Blog for a Better World

An investigation by the NASA inspector general found that political appointees in the space agency’s public affairs office worked to control and distort public accounts of its researchers’ findings about climate change for at least two years. The probe came at the request of 14 senators after The Washington Post and other news outlets reported in 2006 that Bush administration officials had monitored and impeded communications between NASA climate scientists and reporters.  From the fall of 2004 through 2006, the report said that NASA’s public affairs office “managed the topic of climate change in a manner that reduced, marginalized, or mischaracterized climate change science made available to the general public. News releases suffered from inaccuracy, factual insufficiency and scientific dilution.”

Global warming is disrupting wildlife and the environment on every continent, according to an unprecedented study that reveals the extent to which climate change is already affecting the world’s ecosystems. Scientists examined published reports dating back to 1970 and found that at least 90% of environmental damage and disruption around the world could be explained by rising temperatures.  Big falls in Antarctic penguin populations, fewer fish in African lakes, shifts in American river flows and earlier flowering and bird migrations in Europe are all likely to be driven by global warming, the study found.  This is the first to formally link some of the most dramatic changes to the world’s wildlife and habitats with human-induced climate change.

Dee Boersma, a biologist at the University of Washington, has just written a new article in the journal BioScience warning that penguins, the animals that she has been studying for 30 years, are ‘sentinels’, and these ‘canaries in the mine’ are telling that danger is present with their declining population numbers.  The danger is a combination of climate change, fishing and pollution.  She says that penguins are among those species that show us that we are making fundamental changes to our world.  The fate of all species is to go extinct, but there are some species that go extinct before their time and we are facing that possibility with some penguins.

Apparently there is a growing problem of food shortages across the world and climate change may be the culprit.  Kandeh Yumkella, director-general of the UN International Development Organization, claims that climate change will impose great stresses on the world’s ability to feed ever-growing populations.  This challenge brings new threats to arable land areas, livestock rearing and fisheries through droughts, water shortages and pollution of land, air and sea.  Last month it was revealed that the UN’s World Food Program was begging for $500 million to deal with a ‘food crisis’.  Yumkella believes that there is a full blown crisis now, with problems in India and Bangladesh, riots over rice in Haiti and Africa, and Thai farmers guarding their rice paddys to prevent theft.