds de dotation pour le développement de l’économie sociale (LE MONDE, 06/04/10):
L’article publié par Le Monde daté du vendredi 26 mars sous le titre “Les climato-sceptiques américains à l’assaut des écoles” laisse rêveur un lecteur non prévenu. Les “climato-sceptiques” y apparaissent comme des émules des créationnistes hostiles à la théorie darwinienne de l’évolution. Une expression suffit à faire le lien : “traitement équilibré”. De fait, les “créationnistes scientifiques” américains font pression depuis plus de vingt ans pour que l’enseignement de la biologie fasse place à une version du récit biblique … Seguir leyendo
By William R. Hawkins, a consultant specializing in international economic and national security issues. He is a former economics professor and Republican congressional staff member (THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 06/04/10):
After two years of raucous meetings at great hotels and resorts around the world, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) failed to deliver a treaty in Copenhagen in December. The clash of national interests over who would be required to cripple their economies to “save the planet” from the chimera of global warming proved insurmountable. The flawed process should have ended, but UNFCCC is pressing on. Talks … Seguir leyendo
By Frank Pope, ocean correspondent (THE TIMES, 26/03/10):
When is an endangered species not an endangered species? When it lives in the sea, apparently. Despite continuing carnage in the ocean, marine creatures were refused any protection at the United Nations conference on trade in wildlife that ended yesterday in Doha, Qatar.
Tigers, rhinos and elephants are all better protected after the meeting of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites). But hammerhead sharks, bluefin tuna and other marine species should be quaking in their skins. For when it comes to fish, the world has decided that scientific … Seguir leyendo
By Marcelo Aizen, a researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina and Lawrence Harder, a professor of pollination ecology at the University of Calgary (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 25/03/10):
In the past five years, as the phenomenon known as colony-collapse disorder has spread across the United States and Europe, causing the disappearance of whole colonies of domesticated honeybees, many people have come to fear that our food supply is in peril. The news on Wednesday that a Department of Agriculture survey found that American honeybees had died in great numbers this winter can only … Seguir leyendo
By Nick Herbert, the Shadow Environment Secretary (THE TIMES, 22/03/10):
Last week the international community catastrophically failed to agree measures to protect vanishing stocks of bluefin tuna. “Special interests” — that is, a love of a food despite it being endangered — prevailed. Today it appears we’re heading for a second failure, this time to protect elephants.
Despite being banned 20 years ago, the ivory trade is still thriving in some parts of the world and is, in fact, on the rise. In Kenya the number of elephants poached has increased fourfold in the past two years; in Sierra … Seguir leyendo
By Anthony J. Sadar, a certified consulting meteorologist and co-author of Environmental Risk Communication: Principles and Practices for Industry (THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 17/03/10):
Diversity is a big deal on college campuses these days. Yet social diversity is what’s promoted primarily, if not exclusively, not diversity of opinion. In a complex field such as climatology, intellectual diversity should be encouraged to help unravel the what, why and how of the globe’s climate.
A careful, dispassionate look at the enormous complexity of the Earth-atmosphere system and what we think we know about it reveals that we know very little. Mountains of … Seguir leyendo
By Sir John Houghton, former chief executive at the Met Office (THE TIMES, 15/03/10):
In the UK only about 26 per cent of the population believe the scientific consensus that climate change is happening and is man-made. Many feel they are being steamrollered into believing something false or flakey that will make them poorer or stop them flying.
Given this dangerous mood of scepticism, it is no surprise that the IPCC — the body that represents the integrity of climate-change scientists across the world — is being attacked.
Let’s be honest, sometimes the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change does … Seguir leyendo
Por Jorge Edwards, escritor chileno, premio Cervantes en 1999, y autor de Persona non grata. Su último libro publicado es La casa de Dostoievsky, 2008 (EL PAÍS, 08/03/10):
Las grandes catástrofes son grandes y duras lecciones de la naturaleza. Sacan a relucir lo peor y lo mejor que tenemos. Por un lado, la barbarie, los saqueos, la picaresca criolla, el deseo dictatorial de represalias ilegales. Por el otro, sentimientos reales, no fingidos, a menudo conmovedores, de generosidad y solidaridad.
Mis memorias retroceden hasta el terremoto de Chillán de 1939, donde me sacaron de niño de la cama, envuelto en … Seguir leyendo
By Michael Fumento, director of the nonprofit Independent Journalism Project where he specializes in science and health issues (THE WASHINGTON TIMES, 01/03/10):
There have been a lot of well-kept secrets among the global warmists – which is primarily why the so-called “Climategate” stolen e-mails proved such a scandal. They showed that, in addition to squelching dissenters, the warmists were admitting things to each other that they were denying to the public. They felt, as a Jack Nicholson character put it, “You can’t handle the truth!”
But now the truth is coming out. One fact is that there has been … Seguir leyendo
By Al Gore, the vice president from 1993 to 2001, the founder of the Alliance for Climate Protection and the author of Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis. As a businessman, he is an investor in alternative energy companies (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 27/02/10):
It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.
Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks … Seguir leyendo
By Nicky Clayton, Professor of Comparative Cognition at the University of Cambridge (THE TIMES, 26/02/10):
It is but an evolutionary accident that we ended up as the planet of the apes, albeit slow, almost hairless apes with oversized brains. It is scary to think that we might have lived on the planet of the crows, with humans as mere intellectual curiosities of our avian masters — those big-brained, formidable looking crows.
Our feathered friends are arguably more successful than us mammals: there are 9,000 species of them, and just over 4,000 species of us; birds inhabit every continent and … Seguir leyendo