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Insecticide! (An ecological disaster that will affect us all)
Michael McCarthy, The Independent (UK)
While the plight of mammals and birds commands the world's attention, insects are quietly but rapidly disappearing. Michael McCarthy explains why their loss is bad news for the planet
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It is a realisation that may be dawning at last: the importance of the little things that rule the world. The great American biologist, E O Wilson, said insects were world-rulers, but although they play a central role in maintaining ecosystems and the whole web of life, most insects have long been viewed with distaste or even revulsion as creepie-crawlies (apart from butterflies, which have been viewed as something akin to honorary mini-birds).

But the recent alarms in Britain, Europe and America about the fate of the honey bee – colonies have been crashing in increasing numbers – have started to open people's eyes to insects' importance in a more general way, says Matt Shardlow, director of Buglife, the Invertebrate Conservation Trust.

But it is only the beginning of an understanding, he says, and much more is needed if we are to take the action necessary to preserve our populations of insects and other invertebrates, the creatures without backbones which make up the majority of animal life, including snails, worms and spiders (spiders being arachnids, not insects).

The population declines among invertebrates in general and insects in particular are now greater than among any other group of living things, greater than declines in mammals, birds and plants. Yet although people get excited about endangered pandas, or eagles, or orchids, endangered insects generally remain below the level of their perception, Mr Shardlow says.
(15 November 2008)

Brown clouds of pollution a huge threat to Asia: UN
AFP
Enormous brown clouds of pollution hanging over Asia are killing hundreds of thousands of people, melting glaciers, changing weather patterns and damaging crops, the United Nations said Thursday.

Car traffic, factory emissions and indoor cooking are among the culprits for the "Atmospheric Brown Clouds", which are up to three kilometres (1.8 miles) thick, according the UN's Environment Programme (UNEP).

Releasing a landmark report on the phenomenon, the UNEP said getting rid of the clouds could help ease many environmental problems in Asia.
(13 November 2008)

U.N. Reports Pollution Threat in Asia
Andrew Jacobs, New York Times
A noxious cocktail of soot, smog and toxic chemicals is blotting out the sun, fouling the lungs of millions of people and altering weather patterns in large parts of Asia, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations.

The byproduct of automobiles, slash-and-burn agriculture, cooking on dung or wood fires and coal-fired power plants, these plumes rise over southern Africa, the Amazon basin and North America. But they are most pronounced in Asia, where so-called atmospheric brown clouds are dramatically reducing sunlight in many Chinese cities and leading to decreased crop yields in swaths of rural India, say a team of more than a dozen scientists who have been studying the problem since 2002.

... The brownish haze, sometimes in a layer more than a mile thick and clearly visible from airplanes, stretches from the Arabian Peninsula to the Yellow Sea. In the spring, it sweeps past North and South Korea and Japan. Sometimes the cloud drifts as far east as California.
(13 November 2008)

Climate change may carry huge price tag for California
Margot Roosevelt, Los Angeles times
About $2.5 trillion of real estate assets in California are at risk, with a projected annual price tag of between $300 million and $3.9 billion, according to a report by UC Berkeley researchers.
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Eroding beaches, disappearing snowpacks, subdivisions decimated by wildfires -- climate change in California could be expensive.

For the first time, the costs of global warming's projected effects in the nation's largest state have been quantified: About $2.5 trillion of real estate assets in California are at risk from extreme weather events, sea level rise and wildfires, with a projected annual price tag of between $300 million and $3.9 billion, according to a new report, "California Climate Risk and Response," written by UC Berkeley researchers Fredrich Kahrl and David Roland-Holst.
(14 November 2008)

The Greenhouse Gas That Nobody Knew
Richard Conniff, Yale Environment 360
When industry began using NF3 in high-tech manufacturing, it was hailed as a way to fight global warming. But new research shows that this gas has 17,000 times the warming potential of carbon dioxide and is rapidly increasing in the atmosphere – and that's turning an environmental success story into a public relations disaster.
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Hypothetical question: You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming?

It may sound like somebody’s idea of a bad joke. But last month, a study from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography reported that nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), with a global warming potential of 17,000, is now present in the atmosphere at four times the expected level and rapidly rising. Use of NF3 is currently booming, for products from computer chips and flats-screen LCDs to thin-film solar photovoltaics, an economical and increasingly popular solar power format.

Moreover, the Kyoto Protocol, which limits a half-dozen greenhouse gases, does not cover NF3.
(13 November 2008)