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THE WITNESS
Kevin Grandia is a Director at Greenpeace USA and has been writing on climate change and other pressing environmental issues for more than six years. 
Scientists are saying that with the climate disruption they are seeing we can expect a lot more extreme weather events - droughts, wildfires, extreme heat and strange storm patterns with names like “derecho” are the future.
So it’s important to know how best to help our four-legged family members fare these extreme weather events. Here’s 10 things to know about pets and extreme weather that I have compiled from various sources:
Christopher Monckton, well known for his wacky behavior attempting to deny the scientific realities of climate change, has now moved on to look into the conspiracy theory around whether US president Barack Obama was actually born in the United States!
Monckton, decked out in an American flag shirt, fire arm on his hip and a cowboy hat, tells the interviewer that:
My purpose in being here [in Arizona] is to have a further look into whether the president of the United States is the president of the United States. Now you might say, what has this got to do with someone from Britain… I am here because I am curious. As a peer of the realm I am allowed to stick my long aristocratic nose into anything I want to stick it in.
Seriously, you can’t make this stuff up. Here is the video:
You can read more on the history of Monckton here on DeSmogBlog’s Disinformation Database.
Monckton recently spoke at the Heartland Institute’s climate denier conference. As part of that conference, an outrageous ad campaign ran by Heartland just prior to the conference equated anyone who believed in climate change to Osama Bin Laden, the Unabomber and the mass-murderer Charles Manson.
Nucor, one of the largest steel producers in the US, funds the Heartland Institute and we are calling Nucor’s CEO to end funding to the Heartland Institute.
Cross-posted with permission from The Guardian
Suzanne Goldenberg, The Guardian
The first Heartland Institute conference on climate change in 2008 had all the trappings of a major scientific conclave — minus large numbers of real scientists. Hundreds of climate change contrarians, with a few academics among them, descended into the banquet rooms of a lavish Times Square hotel for what was purported to be a reasoned debate about climate change.
But as the latest Heartland climate conference opens in a Chicago hotel on Monday, the thinktank’s claims to reasoned debate lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain.
The first Heartland Institute conference on climate change in 2008 had all the trappings of a major scientific conclave – minus large numbers of real scientists. Hundreds of climate change contrarians, with a few academics among them, descended into the banquet rooms of a lavish Times Square hotel for what was purported to be a reasoned debate about climate change.
But as the latest Heartland climate conference opens in a Chicago hotel on Monday, the thinktank’s claims to reasoned debate lie in shreds and its financial future remains uncertain.
By: Jon Burgwald, Greenpeace Nordic Arctic campaigner
It’s late in the evening, but the sun has not yet settled here in Usinsk in the northernmost part of Russia where my Russian colleague and I arrived in a storming blizzard a few days ago.
Located just at the border of the Arctic, Usinsk is the oil capital of Russia’s Komi Republic and even though the city has a meagre size, the oil industry’s influence is unfortunately far from meagre.
Usinsk is located close to a basin of rivers, which were once full of life. But this was before oil was discovered back in the 1970s and today the picture is completely different. The area has turned into a dystopia, where smoke from burning oil and gas flares paint the horizon.
Flaring — besides emitting massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere — is releasing a wide range of toxins into the environment and is known to cause cancer. The Russian government promised back in 2007 that it would stop the use of gas flaring (at the time Russia was responsible for more than 25 percent of all flaring in the world).
The New York Times today called on EPA administrator Lisa Jackson to use her authority under the Clean Air Act to require dangerous chemical facilities to use safer processes, instead of storing large quantities of poison gases.
They write:
“More than a decade after 9/11, thousands of facilities that produce, store or use highly toxic chemicals remain vulnerable to a terrorist attack or accident that could kill or injure hundreds of thousands of people living downwind of an explosion. A Congressional Research Service report identifies 483 facilities in 43 states where a chemical disaster would put 100,000 or more people at risk.”
Writing on the highly influential tech site ZDNET, the award winning business writer Heather Clancy highlights the work Greenpeace has been doing over the years to improve energy-efficiency in the IT sector. Continue reading
Big tech companies Amazon, Microsoft and Apple are hearing our members loud and clear – in the last 2 days over 76,000 people have sent a message asking them to walk away from coal power and adopt clean energy to power their massive data centers.
And we are just getting warmed up. A lot more to come so stay tuned.
Take a minute and send your own message to Apple, Microsoft and Amazon.
In response to the Greenpeace How Clean is Your Cloud report released yesterday, Urs Hoelzle Google’s Senior Vice President for Technical Infrastructure in a statement published in the New York Times said that:
“The company welcomed the Greenpeace report and believed that it would intensify the industry’s focus on renewable energy.” Continue reading
We are seeing big global media buzz today around the launch of our campaign urging tech giants Apple, Microsoft and Amazon to clean up our data clouds. If you want in depth information on the campaign you can go here: Tell Apple, Amazon and Microsoft you want a cleaner cloud.
Here’s a good sample of the first day of media if you’re interested in learning more about the issue:
NY Times: Online Cloud Services Rely on Coal or Nuclear Power, Report Says Continue reading
