"Thank you so much for printing this (Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate)- I had been hearing about "the article" but hadn't read it - now I have." - Reader

I started putting out this newsletter as part of a college sustainability proposal. The idea was to send it to students to keep them informed on topics related to sustainability. The community college wasn't "hip" on the idea (or any other sustainability ideas). Now there has been a study released that confirms that informed students are more realistic about environmental challenges facing the world.
Of course another article is showing that more colleges and universities are going green. I did a follow-up on the last school I worked for and found that after a year and a half that particular school has literally done nothing. So while "some" schools are going green, others are just green washing to placate the climate change advocates.

The new "Bright" Idea is another demonstration of how the Auto Industry is stuck in the mud.

Parkinson's disease has been increasing over the years. A study done has linked paraquat and a fungicide to the disease. Some may recognize paraquat, during the late 1970s, a controversial program sponsored by the US government sprayed paraquat on marijuana fields in Mexico. There was a United States Environmental Protection Agency publication that stated: "Smoking Paraquat-contaminated marijuana does not result in lung damage as the herbicide is pyrolyzed to dipyridyl (which does not present a toxic hazard) during smoking". Of course, there was a problem with the air at ground zero after 9-11.
Enjoy...

Students Least Informed About Environmental Science Are Most Optimistic
The Daily Green: Colleges increasingly going green
Universities Take Climate Savers Computing Pledge to Save Energy, Emissions
Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate.
The Automotive Future: a 100 mpg Bright IDEA
Climate change could worsen African "megadroughts"
China spending much more on FGD and other air pollution control than the US
Global Warming Study: Nations Need to Cut Emissions by 70 Percent
Long-term solutions needed to feed the world's poor
COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?
World's major rivers 'drying up'
Pesticide exposure found to increase risk of Parkinson's disease
Days to Stretch Longer With Climate Change
Greenhouse Gases Rise Despite Global Recession
Ship-generated emissions play havoc on environment

Students Least Informed About Environmental Science Are Most Optimistic
ScienceDaily (Apr. 23, 2009) - Will problems associated with environmental issues improve in the next two decades? According to an analysis of student performance on PISA 2006--an international assessment of 15-year-old--students who are the best informed about environmental science and the geosciences are also the most realistic about the environmental challenges facing the world in the next 20 years. Meanwhile, students who are least informed in these areas are the most wildly optimistic that things will improve.
These attitudes are among the results presented in Green at 15?, a study done by sociologist David Baker and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, in collaboration with a team of researchers at the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, an international organization that helps governments tackle the economic, social and governance challenges of a globalized economy. A PISA assessment is done every three years. PISA 2006 focused on science, assessing the knowledge and skills of more than 400,000 students in 57 countries around the world.
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The Daily Green: Colleges increasingly going green
Two in three colleges improved their performance on the annual College Sustainability Report Card released this week, but many of the wealthiest schools don't apply the same standards to their investments that they do to their campus scene.
The Report Card calls itself "the only independent sustainability evaluation of campus operations and endowment investments." It is published by the Sustainable Endowments Institute and assesses the 200 public and private universities with the largest endowments, ranging from $230 million to nearly $35 billion.
Here's a look at some of the results:
* 45% of campuses have made strides to fight global warming by cutting carbon emissions.
* 59% have high-performance green building standards for new buildings.
* 42% use hybrid or electric vehicles.
* 37% purchase renewable energy, and 30% produce some of their own with wind or solar generators.
* 70% buy food from local farms, and 64% serve fair trade coffee.
These colleges received the highest marks: Harvard, Dartmouth, University of Washington, Middlebury, Carleton, and University of Vermont. The lowest marks went to Juilliard School, Howard University, Regent University, and Samford University.
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Universities Take Climate Savers Computing Pledge to Save Energy, Emissions
PORTLAND, Ore. -- With nearly 25 percent of its campus community pledging to do more to manage the energy used by their computers, the University of Maine at Farmington won the first-ever pledge drive to bring campuses on board with green IT practices.
The contest was part of the Climate Savers Computing Initiative's "Power Down for the Planet Pledge," which brought 19 colleges on board with CSCI's mission to practice smart computing. Together, the group estimates that the 17,000 total pledges will save around 4.2 million kilowatt-hours of electricity in a year, saving $450,000 or more in costs and offsetting over 3,000 tons of CO2 emissions.
"The University of Maine at Farmington won by getting the highest percentage of their campus to pledge," said Pat Tiernan, executive director of Climate Savers Computing Initiative. "Their commitment means they'll offset 125 tons of carbon per year, save 164,000 kilowatt-hours of energy and more than $17,000 in energy costs." Rounding out the top five universities were Mississippi's Jackson State University, the University of Iowa, Furman University in South Carolina, and the University of Michigan.
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Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate.
Scientists advising fossil fuel funded anti-climate group concluded in 1995: "The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of GHGs such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied"
Andy Revkin has a must-read NYT piece, "Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate."
Turns out the Global Climate Coalition, an anti-action lobbying group floated by fossil fuel industries, ignored its own climate scientists while spreading disinformation about global warming. An internal report stating that the human causes of global warming "cannot be denied" fell on the deaf ears of Coalition leaders. The amazing 14-year-old document totally trashes the standard arguments by deniers � including Richard Lindzen and Pat Michaels - that are still used today. As Revkin writes: For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.
But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.
"The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied," the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.
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The Automotive Future: a 100 mpg Bright IDEA
WASHINGTON, DC, April 21, 2009 (ENS) - Today, the lawmakers on Capitol Hill caught a glimpse of the next Bright IDEA in America's automotive future.
Indiana-based Bright Automotive brought its new plug-in hybrid electric vehicle out for its first public showing. The world's first purpose built 100 mile per gallon vehicle, the endeavor is built on private investment, but the company has applied for a $450 million loan from the federal government to jumpstart production.
At the showing, Bright Automotive CEO John Waters was joined by Carol Browner, assistant to the President for energy and climate Change, Congressman Mike Pence, an Indiana Republican, and executives from Duke Energy and Frito-Lay North America, who have contributed their feedback to the Bright design engineers.
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Climate change could worsen African "megadroughts"
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The recent decades-long drought that killed 100,000 people in Africa's Sahel may be a small foretaste of monstrous "megadroughts" that could grip the region as global climate change worsens, scientists reported on Thursday.
Droughts, some lasting for centuries, are part of the normal pattern in sub-Saharan Africa. But the added stress of a warming world will make these dry periods more severe and more difficult for the people who live there, the scientists said.
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China spending much more on FGD and other air pollution control than the US
Chinese suppliers of flue gas desulfurization systems have installed or have orders for plants with the total electrical capacity of over 500,000 MW. This compares to only 180,000 MW in the U.S. China is operating 379,000 MW of scrubbers compared to only 130,000 MW in the U.S. China has these FGD scrubbers on 67 percent of the coal-fired plants which is a higher percentage than the U.S. This analysis is based on the plant-by-plant tabulation in the McIlvaine Chinese Utility Plans database:
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Global Warming Study: Nations Need to Cut Emissions by 70 Percent
The threat of global warming can be significantly lessened if nations cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century, according to a new study. This would help reduce the most dangerous aspects of climate change including massive losses of Arctic sea ice and permafrost and significant sea level rise, although global temperatures will still rise.
The study, led by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), will be published in Geophysical Research Letters. It was funded by the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, NCAR's sponsor.
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Long-term solutions needed to feed the world's poor
One of the unfortunate side effects of the global economic crisis is that it has deflected attention from the food crisis that was grabbing headlines a year ago. Rapidly escalating food prices - spurred on by the price of oil and commodity speculation among other factors - have a disproportionate impact on the world's poor.
Now oil prices have fallen and the speculation frenzy has cooled off, food prices have also fallen by up to 50 per cent. But this does not mean the problem has gone away. For although the price of food has fallen, so too has the poor's ability to pay for it as a result of their reduced income. The World Food Programme estimates it will need 20 per cent more funding this year - on top of last year's record US$6 billion budget - to feed the world's poorest.
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COULD FOOD SHORTAGES BRING DOWN CIVILIZATION?
In the May issue of "Scientific American," Lester Brown discusses how food shortages could be the weak link that brings down civilization. In this feature article, "Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?" Brown reveals that the biggest threat to global political stability is the potential for food crises in poor countries to cause government collapse. Those crises are brought on by rising demand and ever worsening environmental degradation.
"In the twentieth century, dramatic rises in grain prices resulted from poor harvests. They were event driven and short-lived," Brown says. "In contrast, the recent escalation in world grain prices is trend-driven, making it unlikely to reverse the rise in food prices without a reversal in the trends themselves."
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World's major rivers 'drying up'
Some of the developing world's largest rivers are drying up because of climate change, threatening water supplies in some of the most populous places on Earth, say scientists. Researchers from the US-based National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) analysed data combined with computer models to assess flow in 925 rivers - nearly three quarters of the world's running water supply - between 1948 and 2004.
A third of these had registered a change in flow and most of them - including the Niger in West Africa, the Ganges in South Asia and the Yellow River in China - were dryer. "Reduced run-off is increasing the pressure on freshwater resources in much of the world, especially with more demand for water as population increases. Freshwater being a vital resource, the downward trends are a great concern," said Aiguo Dai, a scientist at NCAR and lead author of the research.
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Pesticide exposure found to increase risk of Parkinson's disease
The fertile soil of California's Central Valley has long made it famous as one of the nation's prime crop-growing regions. But it's not just the soil that allows for such productivity. Crops like potatoes, dry beans and tomatoes have long been protected from bugs and weeds by the fungicide maneb and the herbicide paraquat.
Scientists know that in animal models and cell cultures, such pesticides trigger a neurodegenerative process that leads to Parkinson's disease. Now, researchers at UCLA provide the first evidence for a similar process in humans.
In a new epidemiological study of Central Valley residents who have been diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, researchers found that years of exposure to the combination of these two pesticides increased the risk of Parkinson's by 75 percent. Further, for people 60 years old or younger diagnosed with Parkinson's, earlier exposure had increased their risk for the disease by as much as four- to six-fold.
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Days to Stretch Longer With Climate Change
Climate change will make the day longer by the end of the century, according to a new study.
Earth's atmosphere plays a large role in controlling how fast the planet rotates. As the seasons change, variations in high-level jets of wind shift, adding and subtracting about a millisecond to our day each year.
Elfrun Lehmann of the Free University of Berlin in Germany and a group of researchers compared wind patterns measured between 1982 and 2000 to a computer model that projected conditions from 2071 to 2100.
They found that Earth's days will lengthen by an average of millisecond in the future if carbon dioxide doubles compared to preindustrial levels, thanks mostly to increasingly warm "El Nino" conditions in the tropical Pacific Ocean.
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Greenhouse Gases Rise Despite Global Recession
WASHINGTON, DC, April 21, 2009 (ENS) - Atmospheric concentrations of two of the most potent global warming gases rose last year, according to a preliminary analysis for the annual greenhouse gas index compiled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA, which tracks data from 60 sites around the world.
At the end of December 2008, researchers measured an additional 16.2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, CO2, a byproduct of fossil fuel burning, and 12.2 million tons of methane in the atmosphere.
Human activities that emit methane include fossil fuel production, animal husbandry, rice cultivation, biomass burning, and waste management landfills.
These increases occurred despite the global economic downturn, which slowed many activities that depend on burning coal, oil and gas.
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Ship-generated emissions play havoc on environment
New research shows that emissions generated by ships increase acid rain on shore and may be responsible for over 25% of the ground-level ozone in a number of coastal areas. The research results were recently published in the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics. Past studies have shown that 70% of shipping occurs within 400 kilometres of land.
Taking this research further, Professor Stig B. Dals�ren, from the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research at the University of Oslo in Norway, and his team, investigated the amount of pollution generated by ships and located the affected sites. The researchers evaluated data that was collected globally in 2004.
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