A Starting Line And A Dump: Staten Island, The Forgotten Borough. By Joanne Stocker, Kenneth Lipp and Dustin Slaughter The baseball field behind Egbert Middle School is pitch black as our journalist team, led by Liam (who prefers his last name not be used), a Staten Island resident who swam flood waters to rescue neighbors as the nearby ocean swallowed his community, walk down an unlit street strewn with the detritus of Hurricane Sandy’s watery rage. Liam wants to show us what the neighborhood has been abuzz over: the site of what was a makeshift morgue, in the hopes that we might challenge what many here in Midland Beach see as an official orchestrated attempt to downplay Sandy’s death toll.
Midland Beach, a tight-knit working class neighborhood on the Island, has largely been washed away. What remains are uninhabitable homes and harsh utility floodlights that pierce the inky darkness to discourage looters, as unmarked police cars patrol the shells of former neighborhoods. It is the closest to Hell any of us have ever been. How the US Is Undermining Critical Climate Talks and Putting the World in Jeopardy | Environment. December 8, 2011 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. The U.N. climate talks desperately need a crisis. Instead, the pace of negotiations has been set by the one country the rest of the world should be turning their back on: the United States.
The U.S. never signed the Kyoto Protocol, the only legally binding international agreement designed to reduce emissions, but it is allowed to take part in the negotiations in a separate track dedicated to securing a long-term climate agreement. Instead, the only thing the U.S. brought to the table was a wrecking ball. Highest on the U.S. hit list is the Kyoto Protocol, an imperfect treaty (thanks in large part to U.S. recalcitrance), but currently the best instrument in the global climate toolbox.
This isn't just a delay, it's a death sentence. It is especially callous and cold-hearted for the U.S. to be pushing the 2020 timeline here in Durban. It's time for a crisis moment. A Recipe for Carbon Farming | COP17 CLIMATE CHANGE DURBAN 2011. Only owners of large tracts of land can be expected to benefit from soil carbon credits. Credit: Zukiswa Zimela/IPS By Stephen Leahy DURBAN, South Africa, Dec 2 (IPS) – Civil society has warned of the danger of turning Africa’s food-producing lands into “carbon farms” so that rich countries can avoid making cuts in their carbon emissions.
On Friday, they called on host country South Africa to refrain from forcing so-called “climate smart” agriculture into the United Nations climate treaty negotiations known as the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP 17). South African President Jacob Zuma has stated that agriculture should be part of a new climate treaty. South African officials have previously told IPS they want it included so there will be “specific funds and specific actions” for agriculture under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “This consolation prize is a poisoned chalice.
Changes in agricultural practices can greatly reduce emissions. The World Bank and the U.N. New Trove of Stolen E-Mails From Climate Scientists Is Released. The new e-mails appeared remarkably similar to the ones released two years ago just ahead of a similar conference in Copenhagen. They involved the same scientists and many of the same issues, and some of them carried a similar tone: catty remarks by the scientists, often about papers written by others in the field.
Climate scientists said the release was likely intended to torpedo any potential progress in the Durban negotiations, though not much progress had been expected anyway given that countries have been reluctant to commit to binding emissions limits. The University of East Anglia, the British institution at the middle of the previous hacking episode, confirmed that at least some of the newly released e-mails were authentic. The cache released in 2009 appeared to have come from a file someone obtained by hacking into the university’s computers, a crime for which no charges have been filed or suspects named. But Michael E. In one of the e-mails, Raymond S. Dr. Gavin A. Dr. Poisoned Places Map. Greenland glacier: Before/after pics.