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Whale Sharks: Victims of Bad Journalism
"Looking at 45 different news sources (including papers, online media, television, and new agencies), the researchers found that 54.4 percent misreported information about the whale shark, including some news media listing the whale shark as a mammal (it's a fish, not a mammal) while others said it lived in deep, temperate oceans (not shallower, tropical ones)."
Read more:http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0709-hance-tcs-whaleshark-mistakes.html#ixzz20BVMtzOg
Truth
Written by t(e world's leading conservation biologists
“We die, and the world will be poorer for it.”
The impending enrichment of Arctic countries would not compensate for the costs of runaway Arctic warming. Arctic species, habitats and quite possibly whole ecosystems would be lost. No Arctic country—not even Russia, which has a poor history of conservation—could contemplate wreaking such environmental havoc unilaterally. Yet all are happy to profit from it. That makes the Arctic a textbook illustration of the commons-despoiling tragedy that climate change is.
Cold Comfort, The Economist (Special Report: The Arctic)
The Economist article about the agreement reached at the much talked about Rio+20 summit
The Future of the Arctic?
NADYA KULAGINA/REX FEATURES
These breathtaking images show a vast school of sardines in the Philippines. The magnificent spectacle, known as a ‘sardine run’ sees the silver fish swimming in formation to create a shimmering wall in their annual migration.We would swim into the shoal and lose track of reality not being able to tell which way was the sky or the seabed, explained Nadya. The shoal was so powerful it kept pulling us down and further off course. I was trying hard not to lose sense of direction.
"Do we really think more international events, conferences and ever-expanding climate festivals of excess are going to solve the problem or provide new insights? We need to think and act differently – and starting at home and leading by example would perhaps add gravity to our otherwise unattractive message.”
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The "unpalatable climate change basics", and the need to lead by example.
Read more: http://conservationbytes.com/2012/06/19/whos-responsible-for-climate-change/
Declining biodiversity may be contributing to the rise of asthma, allergies, and other chronic inflammatory diseases among people living in cities worldwide, a Finnish study suggests. Emerging evidence indicates that commensal microbes inhabiting the skin, airway, and gut protect against inflammatory disorders. However, little is known about the environmental determinants of the microbiome. (Source)
Read the full journal article here. (Free access available.)
Why Lego & Ikea are building wind farms
http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0606-hance-jaguars-palm-oil.html
Researchers in Magdalena River Valley have taken the first ever photos of jaguars in a palm plantation, including a mother with two cubs, showing that the America's biggest cat may not avoid palm oil plantations like its Asian relative, the tiger.
"Our data suggest that plantations can be part of a landscape mosaic that jaguars will use. But careful planning that avoids large-scale replacement of forest with huge palm oil areas will be essential if we want to avoid the kind of isolation that tigers now suffer," Howard Quigley, Panthera's Jaguar Program Executive Director, said. Read more:http://news.mongabay.com/2012/0606-hance-jaguars-palm-oil.html#ixzz1xJAgdSbW
That Controversial 1991 Summers Memo
DATE: December 12, 1991
TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers Subject: GEP
'Dirty' Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn't the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Least Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons:
1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that.
2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I've always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare enhancing trade in air pollution and waste.
3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostrate[sic] cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostrate[sic] cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.
The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.
—Lawrence Summers
Background to this memo: NYTimes article, Harvard Magazine article (suggesting that this internal memo was not written by Summers himself, but had been signed by him and intended to "stimulate internal debate")
Check out this paper which discusses why economic cost-benefit analysis cannot be used as a moral basis for analysing environmental policy.