A fresh look at Iceland’s fin whale hunts and meat exports to Japan. Originally posted here: Dot Earth Blog: Should Fin Whales Be a Source of Wonder or Meat? ; ; ;
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Dot Earth Blog: Should Fin Whales Be a Source of Wonder or Meat?
Mother Jones
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The early stages of Hillary Clinton’s proto-presidential campaign this summer were light on details about her domestic policy proposals. Instead, she focused on selling her book, Hard Choices, which focuses on her foreign policy opinions and diplomatic chops.
But this week, during a videotaped speech to a conference on women’s issues in Japan, Clinton staked out a strong view on paid family leave, a topic that could play a role in her 2016 campaign. “The United States, unfortunately, is one of a handful of developed countries without paid family leave,” she said, according to the Wall Street Journal. “If we give parents the flexibility on the job and paid family leave it actually helps productivity, which in turn helps all of us.”
Clinton was asked about family leave during a CNN-hosted town hall in June, and said it was a good idea but one that won’t come to America anytime soon. “I don’t think, politically, we could get it now,” she said.
The United States is one of just four countries where employers are not required to grant new mothers any paid time off after giving birth. Japan, on the other hand, offers 14 weeks.
Paid family leave has been an increasingly important cause for progressives. Three states now buck the national trend and force employers to offer their employees time off. “Many women can’t even get a paid day off to give birth—now that’s a pretty low bar,” President Obama said in June. “That, we should be able to take care of.”
Republicans have resisted calls for offering maternity leave, as it would force company’s to spend more on employee benefits. But polls consistently show that the public is overwhelmingly supportive of such measures. “For her 2016 campaign, Clinton should make paid family leave a—no; the!—central plank,” the Daily Beast‘s Michael Tomasky wrote in July. Clinton’s past profile on domestic politics largely centered on her experience and wisdom on finding ways to offer universal health insurance—a topic that is mostly off the national radar thanks to Obamacare. If she wants to run for president again, anchoring her campaign on getting the US in line with the international consensus of letting workers take a bit of paid time off to take care of newborns or a sick loved one seems like a no-brainer.
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Hillary Clinton: Strong Parental Leave Laws Are Great. Here’s Why You Can’t Have Them.
Mother Jones
They come to the Jerusalem Youth Chorus from as far away as Ramallah (a Palestinian outlook in the occupied West Bank) and a moshav (a Jewish settlement) outside of Jerusalem. They speak Arabic, Hebrew, and often a bit of English. They are five tenors, eight sopranos, six altos, and seven basses. They are 13 Palestinians and 13 Israelis, all high school students. Some are friends of friends with Gilad Shaar, Naftali Frenkel, and Eyal Yifrach, the Israeli teens whose kidnapping and killing sparked the latest round of clashes; others grew up around the corner from Muhammad Khdeir, a 16-year-old Palestinian boy who was murdered in the wake of those kidnappings.
For the past two years, the chorus—the only mixed Israeli-Palestinian choral group in the Holy City—has met weekly in Jerusalem to sing at the international YMCA, one of the few places Arabs and Jews can meet comfortably. This summer, they’ve rehearsed several times a week—despite the rocket launches and airstrikes—in a flurry of preparations for their first international singing tour. It took them last week to Kyoto and Tokyo, Japan, where they could enjoy a break from the troubles at home.
Here the kids perform “Adinu,” based on a poem by the Sufi mystic Ibn ‘Arahi: “I believe in the religion of love, wherever love is found.”
Micah Hendler, the chorus’ founder and director, didn’t know whether anyone would show up for rehearsal on the day after Khdeir was killed, especially anyone from Palestinian East Jerusalem, in whose Shu’fat neighborhood the boy’s body was discovered. “Don’t risk your safety,” he recalls telling them. But half of the kids made it anyway—including half of the Palestinians.
“Then this girl comes in from Shu’fat,” Hendler says.
“How did you even get here?” he recalls asking her. “Like physically. How did you get here?”
Source:
These Israeli and Palestinian Kids Would Rather Sing Than Fight
A gassy, icy concoction
Most people think the thinning of the sea ice at the top of the world is a bad thing. But not shipping and fossil fuel interests.
Shipping companies this week announced that they would use icebreakers to carve a new Arctic shipping route to help them deliver natural gas from a processing plant in western Siberia to customers in Japan and China. The Wall Street Journal reports:
Once virtually impassable, the Arctic Ocean is now attracting interest as a shipping route because global warming has reduced the ice cover within the Arctic Circle. More ships have been plying the northern route between Europe and Asia, which is roughly 40% shorter than the conventional path through the Suez Canal.
Last year, 71 ships crossed the Arctic Ocean between Europe and Asia, compared with four in 2010, according to Japan’s transportation ministry.
Mitsui O.S.K. characterized its planned route as the first regular service linking Europe and Asia via the Arctic, although it will operate the Arctic route only during the warmer months of the year.
“The shorter distance would be good for buyers, by cutting shipping costs and reducing other risks,” said Yu Nagatomi, an economist at Tokyo’s Institute of Energy Economics.
A truly less risky approach, of course, would be leaving the fossil fuels in the ground and off the ocean’s surface. But, hey, $.
Source
Shipping Firms to Add Arctic LNG Route, The Wall Street Journal
John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.
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New shipping channel will carry natural gas through the Arctic
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You’ve seen their logos on the sidelines, now get a peak inside the company trying to transform the world. It takes about two hours by car from the Chinese capital Beijing to get to the smog-blanketed city of Baoding. I don’t mean to be rude, but it’s nothing much to speak of, typical of the Northeast’s expanse of industrial wastelands, threaded together by super-highways. So we were surprised to find that Baoding—where air pollution registers at hazardous levels for more than a quarter of the year—was also home to the sprawling campus of the world’s top solar panel manufacturer, Yingli. We had landed, it seemed, in the very epicenter of China’s clean tech revolution. After weeks of negotiations, my colleague Jaeah Lee and I were finally granted access to film this exclusive footage at Yingli’s headquarters in the fall of 2013. What awaited inside blew our socks off: acres of high-tech solar wizardry attended to by an impressive fleet of skilled workers, and an understandably boastful management. In the video above, we take you behind-the-scenes of Yingli, and put a face to the name you’ve been seeing in the background of World Cup games: In 2010, Yingli became the first renewable energy company, and the first Chinese company, to partner with the tournament.
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Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup
Exploring the Social and Environmental Challenges as Brazil Prepares for Two Sports Spectacles
Dot Earth Blog: Exploring the Social and Environmental Challenges as Brazil Prepares for Two Sports Spectacles
VIDEO: Can We 3D Print Our Way Out of Climate Change?
Most Chinese Cities Fail Pollution Standard, China Says
Most Chinese Cities Fail Minimum Air Quality Standards, Study Says
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Inside Yingli, the Giant Chinese Solar Company Sponsoring the World Cup
Mother Jones
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Japanese forecasters are calling it a “once in decades storm.” And at Kadena Air Base, a US military installation on the island of Okinawa, one commander dubbed the storm “the most powerful typhoon forecast to hit the island in 15 years.”
Super Typhoon Neoguri, currently sporting maximum sustained winds of nearly 150 miles per hour and just shy of Category 5 strength, is heading straight at Japan’s islands, and its outer bands are currently battering the island of Okinawa. Here’s the forecast map from the Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center. As you can see, the forecast for tomorrow brings the storm up to maximum sustained winds of 140 knots (161 miles per hour), or Category 5 strength (click for larger version):
The Western Pacific basin, home to typhoons (which are elsewhere called tropical cyclones or hurricanes), is known for having the strongest storms on Earth, such as last year’s devastating Super Typhoon Haiyan. July is, generally, when the Western Pacific typhoon season really starts getting into gear, but August, September, and October are usually busier months.
Neoguri will weaken by the time it strikes Japan’s main islands, but as meteorologist Jeff Masters observes, “the typhoon is so large and powerful that it will likely make landfall with at least Category 2 strength, causing major damage in Japan.”
One pressing issue is the safety of Japan’s nuclear plants. In the wake of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, it’s important to consider whether a similar vulnerability arises here.
Fukushima is located north of Tokyo on Japan’s largest island, Honshu. By the time the typhoon reaches that point, it is forecast to be considerably weaker. But there are a number of other reactors spread across the islands; perhaps most exposed will be the southwestern island of Kyushu, where the current forecast has the typhoon making its first major landfall.
According to reporting by Reuters, there are two nuclear plants on the island. A company spokeswoman for Kyushu Electric Power Co. told the news agency that it “has plans in place throughout the year to protect the plants from severe weather.”
Will that be good enough? According to Edwin Lyman, senior scientist in the global security program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, the good news overall is that Japan’s nuclear plants are currently shut down, awaiting permission to restart as they institute stronger safety protections, including the construction of higher seawalls. A shut-down plant is still not without risks, because “you still have to provide cooling for the fuel,” says Lyman. But overall, he thinks that the newer protections, combined with the fact that the plants have been cooling while shut down, suggests less vulnerability than existed in 2011.
“I would say that they’re probably in a better position than they were to withstand massive flooding from a typhoon, and the fact that the reactors have been shut for some time, increases the level of confidence,” Lyman says. “But there’s still issues, and we’ll just have to hope that if there’s a massive flooding event at one of the reactors, that the measures they’ve already put into place will be adequate to cope with them.”
Here’s a stunning NASA image of Neoguri, snapped yesterday:
Typhoon Neoguri on July 6 NASA
Continued here:
A Scary Super Typhoon Is Bearing Down on Japan…and Its Nuclear Plants
Mother Jones
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Climate skeptics like to point out that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere stimulates plant growth—suggesting that ever-growing fossil fuel consumption will lead to an era of bin-busting crop yields. But as I noted last week, the best science suggests that other effects of an over-heated planet—heat stress, drought, and floods—will likely overwhelm any bonus from CO2-rich air. Overall, it seems, crop yields will decline.
And here’s more bad news: In a paper published in Nature this month, a global team has found that heightened levels of atmospheric carbon make key staple crops wheat, rice, peas, and soybeans less nutritious.
The team, led by Samuel Myers, a research scientist at Harvard’s Department of Environmental Health, grew a variety of grains and legumes in plots in the US, Japan, and Australia. They subjected one set to air enriched with CO2 at concentrations ranging from 546 and 586 parts per million—levels expected to be reached in around four decades; the other set got ambient air at today’s CO2 level, which recently crossed the 400 parts per million threshold.
The results: a “significant decrease in the concentrations of zinc, iron, and protein” for wheat and rice, a Harvard press release on the study reports. For legumes like soybeans and peas, protein didn’t change much, but zinc and iron levels dropped. For wheat, the treated crops saw zinc, iron, and protein fall by 9.3 percent, 5.1 percent, and 6.3 percent, respectively.
These are potentially grave findings, because a large swath of humanity relies on rice, wheat, and legumes for these very nutrients, the authors note. They report that two billion people already suffer from zinc and iron deficiencies, “causing a loss of 63 million life-years annually.” According to the Harvard press release, the “reduction in these nutrients represents the most significant health threat ever shown to be associated with climate change.” Symptoms of zinc deficiency include stunted growth, appetite loss, impaired immune function, hair loss, diarrhea, delayed sexual maturation, impotence, hypogonadism (for males), and eye and skin lesions; while iron deficiency brings on fatigue, shortness of breath, dizziness, and headache.
Wheat, rice, soybeans, and peas are all what scientists call C3 crops, characterized by the way they use photosynthesis to trap carbon from the atmosphere. C4 crops, which use a different pathway, include staples like corn and sorghum. Fortunately, C4 crops showed much less sensitivity to higher CO2 levels, the study found.
Meanwhile, in my post last week about the big National Climate Assessment and its finding on agriculture, I left out a key point on weeds. The report’s agriculture section notes that “several weed species benefit more than crops from higher temperatures and CO2 levels,” meaning that climate change will likely intensify weed pressure on farmers. And then it adds a bombshell: glyphosate, the widely used herbicide marketed by Monsanto as Roundup, “loses its efficacy on weeds grown at CO2 levels projected to occur in the coming decades.” And that means “higher concentrations of the chemical and more frequent sprayings thus will be needed, increasing economic and environmental costs associated with chemical use.”
In short, the era of climate change will hardly be the paradise of carbon-enriched bounty envisioned by fossil fuel enthusiasts. For a look at how farmers probably should adapt to these unhappy developments, see my 2013 profile of Ohio farmer David Brandt.
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Japan officials said the whaling, which they say is for research, would be redesigned to address objections raised by an international court. Continued: Japan Plans to Resume Whaling Program, With Changes to Address Court Concerns Related ArticlesJapan Says It Will Resume Whaling Off AntarcticaU.S. Delays Final Call on Keystone XL PipelineIt’s the End of the World as We Know It . . . and He Feels Fine
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Japan Plans to Resume Whaling Program, With Changes to Address Court Concerns
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White Dwarf Issue 10: 5 April 2014 – White Dwarf
Rain down death on the enemies of the Imperium as the new Astra Militarum Hydra and Wyvern hit the pages of White Dwarf 10! Also between the covers of this most august of publications you’ll find a Throne of Skulls event report, painting guides for the new tanks and much more besides.
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Codex: Astra Militarum (Enhanced Edition) – Games Workshop
The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hold back the advance of a […]
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White Dwarf Issue 11: 12 April 2014 – White Dwarf
This issue, the Bullgryns smash into Warhammer 40,000 along with their Ogryn counterparts and the infamous bodyguard Nork Deddog, complete with painting guides in Paint Splatter. We also take the Astra Militarum out for a Battle Report: who will win, humanity’s finest defenders or the marauding Orks? About this Series: White Dwarf is Games Workshop […]
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All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition – Mel Bartholomew
Rapidly increasing in popularity, square foot gardening is the most practical, foolproof way to grow a home garden. That explains why author and gardening innovator Mel Bartholomew has sold more than two million books describing how to become a successful DIY square foot gardener. Now, with the publication of All New Square Foot Gardening, Second Edition , t […]
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Codex: Astra Militarum (eBook Edition) – Games Workshop
Codex: Astra Militarum The Astra Militarum are the mighty Hammer of the Emperor, an army so vast that it has never been fully recorded by the scribes of the Administratum. Drawn from a million worlds, its men and women are the thin line between Humanity and the void. On hundreds of thousands of warzones across the galaxy the armies of the Astra Militarum hol […]
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How to Raise the Perfect Dog – Cesar Millan & Melissa Jo Peltier
From the bestselling author and star of National Geographic Channel’s Dog Whisperer , the only resource you’ll need for raising a happy, healthy dog. For the millions of people every year who consider bringing a puppy into their lives–as well as those who have already brought a dog home–Cesar Millan, the preeminent dog behavior expert, says, “Yes, […]
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Codex: Militarum Tempestus (Interactive Edition) – Games Workshop
Codex: Militarum Tempestus The Scions of the Militarum Tempestus are the highly skilled elite of the Astra Militarum. Trained from youth in the combat schools of the Schola Progenium, each one has been psycho-conditioned to obey without question and kill without remorse. In battle, the toughest missions fall to the Tempestus Scions. Their specialist sq […]
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Warhammer 40,000: The Rules – Games Workshop
There is no time for peace. No respite. No forgiveness. There is only WAR. In the nightmare future of the 41st Millennium, Mankind teeters upon the brink of destruction. The galaxy-spanning Imperium of Man is beset on all sides by ravening aliens and threatened from within by Warp-spawned entities and heretical plots. Only the strength of the immortal […]
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How to Paint Citadel Miniatures: Astra Militarum – Games Workshop
The Astra Militarum is an army of regimentation and proud tradition, with soldiers drawn from across the length and breadth of the Imperium. Their uniforms and iconography reflect this strict adherence to military organisation, and whether it is the Scions of the Militarum Tempestus, the Imperial Guardsmen of Cadia or the tanks of an armoured formation, each […]
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My Boyfriend Barfed in My Handbag . . . and Other Things You Can’t Ask Martha – Jolie Kerr
“Wise and funny. . . . The Lorrie Moore short story, or the Tina Fey memoir, of cleaning tutorials.” —Dwight Garner, The New York Times “Thrillingly titled. . . . For a generation overwhelmed not just by dust bunnies, but by bong water on the carpet, pee stains on the ceiling and vomit seemingly everywhere, Jolie Kerr dispenses cleaning advice free of judgme […]
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An international court rules that Japan’s so-called scientific whale hunts are not science, and thus not allowed under a moratorium. Continued: Dot Earth Blog: A Whale of an International Court Ruling Against Japan ; ;Related ArticlesDot Earth Blog: U.N. Climate Report Authors Answer 11 Basic QuestionsSweetwater Journal: Rattlesnake Wranglers, Armed With GasolinePanel’s Warning on Climate Risk: Worst Is Yet to Come ;
Originally posted here:
Dot Earth Blog: A Whale of an International Court Ruling Against Japan
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