???????????

 

? ? ?

 

       ?  October 8, 2007: The world used up its “ecological budget” for 2007 almost two months early, exhausting the natural resources that the earth’s ecosystem can regenerate in a calendar year. According to a new measure of environmental impact from the new economics foundation, a think-tank, this is the quickest descent into ecological hock since the world began living beyond its sustainable means in 1987. Andrew Simms, nef’s policy director, said “today is the day when the world, in effect, starts eating into its stock of natural resources and goes into ecological debt. The date has been creeping ever earlier in the year since the world first entered deficit in the 1980s.” The nef study, called Chinadependence in reflection of the growing impact of China on the global economic system, compared the world’s capacity to produce food, minerals and other raw materials with current levels of consumption using UN data on the state of the planet’s forests, fisheries and agriculture. Twenty years ago, the world used up its stock of renewable resources on 18 December, the first year in which it first ran up against the limits of sustainability. By 1995 “world ecological debt” day had come forward to November 21. Five years ago the world had consumed more than it could naturally replace by October 25. Mr Simms said the situation was much more extreme in wealthy countries. “If everyone in the world wanted to live like people in the UK, for example, we would need over three planets like Earth” he added. The ecological footprint of the UK is among the world’s biggest, matched by France and only beaten by the US. Worldwide consumption on an American scale would only be sustainable with the natural resources of more than five Earths, the study claimed. One reason for the accelerating plunder of the world’s resources, nef said, was a little-known quirk of world trade statistics whereby two countries often import and export almost identical amounts of a similar product to and from each other. In 2006, the UK imported 21 tonnes of mineral water from Australia and sent 20 tonnes back again. Britain bought 2,257 tonnes of ice cream from Sweden and sold 2,297 tonnes back to the Scandinavian country. The study also showed how the ecological impact of profligate western life-styles is disguised because a web of interdependent economies shifts the environmental effect of consumption from developed to developing countries. “China is increasingly blamed for its levels of pollution and its rising greenhouse gas emissions” Mr Simms said. “But it is demand from countries like the UK which leads to smoke from Chinese factories and power plants entering the atmosphere. China has become the environmental laundry for the Western world.”

(Stevenson, Tom [2007, October 6]. Today the world’s “ecological budget” for 2007 runs out. The Daily Telegraph.  Retrieved October 8, 2007, from the Daily Telegraph website: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?xml=/money/2007/10/06/ccnef106.xml)

 

      ?  ???2007?10?7??  ?BBC?????“??????”(New Economics Foundation) ??????????????????????????????????????1/3????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????10%??????????????????????????????????????5.3?????????????????????????????????3.1??????????????????3????2.5????2.4??????0.9????????????????????????????2007?????10?9???“?????”(World Ecological Debt Day)???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????14%????????????????????????????????????????????????????????

????????????????????. 2007-10-07 . 2007-10-7 ??http://news.jlonline.com/Guonei/2007/10/7/7113933AEKD6IH1DCFB09DCDBC8GH08H.shtml?

 

      ?  ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????(?????)??????????????????142???????????????????????22??????24??????27?????????????????20????????????????30%?70%??????????????????????????????????????????????????????(?)?????????10????????13???????99%?????????????????????????????????100???????77??????“??????????”????????????????

????????????2006?12?15????????????????????. 2006-12-20 ??http://www.jlonline.com/news/News-16195.html?

 

      ?  ?????????????????????????????????40????????????????

      ?  ???????????????????????1000???????“??”?

      ?  ???????1??????50??????????4000????????????

      ?  ?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????2000???????2.9????????????????6??????????????????????????1000????????

      ?  ??????????????????????1998???????3.92?????2003???????3.38???????5000??????????????

      ?  ???????????????2000??2010????????9000?????????????500??????800????????60??????????????1270??????2060???????62????????????????

      ?  ??????????????????1600????????????????——2000???——????????????????????????????????????1300?????6.4?????????????????????????????1300???????????????2800????????

??????????????????????????????15???????????????30?????????????????B????????????[??? ???????2003???]??????????????????•?•?????????????? ??

 

      ?  “??????????????????”???????????????2004???????????????????????????“????????1/10?????????????????????30%?”??????????????????????1500?????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????——?????????????????????????????????“??????”??????

      ?  ???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????40%??????????50%????????????????????????????????????????

      ?  ????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????“???????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????”

???????????????????????2004?11?02??????????????????????????????????????????????????2004?11?30????????[invalid link]?

 

      ?  The world’s fish and seafood populations will collapse by 2048 if current trends in habitat destruction and overfishing continue, resulting in less food for humans, researchers said on Thursday. In an analysis of scientific data going back to the 1960s and historical records over a thousand years, the researchers found that marine biodiversity — the variety of ocean fish, shellfish, birds, plants and micro-organisms — has declined dramatically, with 29 percent of species already in collapse. Extending this pattern into the future, the scientists calculated that by 2048 all species would be in collapse, which the researchers defined as having catches decline 90 percent from the maximum catch. This applies to all species, from mussels and clams to tuna and swordfish, said Boris Worm, lead author of the study, which was published in the current edition of the journal Science. Ocean mammals, including seals, killer whales and dolphins, are also affected. “Whether we looked at tide pools or studies over the entire world’s ocean, we saw the same picture emerging,” Worm said in a statement. “In losing species we lose the productivity and stability of entire ecosystems. I was shocked and disturbed by how consistent these trends are — beyond anything we suspected.” When ocean species collapse, it makes the ocean itself weaker and less able to recover from shocks like global climate change, Worm said. The decline in marine biodiversity is largely due to over-fishing and destruction of habitat, Worm said in a telephone interview from Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.

(Zabarenko, Deborah. [Environment Correspondent 2006]. Ocean fish, seafood could collapse by 2048: study. Reuters Science News. November 2, 2006. Retrieved November 3, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20061102/sc_nm/environment_fish_dc_2)

 

      ?  BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s longest river is “cancerous” with pollution and rapidly dying, threatening drinking water supplies in 186 cities along its banks, state media said on Tuesday. Chinese environmental experts fear worsening pollution could kill the Yangtze river within five years, Xinhua news agency said, calling for an urgent clean-up. “Many officials think the pollution is nothing for the Yangtze,” Xinhua quoted Yuan Aiguo, a professor with the China University of Geosciences, as saying. “But the pollution is actually very serious,” it added, warning that experts considered it “cancerous.” Industrial waste and sewage, agricultural pollution and shipping discharges were to blame for the river’s declining health, experts said. The river, the third longest in the world after the Nile and the Amazon, runs from remote far west Qinghai and Tibet through 186 cities including Chongqing, Wuhan and Nanjing and empties into the sea at Shanghai. It absorbed more than 40 percent of the country’s waste water, 80 percent of it untreated, said Lu Jianjian, from East China Normal University. “As the river is the only source of drinking water in Shanghai, it has been a great challenge for Shanghai to get clean water,” Xinhua quoted him as saying. China is facing a severe water crisis — 300 million people do not have access to drinkable water — and the government has been spending heavily to clean major waterways like the Yellow, Huaihe and Yangtze rivers. But those clean-up campaigns have made limited progress because of spotty regional enforcement. Toxic spills are common, the worst recently being in the Songhua river in the northeast which led to the taps of Harbin being turned off for days.

(China's longest river “cancerous” with pollution. Reuters Science News. May 30, 2006. Retrieved May 31, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060530/sc_nm/environment_china_river_dc_1)

 

      ?  Greenhouse gas pollution from China and India rose steeply over the last decade, but rich countries, including the United States, remain the world's biggest polluters, a World Bank official said on Wednesday. The United States accounts for nearly a quarter — 24 percent — of all emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas linked to global warming, said Steen Jorgensen, the bank’s acting vice-president for sustainable development. The countries of the European Monetary Union contribute 10 percent. But China and India are catching up. “(Greenhouse gas emissions from) China and India are growing very rapidly at the moment, very much because of inefficient investments in energy, in power generation,” said Jorgensen. China, the world’s second-largest polluter after the United States, increased carbon dioxide emissions by 33 percent between 1992 and 2002, according to the bank’s “Little Green Data Book,” a survey of world environmental impact released on Tuesday. India’s emissions rose 57 percent over the same period. Jorgensen said those likely to suffer most from the consequences of these emissions, including the increasingly severe weather patterns associated with global climate change, are farmers in the poorest parts of the world. “The gloom and doom (is) if you are a farmer on a small island state somewhere, looking at sea level rise, looking at more severe weather - those are really the people we should be concerned about,” Jorgensen said in a telephone interview from New York. “It’s an unequal distribution of the people who pollute and the people who suffer from the pollution.” He said the main reason emissions from China and India are rising so fast compared to the rest of the world, which had a 15 percent rise in carbon dioxide emissions between 1992 and 2002, was older, inefficient coal-fired power plants in both countries. While cleaner coal-fired plants are possible, India and China cannot afford to make the switch.

(Reuters Science News. By Deborah Zabarenko. May 11, 2006, Retreived May 11, 2006,  from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060510/sc_nm/environment_pollution_dc_2)

 

      ?  The world must halt greenhouse gas emissions and reverse them within two decades or watch the planet spiraling toward destruction, scientists said on Monday, January 30, 2006. Saying that evidence of catastrophic global warming from burning fossil fuels was now incontrovertible, the experts from oceanographers to economists, climatologists and politicians stressed that inaction was unacceptable. “Climate change is worse than was previously thought and we need to act now,” Henry Derwent, special climate change adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, said at the launch of a book of scientific papers on the global climate crisis. Researcher Rachel Warren from the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, who contributed to the book “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,” said carbon dioxide emissions had to peak no later than 2025, and painted a picture of rapidly approaching catastrophe. Global average temperatures were already 0.6 Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and a rise of just 0.4C more would see coral reefs wiped out, flooding in the Himalayas and millions more people facing hunger, she said. A rise of 3C — just half of what scientists have warned is possible this century — would see 400 million people going hungry, entire species being wiped out and killer diseases such as dengue fever reaching pandemic proportions. “To prevent all of this needs global emissions to peak in 2025 and then come down by 2.6 percent a year,” Warren said. “But even then we would probably face a rise of 2 degrees because of the delay built into the climate system. So we have to start to plan to adapt,” she added.

(Based on Reuters science news “Global warming demands urgent solutions: scientists.” [By Jeremy Lovell. LONDON (Reuters). Retrieved January 31, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060131/sc_nm/environment_climate_dc])

 

      ?  2005 was the warmest recorded on Earth’s surface, and it was unusually hot in the Arctic, U.S. space agency NASA said on Tuesday. All five of the hottest years since modern record-keeping began in the 1890s occurred within the last decade, according to analysis by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In descending order, the years with the highest global average annual temperatures were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003 and 2004, NASA said in a statement. “It’s fair to say that it probably is the warmest since we have modern meteorological records,” said Drew Shindell of the NASA institute in New York City. “Using indirect measurements that go back farther, I think it’s even fair to say that it’s the warmest in the last several thousand years.” Over the past 30 years, Earth has warmed by 1.08 degrees F (0.6 degrees C), NASA said. Over the past 100 years, it has warmed by 1.44 degrees F (0.8 degrees C). The 21st century could see global temperature increases of 6 to 10 degrees F (3 to 5 degrees C), Shindell said. “That will really bring us up to the warmest temperatures the world has experienced probably in the last million years,” he said.

(2005 was warmest year on record: NASA. By Deborah Zabarenko Tue Jan 24, 2006. Reuters Science News. Retrieved January 25, 2006, from http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060124/sc_nm/environment_warming_dc)

 

      ?  A magnitude 9.0 earthquake, the strongest for 40 years, struck off the coast of Indonesia’s Sumatra island on December 26, 2005. The tsunami it generated claimed more than 250,000 lives. Two weeks after, the Earth was still vibrating from the massive undersea earthquake. Richard Gross, a geophysicist with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, theorised that a shift of mass towards the Earth’s centre during the quake caused the planet to spin three millionths of a second faster and tilt about 2.5 cm on its axis.

(Stuff World News. January 10, 2005. Retrieved January 10, 2005, from http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3151151a12795,00.html. Mortality figure updated on Feb 1, 2005.)

 

      ?  Kyoto protocol, which aims to cut emissions by developed nations by 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12, and which ends in 2012, is meant to be a first step against global warming. U.N. projections show, however, that Kyoto will brake rising world temperatures by only about 0.1C (0.2F), a pinprick compared to a forecast rise of 1.4-5.8C by 2100.

(Reuters Science News. November 24, 2004. Retrieved November 25, 2004, from http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=3&u=/nm/20041124/sc_nm/environment_kyoto_dc)

 

      ?  World surface temperatures have risen by 0.6 degrees centigrade (1.1 degrees Fahrenheit) since the late 1800s when the Industrial Revolution started in Europe. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of 2,000 scientists which advises the United Nations, projects a further rise of 1.4-5.8 degrees centigrade by 2100. Even the lowest forecast would be the biggest century-long rise in 10,000 years.

(Reuters Science News. February 11, 2005. Retrieved February 12, 2005, from http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=3&u=/nm/20050211/sc_nm/environment_warming_dc)

 

      ?  The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the planet because of a build-up of gases from fossil fuels burned in cars, factories and power plants, according to a report by 250 scientists from 8 countries this month. That could make the North Pole ice-free in summer by 2100, driving species like polar bears toward extinction and undermining indigenous hunting cultures, the report says. In turn, a global thaw could push up sea levels by almost a meter (3 ft) by 2100, according to U.N. projections, threatening to sink low-lying Pacific island states like Tuvalu or the Marshall Islands or the Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

(Reuters Science News. November 25, 2004. Retrieved November 26, 2004, from http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=3&u=/nm/20041125/sc_nm/environment_arctic_dc)

 

      ?  SYDNEY (Reuters) - Islanders on tiny Tuvalu in the South Pacific last week saw the future of global warming and rising sea levels, as extreme high tides caused waves to crash over crumbling sea-walls and flood their homes. “Our island is sinking together with our hearts,” wrote Silafaga Lalua in Tuvalu News (www.tuvaluislands.com). Tuvalu is a remote island nation consisting of a fringe of atolls covering just 10 sq miles, with the highest point no more than 17 ft above sea level, but most a mere 6.5 ft. Global warming (news - web sites) from greenhouse gas pollution is regarded as the main reason for higher sea levels, now rising about 2mm (0.08 in) a year, which could swamp low-lying nations such as Tuvalu and the Maldives in the Indian Ocean if temperatures keep rising. “The Kyoto Protocol is not going to fix the problem in terms of rising sea levels,” said Adam Delaney, Kyoto spokesman for the Pacific Islands Forum, which represents 16 island states. Small island states had originally sought a 40 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, but accepted the 5.2 percent agreed at Kyoto as a start. But some scientists say an emissions cut of at least 60 percent is needed to prevent catastrophic impacts of climate change this century, including more intense cyclones in the Pacific.

(Retrieved Feb 12, 2005, from http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=585&e=2&u=/nm/20050213/sc_nm/environment_kyoto_islands_dc)