Is Global Warming Over? Experts Disagree

IT’S one of the hottest feuds in science – climate chance zealots insist that we’re still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the cast-iron evidence just isn’t there. FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate had finally been resolved. FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate […]

China won’t follow US on carbon emissions

China will not allow its carbon dioxide emissions per person to reach levels seen in the US, according to the minister in charge of climate policy. Xie Zhenhua, vice chair of the National Development and Reform Commission, said that to let emissions rise that high would be a “disaster for the world”. Chinese per-capita emissions […]

Blow-By-Blow Account of the Fukushima Accident

Sometimes it takes a disaster before we humans really figure out how to design something. In fact, sometimes it takes more than one. Millions of people had to die on highways, for example, before governments forced auto companies to get serious about safety in the 1980s. But with nuclear power, learning by disaster has never really […]

7 Billion Reasons Malthus Was Wrong

You’d think after 200 years, folks would eventually say, “That Malthus guy? Kind of wrong.” Yet, with the (projected) birth today of the world’s 7 billionth occupant, there’s no shortage of media hand-wringingabout the dim prospects of our world from here. Thomas Malthus is famous (or infamous, depending on your view) for his belief that human […]

World’s 7 billionth baby expected Monday in Indian village

– At least two villages in India’s most populous state of Uttar Pradesh are preparing to celebrate Monday the arrival of the world’s 7 billionth baby, media reported. The United Nations recently declared that the world’s population would touch 7 billion on October 31, although the exact moment or place where the child would be […]

The Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21st Century

The Club of Rome, in collaboration with the Dept. of Environment and Energy of the City of Basel, Switzerland, recently convened a two-day international conference entitled The Future of Energy and the Interconnected Challenges of the 21st Century. The meeting was held October 17 and 18, 2011, at the Hôtel des Trois Rois in Basel. The conference […]

Fukushima’s Fallout Worse Than Thought

“A new study posted for open peer-review suggests that the nuclear reactors at Fukushima Daiichi released far more radiation than the Japanese government initially estimated. The study [PDF] uses global radioisotope and meteorological data to calculate the size of the release from the plant. Nature News reports that, contrary to official claims, the model shows that fuel being stored […]

World population will more than double to 15billion by 2100, says UN

Experts say urgent action is needed to curb growth and save the planet’s resources Improved healthcare and longer lifespans are contributing to the increase The population of the world is expected to more than double, growing from 7billion to 15billon by 2100, according to the United Nations. The figure has shocked experts who say the […]

Can the World Handle 7 Billion People?

By October 31, the world’s 7 billionth person will be born, according tonew projections from the United Nations Population Fund. That means it will have only taken 12 years for the world to have added a billion people – in 1999, the six billion mark was passed. The numbers provided by the U.N. are disputed by some […]

US approves new BP exploration plan

BP plan to drill up to four new wells is the first to be approved since the Gulf of Mexico disaster in 2010. US regulators have approved BP’s new exploration plan, moving the company closer to drilling new wells in the lucrative deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half after the biggest offshore oil […]

The Mass Extinction Of The Human Species

Hitler’s corporatist regime made the Big Lie popular, but it has been used by every regime of the human culture called “civilization” since it began eight thousand years ago. After several million years of success the human species became entrapped in the mental confines of the Culture of Empire. That culture, characterized by agriculture, emperors, […]

The Club of Rome is back

Yes, the Club of Rome is back. Actually, it had never gone away, but the demonization campaign that had been unleashed against its 1972 report, “The Limits to Growth,” had largely convinced the public that the Club’s approach to the world’s problems had been based on a “wrong” model. Instead, it turned out that the model was […]

Over 20 Radioactive Hotspots Found in Tokyo

I noted last week that Tokyo and the adjoining city of Yokohama were found to contain “hotspots” with very high levels of radiation, and that all of the hotspots were originally found by citizens using geiger counters, because the government wasn’t really testing. On the same day I posted, the New York Times reported:   The patch […]

Keystone XL: The pipeline of poison

The aftermath of a tar sands oil spill in Michigan has left a community with sickness, anger, and loss of livelihood. Deb Miller lives less than 30 metres from the Kalamazoo River in central Michigan, site of one of the largest inland tar sands oil disasters in US history. In July 2010, nearly four million litres […]

Too Many People?

This week, Elizabeth Kolbert writes about the world’s population, which is projected to reach seven billion on October 31st. The United Nations Population Fund, which once predicted that the earth’s population would level out at around nine billion in 2050, now foresees no end to growth, estimating that the number of people on earth in 2100 will […]

New CNOOC oil leak found in China’s Bohai Bay

Chinese offshore oil and gas producer CNOOC Ltd. says it has suspended operation of an oil platform after finding a leak in one of its oil fields in the Bohai Bay. It is the latest in a series of offshore spills in the Bohai Bay that have raised an outcry among fishermen and environmentalists. CNOOC […]

Getting to 350 with a $2 Pocket Knife

“Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration is a cheap and rapid method of re-vegetating deserts and restoring climate balance to below 350 ppm. Vast areas of cleared agricultural land in arid lands retain an “underground forest” of living stumps and roots. By simply changing agricultural practices, this underground forest can re-sprout, at little cost, very rapidly and […]

A Time Frame for Systemic Collapse

A time frame for systemic collapse can be extrapolated easily from the on-line document The Coming Chaos, an abridgement of a larger text (see link below). The most significant page is at the start of the text, the chart of estimated past and future oil production. Most of the other time frames will parallel that […]

Fukushima Nuclear Plant has 38-Hour Margin for Meltdown

Tokyo Electric Power Co. on Saturday released an estimate saying that if the water injections cooling its stricken Fukushima power plant are halted again, the fuel rods could start melting within 38 hours, unleashing another wave of cancerous radioactive fallout. If the plant is hit by another quake and tsunami as powerful as the March […]

Fewer Humans, More Humanity?

80 million more births than deaths (equalling the current population of Egypt or Germany) are added each year to the 7000 million that will be here on earth this coming October 31st. A city for 1.5 million is built, somewhere, every week – inevitably paving over land, destroying habitats and increasing energy use. Authoritative (UN, […]

US tried to conspire with Japan to dump nuclear waste into world’s oceans, reveal documents

When nuclear energy production technology first began to emerge in the US in the 1950s, neither scientists nor the US government considered what would be done with nuclear reactors once it was time for them to be put out of commission. And recently-released documents reveal that, in an effort to hastily deal with this problem […]

The big picture, and a Transition Response

This is my personal truncated version of “the” big picture, which I’ve taken to be the context in which the transition movement is experimenting, responding to the challenges we face, while we live through the unfolding of an extraordinary story. As the scale of our impact on the world becomes clearer, we’re starting to understand […]

Will Renewed Attention to Climate Change Bring Back “Population Control?”

This fall, world population will reach seven billion people at a time of accelerated environmental disruption. This article is part of a series commissioned by RH Reality Check, with Laurie Mazur as guest editor. The series examines the causes and consequences of population and environmental changes from various perspectives, and explores the policies and actions needed […]

Is a world population of seven billion sustainable?

On the eve of the world’s population reaching 7 billion, leading minds discuss what the future holds for our increasingly crowded planet The world’s population is expected to hit 7 billion in October – growing to seven times the estimated one billion population of the early 1800s. As part of the University of Cambridge’s Festival of […]

Fukushima Desolation Worst Since Nagasaki

Beyond the police roadblocks that mark the no-go zone around Japan’s wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant, six-foot tall weeds invade rice paddies and vines gone wild strangle road signs along empty streets. Takako Harada, 80, returned to an evacuated area of Iitate village to retrieve her car. Beside her house is an empty cattle pen, the […]

7 billion reasons to tackle population explosion

Happy birthday, seven billionth human on Earth, wherever you are. Not that there will be much of a party on or around Oct. 31, the due date predicted by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Not if you’re born, statistically anyway, where expected: the poorest parts of India, or perhaps Africa. That’s where you’ll find […]

Gulf of Mexico Oil Leak Creates Mile-Long Sheen

Apache Corp. (APA) said an oil leak aboard a Gulf of Mexico platform created a sheen on the water that spread for one mile (1.6 kilometer). The well beneath Apache’s South Cameron 49 installation was shut after discovery of the leak, which began about 10 a.m. local time yesterday, according to a filing with the […]

Is natural gas ‘fracking’ responsible for the recent earthquake swarms in strange locations?

The natural gas industry and its advocates claim that hydraulic fracturing, the modern technique for extracting natural gas, also known as “fracking,” is beneficial to the interests of American energy independence. However, a simple report recently issued by KARK 4 News in Little Rock, Ark., suggests that fracking operations, which involve pumping large amounts of […]

Sep Updates on Greenland’s Ice

The NYT’s Dot Earth blog has an update on Greenland’s melting ice – Updates on Greenland’s Ice. New research on the dynamics of Greenland’s ice sheets complicates efforts to forecast sea level rise in this century, as the Green Blog reports. Expanding fields of crevasses appear to be limiting the flow of water to the […]

What If The World Population Doesn’t Stabilize At 10bn?

In a mere half-century, the number of people on the planet has soared from 3 billion to 7 billion, placing us squarely in the midst of the most rapid expansion of world population in our 50,000-year history — and placing ever-growing pressure on the Earth and its resources. But that is the past. What of […]

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