The Largest Minority

June 27th, 2008 by evmonk

Global Voices, a unique blogging project started by Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, is holding their yearly conference in Budapest for the next two days. Today the conference panels are focused on the censorship and freedom of expression online. Tomorrow there will be a number of panels on citizen media and the use of web2.0 to improve the political process, build community, and bridge the language barrier. The entire even is being streamed and liveblogged, and archived video of every panel is available here. If you’re interested in this stuff, there are some great speakers and discussions. But remember that these are bloggers and technophiles, so their presentations aren’t always the most entertaining.

If you haven’t heard of Global Voices, check them out. They aggregate and review blogs from around the world and then organize the best posts by region and topic, in addition to having a general feed.

March 26th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

Antarctica’s Wilkins Ice Shelf is a 5000 square mile sheet of permanent floating ice off of Antarctica’s southwest peninsula which has been in place for at least a few hundred years. Satellite images are now showing that a large hunk of the shelf is disintegrating as a result of global climate change, which effects temperature on the continent more dramatically than anywhere else on the planet.

“Block after block of ice is just tumbling and crumbling into the ocean,” Ted Scambos, lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre, said.

“The shelf is not just cracking off and a piece goes drifting away, but totally shattering. These kinds of events, we don’t see them very often. But we want to understand them better because these are the things that lead to a complete loss of the ice shelf.”

Mr Scambos said a large part of the ice shelf was now supported by only a thin strip of ice. This last “ice buttress” could collapse and about half the total ice shelf area could be lost in the next few years, he added.

British Antarctic Survey scientist David Vaughan said: “This shelf is hanging by a thread.”

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January 20th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

January 14th, 2008 by Manila Ryce

The Esperanza, a Greenpeace protest vessel, has chased the lead ship in a Japanese whaling fleet out of its Southern Ocean hunting grounds. The Esperanza pursued the Nisshin Maru for 24 hours over hundreds of kilometers before it left the area where the fleet was planning to slaughter 1,000 whales. Humpbacks, which haven’t been hunted in over 40 years, were also on the menu, along with Minke and Fin whales. Greenpeace expects that the Japanese boats will refuel, via the Oriental Bluebird tanker, before returning to the hunt.

Greenpeace Japan campaigner Sakyo Noda said, “We came here to stop the fleet from whaling and we have done that. Now they are out of the hunting grounds they should stay out.” Though whale meat is sold on the Japanese market, Tokyo claims the slaughter is for scientific research. Me thinks the sinking of the Nisshin Maru would also be good for scientific research.

Australia’s Labor government, which opposes the hunt, says it will use the Customs ship Oceanic Viking to gather evidence for a potential international court case against Tokyo. However, the Australian ship is nowhere to be seen. “It’s almost a month since Labor promised that Oceanic Viking would be out on the high seas — weeks and weeks later the ship has still not caught up with the Japanese fleet,” opposition environment spokesman Greg Hunt said. “If you make a bold promise to the world and don’t keep it, it sends a message to the Japanese that we are only kidding, we weren’t serious and we were just playing a domestic game.”

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November 27th, 2006 by Manila Ryce

Not only was Neil Cavuto of Fox News upset over the supposed message of this animated kids movie, but he even found some random right-wing movie critic that agreed with him. Her biggest beef with the film? That a penguin has a plastic ring around its neck. C’mon, that never happens in real life you enviro-nazis! Other objectionable topics were global warming and overfishing. When will Hollywood learn that if a scientific truth becomes politicized then stating that truth is a form of liberal brainwashing? There ought to be a law.

watch the video at Think Progress

October 22nd, 2006 by Manila Ryce

For the first time, scientists have found direct evidence linking global warming to melting ice shelves. British and Belgian scientists, writing in the Journal of Climate, have discovered that global warming and a thinning of the ozone layer over Antarctica, caused by human chemicals, has strengthened winds blowing clockwise around the Antarctic peninsula. This area of Antarctica has averaged about 2.2 Celsius over the past 40 years, but stronger summer winds have risen the temperature to 5.5 and even 10 Celsius in recent years.

These warming winds over the Antarctic peninsula contributed to the break-up of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002. The area of the shelf that collapsed was 3,250 square kilometers, bigger than Luxembourg or Rhode Island, but not too big for the Bush administration to completely ignore. Gareth Marshall, lead author of the study at the British Antarctic Survey said, “This is the first time that anyone has been able to demonstrate a physical process directly linking the break-up of the Larsen Ice Shelf to human activity.� Previous to 2002, the Larsen ice shelf had been in place for 5,000 years.

Luckily, the collapse of Larsen B did not raise world sea levels because the ice was floating. However, if warming trends continue, scientists expect to see an increase in temperature amongst regions further south, breaking up more ice shelves. As floating ice disappears and warm temperatures migrate southward, land-based glaciers will also melt. In fact, Dr Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey, has revealed that two major glaciers in eastern Antarctica are already starting to discharge into the sea.

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