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ReflexionesNaturaleza,

Por Jordi Garcia-Petit, académico numerario de la Real Academia de Doctores (EL PAÍS, 31/05/06):

No será por falta de conocimiento y de información. Llevamos décadas de informes científicos, de declaraciones de personalidades, de noticias de portada y de reportajes minuciosos sobre el estado de deterioro progresivo de los ecosistemas y de avisos sobre el cambio climático. Ésta es la parte divulgada del problema. Habría que añadir los datos confidenciales de que disponen los dirigentes de algunos gobiernos y los directivos de determinadas empresas, sin olvidar las voces de denuncia que han sido acalladas por la censura o la amenaza.

La primera Conferencia Mundial sobre el Clima tuvo lugar ya en 1979, después de años de pública preparación.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

By Scott Weindesaul, the author, most recently, of "Return to Wild America" (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 30/05/06):

I sat on my farmhouse's back step in the low light of dawn, watching two blackpoll warblers — slim, streaky and hyperkinetic — flit through the new leaves of the maples, which the sun turned into tiny lenses of green.

My trees were a way station for these birds, moving between their winter home in South America and their destination to the north — the boreal forest, the vast shield of spruce and aspen, of muskeg and marsh, that stretches from Newfoundland to western Alaska.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

By Simon Jenkins (THE TIMES, 28/05/06):

All panics are equal. But some are more equal than others. Present-day government warns us to be very, very afraid, successively of Aids, Saddam Hussein, BSE, terrorists, Sars, bird flu and now global warming. Rulers were once elected to free us from fear, not to increase it. Now they cry wolf every day and use it to demand more power and money into the bargain.

Climate change is a hell of a wolf. Last week the BBC’s resources were marshalled to produce a royal variety performance of usual suspects: retreating Patagonian glaciers, collapsing Arctic ice shelves, starving Africans, burning rainforests and storm-lashed New Orleans.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza, ,

By Bill McKibben, a scholar-in-residence at Middlebury College, is the author of "The End of Nature," a book about global warming (THE WASHINGTON POST, 27/05/06):

For those who have been working for decades to raise awareness about climate change, this is a moment charged with opportunity -- and with peril. A series of events -- beginning with Hurricane Katrina and continuing through the release of Al Gore's new movie -- has finally pushed the issue near the forefront of the public agenda. It doesn't yet rank quite up there with the war on terrorism or the high price of gasoline, but it's clear that the next bad storm season or prolonged drought will seal the deal; even as things stand now, there's no chance that it will simply be ignored in the next presidential campaign, not with evangelical leaders and Greenpeace activists taking turns pressing the question.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaNaturaleza, ,

Por Joan Girona, ingeniero agrónomo e investigador del Institut de Recerca i Tecnologia Agroalimentàries (IRTA) de la Generalitat (EL PERIÓDICO, 26/05/06):

Como afirmaba el doctor Narcís Prat en una reciente colaboración en este periódico, la agricultura utiliza aproximadamente el 70% de los recursos del agua regulados en Catalunya, mientras que el 30% restante se destina a otros usos (urbanos e industriales), entendiendo como recurso regulado aquel que es conducido fuera de sus cursos naturales (ríos, torrentes, etcétera) y se utiliza en la agricultura, la ganadería, la industria y las ciudades (usos domésticos). Según la Agència Catalana de l'Aigua (ACA), el recurso regulado en Catalunya se sitúa alrededor de los 3.100 hectómetros cúbicos al año, lo que representa el 15% del agua de lluvia y un 50% del agua que, procedente de las cuencas catalanas, puede circular o almacenarse superficialmente en los ríos y embalses o bajo tierra en los acuíferos.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaNaturaleza, ,

Por el marqués de Tamarón (ABC, 25/05/06):

UNA de las falacias más repetidas es que los españoles son indiferentes ante la Naturaleza. Sorprende esta afirmación reiterada y gratuita -auténtica falacia patética, que diría Ruskin- cuando todo a nuestro alrededor indica que en su mayoría los españoles no sólo no son indiferentes ante la Naturaleza, sino que con notable eficacia la detestan. Esa antipatía se manifiesta a veces de forma canallesca, quemando el monte o envenenando animales. En otras ocasiones el estilo es tan sólo achulado, y se desparrama basura en parajes de singular belleza, estridencias de discoteca y moto en el corazón del silencio, pintadas procaces o mitineras en las rocas.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

By Gregg Easterbrook, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, is the author of "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse." (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 24/05/06):

TODAY "An Inconvenient Truth," Al Gore's movie about the greenhouse effect, opens in New York and California. Many who already believe global warming is a menace will flock to the film; many who scoff at the notion will opt for Tom Cruise or Tom Hanks. But has anything happened in recent years that should cause a reasonable person to switch sides in the global-warming debate?

Yes: the science has changed from ambiguous to near-unanimous.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturalezaEuropaUnión Europea, , ,

By Polly Toynbee (THE GUARDIAN, 23/05/06):

From the control tower of the Thames barrier, gaze down on one of London's heroic wonders. Those gigantic silver sails stretching half a mile across the river float above the water, standing guard against the rising risk of flood. Here global warming is measured by how often the steel gates are closed; in 1987, it was only once every two years: now it's four times a year, eight times more often. By the century's end the barrier will close 300 times a year at this pace of climate change.

The river is rising 6.6mm a year, with more storms and extremes as ice caps melt.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaReflexionesNaturaleza, ,

By Sebastian Mallaby (THE WASHINGTON POST, 22/05/06):

Liberals famously love John McCain, but that's not the weirdest political coupling. The oil industry and its Republican allies are rooting for Al Gore, albeit unintentionally.

Gore stars in a movie that opens this week in New York and Los Angeles. The film features the once and maybe future presidential candidate lecturing about climate change: There are charts, bullet points and diagrams; there are maps of ocean currents and endless iceberg pictures. It's hard to say which menaces the nation more: movie stars who go into politics or politicians who go into movies.

Ordinarily this film would never have been made, let alone scheduled for release in hundreds of theaters.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza, ,

By Katherine Ellison, the author of "The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes Us Smarter." (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 20/05/06):

BY now, only someone who has been hiding under a rock would need to see the new Al Gore movie, "An Inconvenient Truth," to learn that global warming is real. Even Time magazine caught up to the degree of the threat last month, with its cover story urging us to be "very worried." Many of us have also winced at the slick new television ad, co-sponsored by the national nonprofit group Environmental Defense, that depicts global warming as a speeding train headed straight for a little girl standing on the tracks.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica,

Por Javier Junceda, prof. de Derecho Administrativo. Universitat Internacional de Catalunya (ABC, 15/05/06):

Prejuicios aparte, es de suponer que quienes tan a menudo denigran la política ambiental norteamericana hayan reparado en lo mucho que ha significado en tal delicado asunto. A escala internacional, la contribución de los Estados Unidos es posible que no haya tenido parangón en la concepción de herramientas legales básicas para la solución de estos temas: la creación de parques naturales, la evaluación de impacto ambiental, la codificación del derecho ecológico, los mecanismos de responsabilidad e incluso el comercio de derechos de emisión de ciertas sustancias contaminantes, son insuperables creaciones de dicha política y legislación, instrumentos que por sus óptimos efectos han sido luego sabiamente aprovechados por la comunidad de naciones, incluida España.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAméricaMundoOriente Próximo, , ,

By Cass R. Sustein, The writer is a professor of law and political science at the University of Chicago and the author of "Risk and Reason." (THE WASHINGTON POST, 10/05/06):

For the United States, the cost of the Iraq war will soon exceed the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol, the international agreement designed to control greenhouse gases. For both, the cost is somewhere in excess of $300 billion.

These numbers show that the Bush administration was unrealistically optimistic in its prewar prediction that the total cost would be about $50 billion.

And the same numbers raise questions about the Bush administration's claim that the cost of the Kyoto Protocol would be prohibitive, causing (in President Bush's own words) "serious harm to the U.S.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza, , , ,

By William Sweet, the author of "Kicking the Carbon Habit: Global Warming and The Case for Renewable and Nuclear Energy." (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 26/04/06):

TWENTY years ago, a huge plume of radiation spread west from the Chernobyl nuclear plant. Dozens of emergency workers were killed at the scene, while vast tracts of land were evacuated and still lie fallow. Rates of thyroid cancer soared among children in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, and sustained exposure to low levels of radiation in the area has killed or will yet kill thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, of adults. The exact number of casualties will never be known.…  Seguir leyendo »

EspañaEconomía, ,

Por Carlos de la Cruz. Ingeniero industrial, Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. Trabaja en el Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) como Jefe del Departamento de Coordinación y Dinamización (FUNDACIÓN ALTERNATIVAS, 26/04/06):

RESUMEN:

Las cuencas mediterráneas tienen unas necesidades de agua crónico, que se agudiza en períodos de sequía como los sufridos actualmente. Hoy en día, la desalación de agua de mar en España aporta el 2% de los recursos hídricos y, aunque tiene un coste elevado en energía e inversión, se siguen produciendo avances técnicos que reducen progresivamente estos costes. Actualmente, el precio del agua desalada puede ser asumido en el abastecimiento urbano y en la agricultura de alto valor añadido, pero difícilmente en el resto de usos.…  Seguir leyendo »

EuropaUnión Europea, ,

By Robert Macfarlane, the author of Mountains of the Mind (Granta), which won the Guardian First Book award in 2003. He is currently writing The Wild Places, a book about wildness and the British Isles (THE GUARDIAN, 22/04/06):

Oil was the substance that defined the century just ended; ice will define the one just begun. Frozen in the ice sheets of the globe's high latitudes and the glaciers of its high altitudes are more than 33m cubic kilometres of fresh water. And as the Earth's atmosphere warms, so the cryosphere - that part of the planet constituted by ice - dwindles.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza, ,

By Magnus Linklater (THE TIMES, 19/04/06):

SOMETHING TERRIBLE happened last summer beneath the startlingly blue Caribbean seas off the island of Tobago, where we have just been staying. The Buccoo coral reef, home to one of the richest marine ecologies in the world, turned a brilliant white. “It looked as if it had been bleached,” said my brother-in-law, a marine biologist. “It was a strangely beautiful sight, but in fact it was sick, so sick that we wondered whether it could recover.”

We inspected it from our glass-bottomed boat, and watched its dazzling display of exotic fish, dipping down through waving green tendrils, shivering over the strange, sponge-like surface of the coral.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

By Anne Applebaum (THE WASHINGTON POST, 19/04/06):

"Look there, friend Sancho Panza, where thirty or more monstrous giants rise up, all of whom I mean to engage in battle and slay, and with whose spoils we shall begin to make our fortunes."

-- from "Don Quixote" by Miguel de Cervantes

To my eye, they are lovely: Graceful, delicate, white against green grass and a blue sky. Last summer my children and I stopped specially to watch a group of them, wheels turning in the breeze.

But to those who dislike them, the modern wind turbine is worse than ugly. It is an aesthetic blight, a source of noise pollution, a murderer of birds and bats.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

Por Michel Rocard. Ex primer ministro de Francia, dirigente del Partido Socialista y diputado al Parlamento Europeo (ABC, 17/04/06):

¿QUÉ es más decisivo para el futuro de la Humanidad -y de la vida en general-que el agua? El agua abunda en la naturaleza y la mayoría de la Humanidad ha vivido más de diez milenios sin preocuparse ni una sola vez por ella. La obtenemos, la usamos, la tiramos, la mayoría de las veces de nuevo a los ríos y los océanos, pero podría ser que muy pronto resultara que no tuviéramos bastante agua potable, que representa tan sólo el 3 por ciento de toda el agua disponible en nuestro planeta.…  Seguir leyendo »

ReflexionesNaturaleza,

By Camilla Cavendish (THE TIMES, 06/04/06):

“WHAT WOULD Jesus Drive?” is my favourite American bumper sticker, an unbeatable combination of earnestness and hypocrisy. If Jesus is a New Puritan, He presumably pedals a bicycle, revelling in slowing everybody down. If He is a Crunchy, he must drive a Prius, in an unbleached hemp shirt. If He’s an eco-apocalypsist, He’s on the hard shoulder with an “End is Nigh” placard, ignored by everybody.

It is fashionable to say that the doom-mongers have tapped into the superstitions of a credulous public. My colleague Matthew Parris put this beautifully last Saturday when he argued that “eco-apocalypticism runs powerfully with the grain of the collective human unconscious”.…  Seguir leyendo »

MundoAmérica, , ,

By Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the authors of the forthcoming The End of Environmentalism and the Birth of a New American Politics (THE NEW YORK TIMES, 01/04/06):

Environmentalists and their opponents have spent far too much time debating whether global warming is caused by humans, and whether the transition to cleaner energy sources will be good or bad for the economy. Whatever the causes, warming is a genuine risk.

If the earth's temperatures continue to rise, we can expect to face melting glaciers and rising sea levels, warmer ocean temperatures and more intense hurricanes, more frequent droughts and other extreme weather.…  Seguir leyendo »