Category: Ecowatch

“Hadn’t you heard, the age of cheap food is over?”, Ibu Susan retorted tersely one day a couple of years back as I was grumbling to her about the succession of price hikes on a number of staple items. Decent olive oil for example, acceptable soy milk, a nice piece of fresh fish, non-rancid walnuts, […]

  It wasn’t always so. Forty years ago, 20 million Americans took part in the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970. Fifth Avenue in New York City was closed to automobiles as 100,000 people joined in concerts, lectures, and street theater. More than 2,000 colleges and universities across America interrupted their anti-war protests to […]

Do you remember Bjorn Lomborg, the peroxide mop-topped Danish business lecturer who won fame and fortune back in 2001 with a tendentious yet readable book The Skeptical Environmentalist, which told us that doing anything about climate change was a waste of our time and money? Now, just on ten years later, he tells us he’s […]

As scepticism about climate change seems to be gaining traction around the world, a group of international scientists hit back last month with a comprehensive report reinforcing the facts and figures behind global warming. It not only updates the information of the UN’s IPCC report of 2007, but shows the situation is actually quite a […]

In September 2000 world leaders met at the UN headquarters in New York to set out and agree funding for eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to be achieved by 2015, designed to eradicate or reduce world poverty and hunger, alongside improving social, educational and health levels for all. Last month, two thirds of the way […]

The truth of a candid statement made over two years ago by a senior aide of UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon at the Bali Climate Change of December 2007 is now starkly revealed for all to see. Asked what was really going on at the Bali COP15 meeting he said it was, “the first stage […]

International bureaucrats and government climate policy advisers are giving up on the attempt to seek a binding agreement on climate change and do not expect a renewal of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012, will be possible. Delegates at the UN climate change conference (UNFCCC) in Bonn last month were shocked when Christiana Figueres, […]

I don’t recall who said it, probably Oscar Wilde, but whoever it was defines a cynic as just another disappointed optimist. Nowhere in our age would this be more true than in the arena of climate change. A healthy skepticism in all spheres when it comes to what politicos and corporate honchos of all stripes […]

With a qualified result, at best, achieved in Copenhagen last December, progress toward reducing the world’s green house gas (GHG) emissions appears to have stalled, pending the next major conference on climate change COP16, scheduled for Mexico this coming December. Some progress appeared to have been made at Copenhagen toward reducing the destruction of tropical […]

What on earth are we to believe when it comes to global   warming and the health of our planet? For every scientific claim that says unless we take drastic action now we are headed for catastrophic climate change, that the planet is grossly overpopulated and we will be unable to feed ourselves, that pretty soon […]