live earth madness

sorry i'm not into the LIVE EARTH madness..I think its really because I don't have cable anymore. =( Not having cable is like being away from the rest of the world....from mtv. but I believe its airing today. since right now is 12:20 am. yes, today but i don't know if its in NEW JERSEY or DC. well its certainly happening and MTV is covering it so if you have MTV, then you've deffo heart about it and you'll probably catch the performances on tv. There are some big name artists performing.

This site has awesome videos. My fav is the one of the polar bears..its quite funny but then it also makes you sad. There are also other great videos. This too is a part of LIVE EARTH.

click here or copy paste this link.
http://entimg.msn.com/i/LiveEarth/player/altplayer/q.html?StreamName=US.smi

I hope all of you watch it!

LIVE EARTH worldwide concerts

Live Earth kicks off in Australia
Madonna, The Police among artists to perform at event for climate change


SYDNEY, Australia - The Live Earth global concert series kicked off Saturday with a digeridoo-backed Aboriginal group dancing and singing a traditional welcome at the first venue in Sydney.

Tribal leaders with white-painted bodies and shaking eucalyptus fronds were the first of more than 150 performers at the nine, concert, 24-hour series to raise awareness about climate change.

The performance was immediately followed by a video greeting from former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, whose campaign to force global warming onto the international political agenda inspired the event.

Gore invited the crowd — which appeared to be several hundred when the show started at 11 a.m. and scattered throughout the sporting stadium arena — to take Live Earth’s seven-point pledge to reduce their personal environmental impact and support policies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

“Thank you for coming today and thank you for being the very first to launch this movement to help solve the climate crisis,” Gore said, standing before the Capital building in Washington. “Enjoy the show.”

Acts big and small

The funk, roots act Blue King Brown took the stage shortly afterward — the first official band on the global bill. The worldwide lineup includes Madonna, Metallica, the Police and Kanye West.

Problems and changes to the series continued right down to the last minute, with a ninth concert — in Washington, D.C. — added on Friday and a court battle continuing in Brazil to decide whether the show there could go ahead as planned.

Critics say that it lacks achievable goals, and that bringing in jet-setting rock stars in fuel-guzzling airliners to plug in to amplifier stacks and cranking up the sound may send mixed messages about energy conservation.

“The last thing the planet needs is a rock concert,” The Who’s singer Roger Daltrey recently told a British newspaper.

Concerts strive for ‘green’
Organizers say the concerts will be as green as possible, with a tally of energy use being kept. Proceeds from ticket sales will go toward distributing power-efficient light bulbs and other measures that will offset the shows’ greenhouse gas emissions, they say.

In Johannesburg, four-time Grammy nominee Angelique Kidjo offered a tart response to Daltrey’s comment. “Criticism is easy,” she said during a news conference Friday that involved performers in the local concert. “And there is a kind of fashion of cynical people around us. You are cynical — what the hell are you doing to change the world? Get your butt out there. Do something.”

And it is beyond time to do so, she explained.

“Climate change is visible today, we can see that now. And if you can talk to farmers they will tell you that their crops that they are harvesting are not the same as before. That for me is a wake-up call because if we cannot eat, we cannot sustain ourselves. We don’t eat cameras, we don’t eat cars, we eat food.”

More than 150 artists will perform at the nine concerts. Rolling west through Saturday, the series starts in Sydney, then Tokyo, Shanghai, Johannesburg, Hamburg, London, Rio de Janeiro, New Jersey and Washington.

the conclusions of the first Arctic expedition on Global Warming 101

I posted an article here on the effects that global warming is having on the Inuits of the Arctic last March. You can still view it here.
I had read about this expedition when it had started and how quickly 78 days passed and the reports from the first of many Global Warming 101 expeditions funded by National Geographic are in. An article on the expedition is going to appear in the next issue of National Geographic Adventurers magazine but here is the news article for now (ps.its a lengthy one):

Global Warming Changing Inuit Lands, Lives, Arctic Expedition Shows

Jon Bowermaster
for National Geographic News

May 15, 2007

An arduous expedition to highlight how rising temperatures, melting sea ice, changing wildlife, and other effects of global warming are altering life for the native peoples of the Arctic has finally reached its conclusion.

After 78 days of trekking across sub-Arctic Baffin Island in the Canadian province of Nunavut, veteran polar explorer Will Steger and his team pulled into the town of Iglulik on the afternoon of Friday, May 11 (Nunavut map).

The 1,000-mile (1,600-kilometer) journey was the first in a series of planned expeditions called Global Warming 101 designed to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change in the polar regions. The expedition was funded in part by National Geographic Society Mission Programs. (National Geographic News is owned by the National Geographic Society.)

Steger is no stranger to such trips—he traveled unsupported to the North Pole in 1986, across Antarctica in 1989-90, and from Russia to Canada in 1995.

But unlike his previous journeys, this one was less about whiteouts and dogs and more about the remote Inuit population living on the edge of the Arctic. (Related: "Arctic Expedition to Spotlight Warming Impact on Inuit Groups" [February 23, 2007].)

"We really wanted to hear from the people on the front line about how the Arctic is changing," Steger said. "And we did, everywhere we went."

Changing Land

At every stop team members engaged the Inuit in conversation about climate change.

There has been a large increase in animals not previously seen this far north, including robins, finches, and dolphins, the adventurers learned.

And faster-melting ice is causing a decrease in hunting days each year, while igloos, which native hunters prefer to tents when they are on the trail, are much harder to build with less snow and ice.

Three Inuit hunters—Theo Ikummaq, 53, born in an igloo near Iglulik; hunting guide Simon Qamanirq, 53, an internationally known carver; and Lukie Airut, 65 a veteran hunter, dog musher, and Canadian ranger who speaks only Inukitut—also traveled with the team to help point out changes.

Ikummaq, for example, showed how shifting winds were changing the shape of ice formations used as landmarks by generations, making reading the terrain more difficult.

The Poles have been two of the regions most affected by climate change. Temperatures there have risen at twice the rate of the rest of the world, and some scientists estimate that large areas of the Arctic will be completely ice-free by the end of the century.

Antarctica and the Arctic are currently the focus on an intense 24-month research program known as International Polar Year. (Related: "Ice Shelf Collapses Reveal New Species, Ecosystem Changes" [February 27, 2007].

Warm Homecoming

The journey was not an easy one. When the expedition set off during the dark days of late February, wind chills often dropped to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 46 degrees Celsius).

The route led the team across ice caps, frozen rivers, thawing ice, and frigid fjords from Iqualuit to Pangnirtung and Qikirtarjueq (formerly Broughton Island), then along the Clyde River to Iglulik.

U.S. experts John Stetson, Abby Fenton, and Elizabeth Andre helped steer the team. They were joined by mountaineer Ed Viesturs and Sam Branson, the 22-year-old son of British tycoon and adventurer Sir Richard Branson, during the run from Clyde River.

Even the final two weeks, with the weather warming into the teens, proved treacherous.

While sea ice near the edge of land softened, opening up tracts of clear, flat ice for the dogs to sprint over, misadventures included a polar bear strolling into camp and sleds dropping through soft ice into the sea, soaking sleeping bags and parkas.

Still, the open ice allowed the team to quickly cover their last 400 miles (640 kilometers)—including a crossing of the Barnes Ice Cap, a remnant of the Ice Age that is receding like the rest of the ice in the north.

Iglulik turned out all the stops for the returning adventurers. Greeting them upon their arrival at the frozen edge of the ice was the town's entire population of 1,600, along with fire trucks, lights aswirl, and, "kind of jarringly, air raid sirens," Steger said by satellite phone.

The Inuit guides were especially glad to return to their home of Iglulik ("home to the igloo people"), which has been populated for 4,000 years and has long served as the cultural center of Nunavut.

Some familiar faces were present at the homecoming: Richard Branson, who earlier had traveled with the team for a week, and his wife, Joan; Alaska-born singer-songwriter Jewel; former supermodel Cheryl Tiegs; and a feature film crew. (Read an interview with Branson and alpinist Ed Viesturs in National Geographic Adventure magazine.)

(That night Inuit guide Qamanirq almost upstaged Jewel, borrowing the singer's guitar to entertain a community center filled with a hometown crowd.)

So what did the veteran Steger, who has traveled in the high Arctic for 40 years, learn from his Inuit travel partners?

"A lot. About weather and ice and running dogs. And that even as things are changing here, and changing fast, the Inuit are changing too," he said. "Theo, Simon, and Lukie and their experience were quite inspirational to me."

Steger is now headed back home to Minnesota, where for the next six months he'll return to the road to talk about alternative energy, raise awareness of biofuels, and recount his experiences about global warming from the front lines.

"It feels like a really good time to be coming back from the wilderness," Steger said. "There seems to be a lot going on back home on the global warming front, in a good way."

(Jon Bowermaster accompanied the expedition team during part of their journey for an upcoming article to appear in National Geographic Adventure magazine.)

The Source

Antarctic region size of California melted in 2005

Its really quite a shocking discovery.

May 16, 2007—New images from space show that giant, snow-covered swaths of Antarctica melted in January 2005.

The melt, shown here in yellow and red, affected a combined region the size of California and amounts to the most significant Antarctic thaw seen from space in 30 years.

Using the QuikScat weather satellite, a team of scientists from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Colorado at Boulder detected the melt while mapping snowfall patterns from 1999 to 2005.

Data from the satellite revealed that vast fields of snow had thawed and refrozen during the Southern Hemisphere's summer of '05, when temperatures reached highs of 41 degrees Fahrenheit (5 degrees Celsius).

While melting has been observed on the Antarctic Peninsula (center left), the newly discovered thaws took place farther inland and at higher elevations, where melting was not expected.

"Antarctica has shown little to no warming in the recent past with the exception of the Antarctic Peninsula, but now large regions are showing the first signs of the impacts of warming as interpreted by this satellite analysis," said Konrad Steffen, director of Boulder's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, in a statement.

The warm spell did not last long enough for the meltwater to flow into the ocean, the researchers noted.

But a longer melt of such severity could create enough water to seep beneath Antarctic ice sheets and send them sliding into the sea, they added.

"Increases in snowmelt such as this in 2005 definitely could have an impact on larger scale melting of Antarctica's ice sheets if they were severe or sustained over time," Steffen said.

Source: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/05/070516-antarctica.html

Xtreme Waste recycling

In this totally rad town of Raglan, New Zealand, the community is trying to make ZERO waste..and its actually not so far fetched and very much possible. Perhaps other towns should do the same too, but ZERO waster will be close to impossible in big cities.

Be an Eco-Hero - Pledge to Make the Switch!How much global warming pollution can you save by swapping out one regular bulb? You'll be astounded. Help us reach our goal of switching 1 million regular bulbs to compact fluorescents. Make the pledge today.

You can make the pledge here:

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagid=483&campaign=mts&source=actioncenter

a flouresecent light bulb only costs a few dollars more than the regular one..& in the long term, you'll save even more on your energy bills! make the pledge & go to your hardware store or home depot, ikea or where ever it is that you buy things like this. This small change can make a hugeeee impact.

Hurricane season starts...3 weeks early!

The first storm of the year Andrea has arrived;only, its 3 weeks early. Normally, the storm season starts on the 1st of June. That's bad news for forstfires in Florida. News reports on CNN say that the storm is going to make it more diffcult for firefighters in Florida to sustain fires becuase the once they sustain a fire, the wind is going blow it a mile away and start another fire! Florida is really having it bad this year with the long drought, the endless forestfires all over Florida and I think it was just yesterday that there was a huge fire in the forest close to the Zoo in LA. That's really awful and the forest fires which are caused by the droughts are all a factor of climate change as we know it. I'm just nervous about this year, and how hurricanes this year will turn out to be especially since it's only getting warmer & warmer & that means even more intensity in hurricanes :O!