Category Archives: climate change
October 24, 2015 Hurricanes: The New Normal
Story ran on Huffington Post October 29, 2012
On October 23, 2015 Hurricane Patricia, a category 5 barreled into Mexico making it the strongest storm to ever reach landfall. Warming ocean temperatures from burning heat-trapping, climate-altering, subsidized fossil fuels are creating new monster storms.
Never have two hurricanes made landfall in Hawaii in one year, never mind two in three days.
In 2010 and 2011, we saw 19 storms, the record was set in 2005 with an astounding 27 storms. The weather is getting wilder so let’s take a much closer look at hurricanes.
Hurricanes are nature’s fiercest storms, with about 18 occurring each year.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, environment, Oceans
November 26, 2014 Earth’s New Normal: Wild Weather 2014
A warmer world is rife with droughts and drought beget bushfires.
Huffington Post January 4, 2014
Australian Broadcasting Corporation (Sydney) Radio Nation – Wild Weather January 7, 2014
Each year in early January (2011, 2012, 2013) I have tallied a scorecard on the vicious effects of burning in excess of 85 million tons of carbon fuels daily on our planet. Irrespective of where you live the human-induced effects of global warming are irrefutable and deadly.
As humans ramp-up the destruction of nature in Australia, Canada, Indonesia and elsewhere to feed the insatiable coal and petroleum markets in China, India and the U.S. the amount of melting ice at both poles continues to erode at an astounding rate.
In the Northern Hemisphere less Arctic ice cover in September means that a warming Arctic Ocean is easily able to infuse its latent heat into the Arctic atmosphere. As this occurs an all-hell-break-loose scenario is felt elsewhere – particularly on the eastern half on the North American continent and in the U.K.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, environment
September 23, 2014 Aussie Households Go Solar: Game-Changer
Heat from the sun, reflected off a field of heliostats (or mirrors) is concentrated onto a central receiver point to create the steam at these supercritical levels. This phenomenal achievement is likened to breaking the sound barrier. It is so impressive, its possible implications for solar thermal technology is revolutionary. Photo credit: abc.net.au
Story ran in Huffington Post July 23, 2014
Australia’s household solar revolution has caught the government-owned electricity sector by surprise.
Join Earth Dr Reese Halter from Los Angeles in another SOS segment as he tells how Australian homeowner are fighting back against climate disruption.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, climate disruption, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, environment
August 20, 2014 Oil and Gas Sonic Cannons Murder Millions of Sea Creatures
At over 99 feet long by the time Blue's tail leaves the surface for a deep dive it's farther than most scuba divers will have ever ventured, into the ethereal abyss. Photo credit: rucool.marine. rutgers.edu
Story ran in Huffington Post August 17, 2014
Millions of Americans are furious because the rights to the Western Atlantic Ocean have been handed over to Big Oil.
Join Earth Dr Reese Halter from Los Angeles as he explains the awful ecocide along the Western Atlantic Ocean as Big Oil blasts the seafloor in search of more gas.
On July 16, the Obama administration approved the use of sonic cannons in the Western Atlantic Ocean. Millions of sea creatures will be senselessly killed by incessant sonic booms along the eastern U.S. seaboard as Big Oil scavenges for more heat-trapping gases.
Sonic booms from multi-beam echosounder systems are known to cause mass strandings of cetaceans (whales and dolphins).
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- Posted under climate change, critters
August 11, 2014 Oceanic Coal Pollution, Epic Rate
Australia's Coalition government lead by Prime Minister Tony Abbott has green-lighted the Carmichael coal mine, which each year will squander, in a highly drought prone region of Queensland, a whopping 3 billion gallons of fresh water from the Great Artesian Basin. Meanwhile, Environment Minister Greg Hunt refuses to address the life-ending noise pollution caused from the coal port development at Abbot Point, which continues to kill the Great Barrier Reef, the largest reef on the globe. Photo credit earthend-newbeginning.com
Story ran in Huffington Post August 11, 2014
Each year, the lion’s share of mercury poison comes from burning more than 8.3 billion tons of coal to provide energy for electricity grids.
Join Earth Dr Reese Halter from Los Angeles in another segment of SOS as he tells us about our oceans brimming with mercury poisoning.
This work comes on the heels of research earlier this spring that found there’s so much toxic Asian air pollution from burning coal, it’s now changing global weather patterns.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, critters
July 21, 2014 Human Footprints all Over the North Pole: Climate Disruption
The Arctic is a barometer of the health of the planet. Its indigenous Peoples, animals and plants are marvelously adapted to the harsh environment. Airborne toxins and global warming are rapidly altering life in the far North.
The area north of the 66th parallel is called the Arctic Circle. Eight countries – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Russia and the United States – surround the Arctic. The Inuit, Denes, Metis, Inupiat (some still called Eskimos), Aleuts, Yup’ik, Chuckchi, Nenets, Saami and the Faroese – all Arctic Peoples eat 194 different species of wild animals, most of them come from the sea.
Marine blubber is low in saturated fats and high in he Omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids which significantly lower heart disease. Those fatty acids also reduce the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease and perhaps more importantly Omega-3s nourish and stimulate brain development especially in the womb. In addition, meat from marine mammals is high in antioxidants which prevent cancers.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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June 20, 2014 Bees Dying Quickly From Neonics and Climate Disruption
Since 2006 honeybees have been dying at a staggering rate. Scientists have dubbed this crisis Colony Collapse Disorder or CCD because all that remains in the colony is the helpless queen - 100,000 femaie workers abandon the hive and die. Photo credit: inhabitat.com
Story ran in Huffington Post May 21, 2014
As if the convincing evidence of 500 billion honeybees lost worldwide is not enough to rope in the use of 5 billion pounds of insecticides annually, new research shows that, in combination with climate disruption, the bees are dying even faster. One-third of these insecticides are neonictinoids (neonics).
Twenty thousand kinds of bees pollinate over 80 percent of all flowering plants or in excess of 200,000 species on Earth including providing food to feed 7.2 billion humans. Neonics, the newest class of insecticides, are a potent neuro toxin. Bees exposed to it lose their minds and shake to death, analogous to humans afflicted by both Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, honeybees, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, critters, environment
May 14, 2014 Here’s the Obvious Response to Climate Change Everyone Is Ignoring
Story in The Huffington Post May 13, 2014
It’s 96 degrees (Fahrenheit) in Los Angeles as I pen this story. We are in the midst of yet another vicious heatwave. It’s tinderbox-dry outside and this is the third consecutive drought year throughout California. We are in extreme fire danger. Again.
Yesterday the epic news on the wire was based upon 20 years of NASA satellite data showing very clearly that six glaciers in Western Antarctica are rapidly melting into the Amundsen Sea. It will raise ocean levels worldwide by a minimum of four feet. “The retreat of these glaciers seems to be unstoppable,” says glaciologist Professor Eric Rignot of University of California at Irvine and NASA.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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April 17, 2014 The real value of British Columbia’s old-growth forests: Water and buffering climate disruption
Wooded areas are a gold mine for worldwide carbon offset markets
Story ran in Vancouver Sun September 16, 2010
Twenty-five years ago I was a freshman in the faculty of forestry at the University of British Columbia I was keen to learn about trees, animals, water, medicine and old-growth forests.
During the early 1980s, the province of British Columbia advertised itself to the world as “Super, Natural British Columbia.” Concurrently, the forest industry ran a campaign of “Forests Forever.”
Much has changed in a quarter of a century.
Multinational forestry corporations received massive tax credits, felled millions of hectares of old growth, shut their doors and moved to South America while thousands of British Columbian forestry workers including Ministry of Forests employees have been dislocated.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Dr Reese Halter, Jacque Cousteau, John Denver, Los Angeles, Steve Irwin
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- Posted under climate change, environment, trees
February 19, 2014 The carbon-credit value of old-growth forests
Story ran in the Victoria Times Colonist January 22,2009
Seven western states and four Canadian provinces have joined forces in a plan to limit greenhouse gas emissions. An entire new source of long-term revenue is available to British Columbia’s (BCs) government, which will enable protection of massive tracks of old growth forests and fresh water supplies.
Under the Western Climate Initiative, Arizona, California, Oregon, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, Washington, B.C., Manitoba, Ontario and Quebec have agreed to cut the region’s carbon emissions by 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020.
The backbone of their plan is a cap-and-trade system. A similar approach was used in the early 1990s to combat acid rain around the Great Lakes caused by the pollution from coal-burning power plants.
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Tags: Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Conservation Foundation, Avaaz, Boston, Chicago, Conservation International, Defenders of Wildlife, Dr Reese Halter, Ducks Unlimited, ellen degeneres, Environmental Defense Fund, forests, global warming, Green Peace, Grist, honeybees, leonardo dicaprio, London, Los Angeles, Marriott International, Melbourne, Muir Woods National Monument, Natural Resources Defense Council, Nature Conservancy, Oprah, Peta, Riverkeepers, San Francisco, Sea Shepherds, Sierra Club, sydney, Ted Danson, Treehugger, trees, world wildlife Fund, Yellowstone National Park, Yosemite National Park
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- Posted under climate change, environment, science, trees
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