Naturaleza (Continuación)

The good news on climate change is that the world wants to do something. It's no longer just the Europeans and a few fellow travelers; a recent survey suggested that 96 percent of South Koreans and 66 percent of Ukrainians regard global warming as an important threat. The latest report from the Nobel-anointed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change got the blanket media coverage it warranted. In the United States, business and congressional leaders have decided action is inevitable.

Then there is the bad news: None of these fine sentiments will matter unless a critical mass of countries unites around a real policy.…  Seguir leyendo »

Los contaminantes atmosféricos con niveles preocupantes en la Europa más desarrollada son las partículas en suspensión (PM), el dióxido de nitrógeno (NO) y el ozono troposférico. Además, los valores límite legales de los dos primeros se superan principalmente en zonas urbanas, donde vive la mayor parte de la población. Según datos del Ministerio de Medio Ambiente, el 60% de zonas con elevado tráfico rodado de España superan el valor límite diario de NO fijado para el 2010, mientras que el 40% y el 70% de ellas superan los valores límite anual y diario de PM fijados ya desde el 2005.

Es verdad que estos problemas ambientales urbanos presentan una dimensión europea.…  Seguir leyendo »

Desde el final de la guerra fría, se han venido abajo barreras de todo tipo y la economía mundial ha cambiado de manera fundamental. Hasta 1989, el mercado mundial comprendía entre 800 y mil millones de personas. Hoy es tres veces mayor, y sigue creciendo. De hecho, estamos presenciando una de las revoluciones más radicales en la historia moderna. La "sociedad de consumo occidental" está pasando de ser un modelo válido para una minoría de la población mundial a ser el modelo económico dominante en el mundo. A mitad de este siglo, sus leyes podrían tal vez regir las vidas de 7.000 millones de personas.…  Seguir leyendo »

Why don’t polar bears eat penguins? Because their paws are too big to get the wrappers off, obviously. It’s not a joke you hear so often these days, though, because polar bears are now a serious business. They’re the standard-bearers of a tear-jerking propaganda campaign to persuade us all that, if we don’t act soon on climate change, the only thing that will remain of our snowy-furred ursine chums will be the picture on a pack of Fox’s glacier mints.

First there came the computer-generated polar bear in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth; then that heartrending photo, syndicated everywhere, of the bears apparently stranded on a melting ice floe; then the story of those four polar bears drowned by global warming (actually, they’d perished in a storm).…  Seguir leyendo »

Pocas son las certezas, nada tan escaso en este mundo como las certidumbres; pero una de las más contundentes es que estamos multiplicando la incertidumbre. La incesante agresión a los procesos esenciales para la continuidad de lo natural; la demolición de la complejidad; y, sobre todo, la siembra de desconciertos en los ciclos ecológicos rompen las reglas del juego de la vida. Los beneficios del progreso se tambalean, fundamentalmente porque los elementos que sostienen a todo y a todos han sido saqueados. Esa imponente, y única verdadera riqueza, que son los aires, las aguas, las tierras y la vivacidad zozobran tras dos siglos de mal uso y peor consumo.…  Seguir leyendo »

Despite growing interest in clean energy technology, it looks as if we are not going to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide anytime soon. The amount in the atmosphere today exceeds the most pessimistic forecasts made just a few years ago, and it is increasing faster than anybody had foreseen.

Even if we could stop adding to greenhouse gases tomorrow, the earth would continue warming for decades — and remain hot for centuries. We would still face the threat of water from melting glaciers lapping at our doorsteps.

What can be done? One idea is to counteract warming by tossing small particles into the stratosphere (above where jets fly).…  Seguir leyendo »

I worked as environmental adviser for the World Bank Group, headquartered in Washington, for 23 years. I joined because I believed the bank wanted to improve the lot of the poor and conserve the environment. Before going to Washington I did an environmental study for the government of Tucurui, the first big dam in Amazonia. A vast part of the forest was flooded, so I saw at first hand the huge environmental and social cost of misguided development projects.

The bank knew how impassioned I was but hired me none the less. I thought I would work with colleagues to prevent blunders in the future.…  Seguir leyendo »

El Premio Nobel de la Paz concedido a Al Gore es un homenaje apropiado para un líder que ha sido profético, audaz y hábil en su tarea de alertar al mundo sobre los peligros del cambio climático causado por el ser humano. Gore ha compartido el premio con alguien menos conocido, pero tan merecedor como él. El Panel Intergubernamental sobre el Cambio Climático (PICC) es el organismo de la ONU encargado de valorar los conocimientos científicos sobre el cambio del clima. El hecho de que haya obtenido el Premio Nobel transmite tres mensajes importantes.

Para empezar, los principales científicos especializados en cuestiones climáticas y la mayoría de los Gobiernos del mundo han colocado la ciencia del clima en el centro de los debates sobre política mundial.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nosotros, la especie humana, hemos llegado a un momento en el que hay que tomar una decisión. Imaginar que podamos realizar una elección consciente como tal especie es algo que no tiene precedentes, que incluso nos resulta risible, pero ése es, sin embargo, el problema que se nos plantea. Nuestro hogar, la Tierra, está en peligro. Lo que corre el riesgo de ser destruido no es el planeta como tal, sino las condiciones que lo han hecho habitable para los seres humanos. Sin darnos cuenta de las consecuencias de lo que hacemos, hemos empezado a arrojar tal cantidad de dióxido de carbono en la delgada capa de aire que rodea nuestro mundo que literalmente hemos modificado el equilibrio calórico entre la Tierra y el Sol.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Guardian's front-page story reported Craig Venter's claims that he is "poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth" (I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer, October 6). On the face of it this seems to be a spectacular advance. Unfortunately the truth is rather different.To provide an analogy, it is as if he had selected a set of car parts, assembled them into a car and then claimed to have invented the car. It will not "herald a giant leap forward in the development of designer genomes". It is merely the crudest and most facile kind of reductionism, an experimental approach that provides no insight whatever into the fundamental nature of cellular processes.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Arctic ice cap melted this summer at a shocking pace, disappearing at a far higher rate than predicted by even the most pessimistic experts in global warming. But we shouldn’t be shocked, because scientists have long known that major features of earth’s interlinked climate system of air and water can change abruptly.

A big reason such change happens is feedback — not the feedback that you’d like to give your boss, but the feedback that creates a vicious circle. This type of feedback in our global climate could determine humankind’s future prosperity and even survival.

The vast expanse of ice floating on the surface of the Arctic Ocean always recedes in the summer, reaching its lowest point sometime in September.…  Seguir leyendo »

El planeta Tierra se caracteriza por albergar una inmensa diversidad de especies biológicas o biodiversidad, constituyendo lo que Margalef llamaba el barroco de la naturaleza. El número de especies distintas, de las que se han catalogado algo más de millón y medio, pero de las que se estiman entre 10 y 30 millones, es la primera imagen que nos viene cuando hablamos de biodiversidad. Pero hay un componente de biodiversidad igualmente importante: las interacciones entre dichas especies.

Las especies tejen redes de interdependencia mutua sin las que no podrían subsistir. Por ejemplo, la reproducción de más del 90% de las especies de árboles y arbustos en las regiones tropicales está en manos de los animales que polinizan sus flores o dispersan sus semillas.…  Seguir leyendo »

Montana is burning again. This summer, some of the nation's worst wildfires incinerated homes, barns and fences, killing livestock and forcing families to evacuate. Wildfires have increased fourfold since the 1980s, and they are bigger and harder to contain because of earlier-arriving springs and hotter, bone-dry summers. Last year's fires broke records; this year could be worse. As courageous firefighters beat back the flames, insurance companies continue to pay out billions for wildfire losses across the West.

Meanwhile, Florida is bracing for the duration of the hurricane season even as rebuilding continues from the eight hurricanes that crisscrossed the Sunshine State in 2004 and 2005.…  Seguir leyendo »

If talking could cut greenhouse gas emissions, then this would be a good week for international action on climate change. It opened with more than 80 speeches from governments at a special session on the issue at the UN, and will close with a two-day "summit" in the White House bringing together all the world's major emitters. The bad news is that we are still heading steadfastly in the direction of an avoidable climate catastrophe.

The special session was a bold effort by the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to instill urgency into climate negotiations. His aim: to prepare the ground for an international treaty with real, enforceable limits on greenhouse gas emissions.…  Seguir leyendo »

En los años setenta el ecologista Iván Íllich escribía no sin malicia: «El socialismo ( ) no puede venir a pie, ni puede venir en coche, sino solamente a velocidad de bicicleta». Casi cuarenta años después, no se le habrá escapado a ningún exégeta que el socialismo ha quedado malherido en la carretera y, sobre todo, que el coche continúa su marcha triunfal. Así, en esta enésima y tan cosmética edición del 'Día sin coches', Europa cuenta con un automóvil por cada dos habitantes, estadística que hará peligrar la justicia mundial y la supervivencia humana cuando China e India hayan alcanzado las pautas del 'maldesarrollo' occidental.…  Seguir leyendo »

In one sense we know much less about Earth than we do about Mars. The vast majority of life forms on our planet are still undiscovered, and their significance for our own species remains unknown. This gap in knowledge is a serious matter: we will never completely understand and preserve the living world around us at our present level of ignorance. We are flying blind into our environmental future.

Since the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus inaugurated the modern system of classification two and a half centuries ago, biologists have found and given Latinized names to about 1.8 million species of plants, animals and microorganisms — an impressive number but probably 10 percent or less of the total.…  Seguir leyendo »

Through his long years of greenhouse denial, George Bush must have been particularly grateful to John Howard. The Australian prime minister was quick to join Bush in refusing to ratify the Kyoto protocol, and has batted for his country's coal interests as trenchantly as Bush has batted for US coal and oil interests.Now Bush has had to deal with the impact on American public opinion of Hurricane Katrina and Al Gore's movie, and can no longer afford to ignore climate change. Howard, contending with a killer drought, is similarly finding that greenhouse denial is out of bounds. The flow of Australian rivers has fallen by a staggering 70% in recent decades.…  Seguir leyendo »

When the weather forecasters make their predictions, why don’t they also predict river water levels? This summer, for example, when they forecast rain, why couldn’t they also tell the people of Tewkesbury what the River Avon was going to do?

There is a science of river water prediction – hydrology – but unfortunately it has not improved at the same rate as weather forecasting. In a paper published in the May issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Edwin Welles, of the US Weather Service, has shown that river forecasting hasn’t got any better for 20 years.

Two decades ago river forecasters could make reasonably accurate predictions of water flows for up to two or three days ahead, but for no more; today they can still make reasonably accurate predictions for two or three days ahead, but for no more.…  Seguir leyendo »

We in the news business often enlist in moral crusades. Global warming is among the latest. Unfortunately, self-righteous indignation can undermine good journalism. A recent Newsweek cover story on global warming is a sobering reminder. It's an object lesson on how viewing the world as "good guys vs. bad guys" can lead to a vast oversimplification of a messy story. Global warming has clearly occurred; the hard question is what to do about it.

If you missed Newsweek's story, here's the gist. A "well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change."…  Seguir leyendo »

Successful laws to protect the environment are built on simple concepts. They discourage harmful behavior -- the dumping of sewage or industrial waste into bodies of water, the destruction of habitat, the emission of toxic chemicals -- by a variety of measures, all of which raise the cost of engaging in certain behavior. You can't develop land, and profit, if you're endangering a threatened animal. You have to dispose of chemical substances responsibly. And so on.

Good environmental law can also encourage good behavior: the development of alternative approaches, such as substances that cause less harm, or new technologies.

We should keep this in mind when discussing carbon.…  Seguir leyendo »