Geo blocked: Journalists walkout in Balochistan Assembly
QUETTA: Journalists staged walk out in Balochistan Assembly in protest against the blocking the transmission of Geo News and another private TV channel here on Monday.
Pakistan floods, Russia heat match climate trends
OSLO: Devastating floods in Pakistan and Russia”s heat wave match projected trends of ever more extremes caused by global warming even though it is impossible to blame mankind for single severe weather events, scientists said.
This year is on track to be the warmest since reliable temperature records began in the mid-19th century, beating 1998, mainly due to a build-up of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, according to the UN”s World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
“We will always have climate extremes. But it looks like climate change is exacerbating the intensity of the extremes,” said Omar Baddour, chief of climate data management applications at WMO headquarters in Geneva.
“It is too early to point to a human fingerprint” behind individual weather events, he said. Recent extremes include mudslides in China or temperature heat records from Finland to Kuwait.
Reinsurer Munich Re said a natural catastrophe database it runs “shows that the number of extreme weather events like windstorm and floods has tripled since 1980, and the trend is expected to persist”.
The worst floods in Pakistan in 80 years have killed more than 1,600 people and left 2 million homeless.
“Global warming is one reason” for the rare spate of recent weather extremes, said Friedrich-Wilhelm Gerstengarbe, a professor at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
He pointed to the heat wave and related forest fires in Russia, floods in Pakistan, rains in China and downpours in countries including Germany and Poland. “We have four such extremes in the last few weeks. This is very seldom,” he said.
RARE RAINS
Russia”s worst drought in decades has led to fires that have almost doubled death rates in Moscow to around 700 per day, an official said. Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced a grain export ban from Aug. 15 to Dec. 31.
Nearly 1,500 people have died in landslides and flooding caused by months of torrential rains across China, the ministry of Civil Affairs said.
Baddour said one cause of a shift in monsoon rains in Asia seemed to be a knock-on effect of La Nina, a natural cooling of the Pacific region.
Scientists say it is impossible to pin the blame for individual events from hurricanes to sandstorms solely on human activities led by burning of fossil fuels that release heat-trapping carbon dioxide.
Still, one study concluded that global warming had doubled the chances of heat waves similar to a scorching 2003 summer in Europe, in which 35,000 people died. Those temperatures could not convincingly be explained by natural variations.
“It may be possible to use climate models to determine whether human influences have changed the likelihood of certain types of extreme events,” the UN panel of climate scientists said in its latest 2007 report.
That report concluded it was at least 90 percent likely that most warming in the past 50 years was caused by mankind.
“Warming of the climate is likely to bring more events of this sort,” said Henning Rodhe, professor emeritus of chemical meteorology at Stockholm University, of Russian forest fires.
“But you can”t draw the conclusion that this is caused by global warming,” he said.
Most countries agreed at a UN climate summit in Copenhagen last year to limit a rise in average world temperatures to below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) above pre-industrial times, a tough goal since temperatures already rose 0.7C in the 20th century.
Taiwan remembers 700 killed on typhoon anniversary
August 8, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
TAIPEI: Taiwan paid tribute on Sunday to more than 700 people killed or missing in Typhoon Morakot a year ago, one of the island”s worst natural disasters.
The typhoon slammed into Taiwan in August 2009, bringing powerful winds and torrential rain that left at least 614 people dead and 75 missing, including an estimated 400 buried in the village of Hsiaolin alone.
Typhoon Morakot dumped a record three metres (120 inches) of rain and some experts have since warned that global warming could trigger another similarly powerful storm in a year or two.
“Last year”s Morakot brought Taiwan the worst flooding in 100 years and caused havoc… the unusual torrential rains were a signal of climate change,” Vice President Vincent Siew said at a ceremony in Taipei.
President Ma Ying-jeou was to attend an evening memorial service in the southern city of Kaohsiung to commemorate the victims from Hsiaolin village.
While the opposition blamed the Ma administration for what they alleged was a slow response to the flooding, Ma has termed the typhoon a “painful lesson” and is now introducing a tough new planning law.
Over the past year, the authorities have built 1,480 new houses accommodating nearly 6,000 people, according to a cabinet statement.
But the homeless — most of them aboriginals — remain unhappy at the government moves. About 500 indigenous villagers staged a rally outside the presidential office Saturday in protest at the resettlement plans.
The government faced a wave of public anger over its handling of the disaster, plunging Ma into his worst political crisis since taking office in 2008.
His approval rating fell plummeted to 16 percent in the aftermath of the typhoon, compared with to an all-time high of 79 percent in the days after his election victory in March 2008.
aral sea
April 4, 2010 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on Sunday called the drying up of the Aral Sea one of the planet’s most shocking disasters and urged Central Asian leaders to step up efforts to solve the problem.
Once the world’s fourth-largest lake, the sea has shrunk by 90 percent since the rivers that feed it were largely diverted in a Soviet project to boost cotton production in the arid region.
The shrunken sea has ruined the once-robust fishing economy and left fishing trawlers stranded in sandy wastelands, leaning over as if they dropped from the air. The sea’s evaporation has left layers of highly salted sand, which winds can carry as far away as Scandinavia and Japan, and which plague local people with health troubles.
Ban toured the sea by helicopter as part of a visit to the five countries of former Soviet Central Asia. His trip included a touchdown in Muynak, Uzbekistan, a town once on the shore where a pier stretches eerily over gray desert and camels stand near the hulks of stranded ships.
“On the pier, I wasn’t seeing anything, I could see only a graveyard of ships,” Ban told reporters after arriving in Nukus, the nearest sizable city and capital of the autonomous Karakalpak region.
“It is clearly one of the worst disasters, environmental disasters of the world. I was so shocked,” he said.
The Aral Sea catastrophe is one of Ban’s top concerns on his six-day trip through the region and he is calling on the countries’ leaders to set aside rivalries to cooperate on repairing some of the damage.
“I urge all the leaders … to sit down together and try to find the solutions,” he said, promising United Nations support.
However, cooperation is hampered by disagreements over who has rights to scarce water and how it should be used.
In a presentation to Ban before his flyover, Uzbek officials complained that dam projects in Tajikistan will severely reduce the amount of water flowing into Uzbekistan. Impoverished Tajikistan sees the hydroelectric projects as potential key revenue earners.
Competition for water could become increasingly heated as global warming and rising populations further reduce the amount of water available per capita.
Water problems also could brew further dissatisfaction among civilians already troubled by poverty and repressive governments; some observers fear that could feed growing Islamist sentiment in the region.
Ban also is taking on the region’s frequently poor human rights conditions.
That is likely to be an especially tense issue when he meets Monday with Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who has led the country since the 1991 Soviet collapse and imposed severe pressure on opposition and civil rights activists.
The meeting comes less than two weeks after the U.N. Human Rights Committee issued a report criticizing Uzbekistan, including calling for fuller investigation of the brutal suppression of a 2005 uprising in the city of Andijan. Opposition and rights groups claim that hundreds were killed, but authorities insist the reports are exaggerated and angrily reject any criticism.
Amy Holmes
Amy Holmes, Amy M. Holmes (born in 1973 in Lusaka, Zambia) is a conservative political contributor for She has also appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher several times. Holmes graduated from Princeton University with a BA in economics in 1994. She is an independent conservative.
Holmes was born to a Zambian father and a Caucasian American mother. She was raised in her mother’s native Seattle, Washington after her parents divorced when she was three. She has co-hosted The View and co-hosted CNN’s Glenn Beck while Beck was on the road with his “Unelectable” show. Holmes wrote Senate floor statements for Bill Frist, a two-term United States Senator from Tennessee and the Republican Majority Leader from 2003 until his retirement in 2007. She is currently an anchor of a morning radio program syndicated by the Washington Times newspaper called “America’s Morning News”. Holmes is skeptical that global warming is caused by human activity.
Nathan Myhrvold Global Warming
December 20, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
TrendPK.com Nathan Myhrvold Global Warming:We’ll If this hose could possibly help,, why make a hose why not use what we have right now in our skys everyday? Planes, when the planes hit a high enough altitude the gases will be auto-released and this will help reduce the carbon and therefore help [...]
Britney Murphy,Britney Murphy Dead
December 20, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
TrendPK.com Britney Murphy,Britney Murphy Dead:Actress Brittany Murphy died Sunday morning in Los Angeles, reports TMZ. She was 32.
The actress known for her roles in such films as “Clueless,” “8 Mile” and “Girl Interrupted” suffered full cardiac arrest and could not be revived.
She was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after her husband, Simon [...]
Brittany Murphy Dead,Brittany Murphy Dies
December 20, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
TrendPK.com Brittany Murphy Dead,Brittany Murphy Dies:Brittany Murphy died early this morning after she went into full cardiac arrest and could not be revived, multiple sources tell TMZ.
She was 32.
A 911 call was made at 8:00 AM from a home in Los Angeles that is listed as belonging to her husband, Simon Monjack, [...]
Fury Erupts At UN Climate Talks
December 19, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under World News
COPENHAGEN : Fury erupted at the Copenhagen climate talks Saturday over a draft accord agreed by a select group of leaders, with several poor nations saying it amounted to a coup against the United Nations.
“You are going to endorse this coup d’etat against the United Nations,” Venezuela’s representative Claudia Salerno Caldera told Danish Prime Minister Lars Loekke Rasmussen, the conference’s chairman, in a speech from the floor.
“Those of us who wish to speak have to make a point of order by cutting our hands and drawing blood,” she added, before opening a red-stained palm.
Tuvalu’s Ian Fry, whose country is one of the most at risk from global warming, said the agreement amounted to Biblical betrayal.
“It looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our people and our future,” he said to applause in the chamber.
“Our future is not for sale. I regret to inform you that Tuvalu cannot accept this document.”
Rasmussen, looking uneasy in his chair, faced a barrage of criticism during the highly-charged session which was convened several hours after US President Barack Obama said he had reached a political agreement with around two dozen fellow leaders, including from China and India.
Cuba accused Obama of “behaving like an emperor,” adding that the Havana government would not accept the draft declaration.
The plenary session was then suspended after Costa Rica demanded explanations for key text that had disappeared from a draft resolution while the leaders’ wrangling had unfolded.
That text said countries would strive for a “legally-binding” agreement in Mexico City at the end of 2010 — a position supported especially by Russia, Canada and Japan in order to lock the United States into a treaty.
Green delegates said they suspected the vital words had been deleted as a quid pro quo to placate the United States.
Obama flew out of Copenhagen late Friday before any decision among the 194 members of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) on whether to accept the draft agreement.
The agreement contains a commitment to limit global warming to two degrees Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit), but did not spell out the important stepping stones — global emissions targets for 2020 or 2050 — for getting there.
Fury Erupts At UN Climate Talks was first posted on December 19, 2009 at 3:27 pm.
Copenhagen Climate Conference
December 10, 2009 by Trend PK
Filed under Breaking News
Copenhagen Climate Conference updates :- Climate change ‘Plan B’ awaits if diplomacy fails.
COPENHAGEN: Just five years ago, anyone who talked of easing Earth’s climate crisis by fertilising the seas with iron, scattering particles in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight or building a sunshade in space courted ridicule.
Today, such advocates — “geo-engineers” — are getting a respectable hearing.
Their ideas are still beyond the scientific pale, for they remain contested as risky for the environment and laden with unknowns about cost, practicality and legality.
But mainstream scientists who once dismissed these projects are now looking at them closely.
And some grudgingly accept that at least some concepts are worth exploring as a possible “Plan B” — a last-resort option if political efforts to tackle global warming fail and catastrophe looms.
Plan A hangs in the balance at the December 7-18 UN talks in Copenhagen, where 194 nations are called to craft a post-2012 treaty to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. Related article: Copenhagen climate talks
But the negotiations are hideously complex, a Gordian knot of interlinked issues, national interests and economic stakes.
The plodding, consensus-driven process is being far outstripped by the surge of fossil-fuel emissions, placing Earth on course for as much as 3.5 degrees Celsius (6.3 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming over pre-industrial times, way over a 2.0 C (3.6 F) threshold widely considered safe.
“A lot of people don’t like to say that Plan A is not working,” Jip Lenstra, a senior scientist at the Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, told AFP at the Copenhagen talks.
“They know that, but they don’t want to say that aloud because it’s very frustrating and it’s not the right signal at the right time.
“If you are working quite hard to make a success of Plan A, and somebody says that we should look at Plan B if Plan A is not successful, that’s not a good strategy.”
Geo-engineering broke new ground this year with an assessment of its options by Britain’s Royal Society, one of the temples of science.
A 12-member panel found that some geo-engineering techniques could have “serious unintended and detrimental effects on many people and ecosystems.”
But they cautiously said some schemes were technically feasible and could be a useful fallback tool to help the switch to a low-carbon economy provided safety worries and doubts about affordability were answered.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) inveighed against geo-engineering schemes in its landmark Fourth Assessment Report in 2007, swiping them in a brief aside as charged with potential risk and unquantified cost.
It now intends to do its own evaluation of the mavericks.
The Royal Society said geo-engineering fell into two main categories.
The most promising entails removal of carbon dioxide, such as by planting forests and building towers that would capture CO2 from the air.
Some of these projects could be harnessed alongside conventional methods to reduce emissions once they are demonstrated to be “safe, effective, sustainable and affordable,” said the report.
The other category is called solar radiation management.
Instead of tackling CO2, it would act like a thermostat, turning down the heat that reaches Earth from the Sun.
Concepts in this field include deflecting the Sun’s heat away from the Earth through space mirrors, scattering light-coloured particles in the high atmosphere to reflect the solar rays and using ships to spray water that would create reflective low-altitude clouds.
The advantage would be to lower temperatures quickly and could be tempting if global warming suddenly cranked up a gear, the report said.
But these techniques would not curb CO2 emissions that cause dangerous ocean acidification; their costs are unclear but possibly astronomical; and they may end up generating disasters of their own.
Even so, they should not be dismissed out of hand, given their potential in an emergency, says Ken Caldeira, a professor of climate modelling at Stanford University, California, who took part in the Royal Society report.
“We need to think if Greenland were to be sliding into the sea rapidly, causing rapid sea-level rise, or if methane started to de-gas rapidly from the Siberian permafrost, or if rainfall patterns were to shift in such a way that wide-spread famines were induced,” he said in London in September.
“We would be remiss if we did not do what we could do to understand the potential of these options as well as their uncertainties and risks ahead of time.”
Copenhagen Climate Conference was first posted on December 10, 2009 at 8:28 pm.
