YPD parties for the earth

The Young People for Development believes in sustainable growth wherein the environment is taken into consideration. Days before the Earthday in April, YPD hosted a party in honor of MOTHER EARTH. Volunteers and friends for the YPD came. The event was carbon neutral thanks to the support of some friends.

Food was simple and candles were used in some areas to minimize the carbon impact.

More importantly, there was fun and bonding for all those who were there.

More evidence of one metre sea rise this century

New Scientist quotes Svetlana Jevrejeva of the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, UK, who says a new, more accurate reconstruction of sea levels over the past 2000 years suggests that the prediction of a an 18-59 centimetre rise by 2100 made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is wildly inaccurate.

New predictions of sea level rises that for the first time takes into account ice dynamics predict that seas will be from 0.8-1.5 metres higher by next century.

At a European Geosciences Union conference in Vienna, Austria, this week, researchers including Jevrejeva said in a statement that the pace at which sea levels are rising is accelerating.

"For the past 2,000 years, the sea level was very stable," Jevrejeva said, explaining that they rose just 2 cm in the 18th century, 6 cm in the 19th century and a greater 19 cm last century.

"It seems that rapid rise in the 20th century is from melting ice sheets," she adds.

"If [the sea level] rises by one metre, 72 million Chinese people will be displaced, and 10 percent of the Vietnamese population," she concluded.

And climate change expert Nicholas Stern says he under-estimated the threat from global warming in a major report 18 months ago when he compared the economic risk to the Great Depression of the 1930s, according to The Age.

Latest climate science showed global emissions of planet-heating gases were rising faster and upsetting the climate more than previously thought, Stern said in a Reuters interview.

For example, evidence was growing that the planet's oceans - an important "sink" - were increasingly saturated and couldn't absorb as much as previously of the main greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2), Stern told reporters.

China gets greener

The BBC reports that there are now over 2000 environmental NGOs, according to official Chinese figures.

But another unofficial study says there are up to two million informal groups of students, farmers or other activists.

Several campaigns have received positive coverage in the state-controlled media, the BBC says.

However, green groups are still closely watched by the government.

An activist told the BBC that intelligence agents sometimes pose as green volunteers to keep an eye on what's going on.

Zhang Jingjing and her boss, Wang Canfa successfully assisted residents of a village in Fujian Province successfully sue a factory for compensation.

The factory was poisoning local crops with chromium.

But Ms Zhang sees limits to China's "green political space" because of the clout polluters have with local governments and judges.

"We have no independent judiciary, that is our problem," she says.

Because local officials and judges often side with polluters, the greens see central government as their ally. It's an internal power struggle in China that outsiders rarely see.

Others blame the West because much of the pollution is actually caused by factories which make products for export. The waste generated by "Made in China" products is left for Chinese people to deal with.

YPD's Earthday Party

The Young People for Development in Australia will organise an Earthday party on April 18, 2008 at the YPD house in Cairnlea, located in the Western suburb of Melbourne. It hopes to bring young people interested in the environment and development.

The YPD Earthday Party is a carbon neutral event courtesy of the Eco-Asia initiative of the Young People for Development.

To register into the Earthday event, click here.

Carry on cutting emissions, British scientists say

The BBC reports that British scientists have produced further compelling evidence showing that modern-day climate change is not caused by changes in the Sun's activity.

The research contradicts a favoured theory of climate "sceptics", that changes in cosmic rays coming to Earth determine cloudiness and temperature.

Presenting their findings in the Institute of Physics journal, Environmental Research Letters, the UK team explain that they used three different ways to search for a correlation, and found virtually none.

This is the latest piece of evidence which raises doubts about the cosmic ray theory, developed by Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark at the Danish National Space Center (DNSC).

"We started on this game because of Svensmark's work," Terry Sloan from Lancaster University told the BBC.

"If he is right, then we are going down the wrong path of taking all these expensive measures to cut carbon emissions; if he is right, we could carry on with carbon emissions as normal."

"We tried to corroborate Svensmark's hypothesis, but we could not; as far as we can see, he has no reason to challenge the IPCC - the IPCC has got it right.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in its vast assessment of climate science last year, concluded that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, the contribution of humankind's greenhouse gas emissions has outweighed that of the Sun by a factor of about 13 to one.

According to Terry Sloan, the message coming from his research is simple.

"So we had better carry on trying to cut carbon emissions."