Planetary Ruin

The Sydney Opera House’s gleaming white-shelled roof was darkened Saturday night along with much of the rest of Australia’s largest city, which switched off the lights to register concern about global warming.

The arch of Sydney’s other iconic structure, the harbor bridge, was also blacked out, along with dozens of skyscrapers and countless homes in the 4 million-strong city, in an hour-long gesture organizers said they hoped would be adopted as an annual event by cities around the world.

Mayor Clover Moore, whose officials shut down all nonessential lights on city-owned buildings, said Sydney was “asking people to think about what action they can take to fight global warming.”

Restaurants throughout the city held candlelit dinners, and families gathered in public places to take part in a countdown to lights out, sending up a cheer as lights started blinking off at 7:30 p.m.
 
Buildings went dark one by one. Some floors in city skyscrapers remained lit, and security and street lights, those at commercial port operations and at a sports stadium, stayed on.

“It’s an hour of active, thoughtful darkness, a celebration of our awakening to climate change action,” said Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett, who attended a harborside function to watch the event.

While downtown was significantly darker than normal, the overall effect, as seen in television footage from overhead helicopters, was that the city’s patchwork of millions of tiny lights had thinned, not disappeared.

“We were expecting a big difference straight away, but it was just a little bit,” said Sonja Schollen, who took sons Harry and James to a park to watch the skyline, joining dozens of other families. Children waved glo-sticks and sparklers while parents picnicked and sipped wine.

“It was quite sweet, actually, because the kids started chanting ‘turn them out, turn them out.’ You can see now the city’s a bit dimmer,” she said toward the end of the hour.
 
Organizers hope Saturday’s event - which about 2,000 businesses and more than 60,000 individuals signed up for online - will get people to think about regularly switching off nonessential lights, powering down computers and other simple measures they say could cut Sydney’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent this year.

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His serious aviation habit means he is hardly the best person to lecture others on the environment. But John Travolta went ahead and did it anyway.

The 53-year-old actor, a passionate pilot, encouraged his fans to “do their bit” to tackle global warming.

But although he readily admitted: “I fly jets”, he failed to mention he actually owns five, along with his own private runway.

Clocking up at least 30,000 flying miles in the past 12 months means he has produced an estimated 800 tons of carbon emissions – nearly 100 times the average Briton’s tally.

Travolta made his comments this week at the British premiere of his movie, Wild Hogs.

He spoke of the importance of helping the environment by using “alternative methods of fuel” – after driving down the red carpet on a Harley Davidson.

Travolta, a Scientologist, claimed the solution to global warming could be found in outer space and blamed his hefty flying mileage on the nature of the movie business.

But his appointment as a “serving ambassador” for the Australian airline Qantas doesn’t seem to have much to do with the movies. Nor does a recent, two-month round-the-world flying trip.

“It [global warming] is a very valid issue,” Travolta declared. “I’m wondering if we need to think about other planets and dome cities.

“Everyone can do their bit. But I don’t know if it’s not too late already. We have to think about alternative methods of fuel.

“I’m probably not the best candidate to ask about global warming because I fly jets.

“I use them as a business tool though, as others do. I think it’s part of this industry – otherwise I couldn’t be here doing this and I wouldn’t be here now.”

Travolta’s five private planes – a customised £2million Boeing 707, three Gulfstream jets and a Lear jet – are kept at the bottom of his garden in the US next to a private runway.

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The place where most of the world’s people could first begin to feel the consequences of global warming may come as a surprise: in the stomach, via the supper plate.    That’s the view of a small but influential group of agricultural experts who are increasingly worried that global warming will trigger food shortages long before it causes better known but more distant threats, such as rising sea levels that flood coastal cities.

    The scale of agriculture’s vulnerability to global warming was highlighted late last year when the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), an umbrella organization representing 15 of the world’s top crop research centres, issued an astounding estimate of the impact of climate change on a single crop, wheat, in one of the world’s major breadbaskets.

    Researchers using computer models to simulate the weather patterns likely to exist around 2050 found that the best wheat-growing land in the wide arc of fertile farmland stretching from Pakistan through Northern India and Nepal to Bangladesh would be decimated. Much of the area would become too hot and dry for the crop, placing the food supply of 200 million people at risk.

[Complete Story] 

A deadly species of jellyfish, translucent and the size of a thumbnail, is spreading along Australia’s coastline as a result of global warming, scientists warned today.

Irukandji jellyfish are among the world’s most toxic creatures – all but impossible to detect in the water but packing a potentially lethal punch belying their tiny size.

Until recently it was thought that they were confined to Australia’s northern tropical waters, but marine biologists have now found them off Queensland’s Fraser Island — a popular tourist spot about 400 miles south of their previously assumed range.

Their discovery has halted production of a Hollywood film, Fool’s Gold, starring Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey, who were originally due to be filmed swimming in the sea. Dr Jamie Seymour, from James Cook University, said she had found five of the animals off the island.

“You can’t now say the waters around Fraser Island are jellyfish safe. I mean, these animals have the potential to kill you,” he told ABC radio.

“The ones we were catching weren’t any bigger than your thumbnail. They’ve got tentacles that are probably a half to three quarters of a metre long, and pretty much transparent. So unless you really know what you’re looking for, you’re not going to see them in the water.”

If they migrate south in sufficient numbers, irukandji would threaten the safety of swimmers, surfers and snorkellers along southern Queensland’s Gold Coast and Sunshine Coast holiday destinations.

Little is known about their biology but their toxicity is legendary. One of the tiny jellyfish was blamed for killing a 58-year-old British tourist, Richard Jordan, in the Whitsunday Islands of Queensland in 2002. A few months later, a 44-year-old American tourist was stung and also died.

Increased sea temperatures caused by global warming would extend the species’ range south, Dr Seymour said. But the tourism industry said it would be alarmist and premature to warn tourists of the new threat to their safety.

“We don’t want a perception to spread that every Sunshine Coast beach is a killing field,” said Daniel Gschwind, the head of the Queensland Tourism Industry Council.

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Fresh from his face-to-face tussle with former Vice President Al Gore, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) is vowing to stall Gore’s hotly anticipated Capitol concert to draw attention to global warming.

Inhofe’s belief that climate change is “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” is common knowledge in the capitol, and environmental groups cheered the new prospects for carbon-capping legislation when he ceded the Environment and Public Works Committee gavel this session. But Inhofe’s parliamentary powers can block indefinitely the resolution that would permit Gore to choose the capitol’s West Front for the U.S. leg of his seven-continent Live Earth concert tour — a collaboration between Gore and promoter Kevin Wall, who masterminded previous blockbuster charity concerts Live Aid and Live 8.

“There has never been a partisan political event at the Capitol, and this is a partisan political event,” Inhofe said yesterday.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) attempted late last week to pass the authorizing measure for Live Earth by unanimous consent. But Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) raised an objection on the floor, seeking more time for his side to look at the resolution.

Inhofe appeared to see little room for an accommodation that could allow the concert to go forward. “There’s no compromise. Either we change the rules or we don’t.”

Inhofe added that other members share his concerns, including unnamed Democrats as well as Sen. Bob Bennett (R-Utah), ranking member of the Rules Committee, which has jurisdiction over the concert resolution.

Democrats “may not be willing to stand up to Al Gore, but many of them found it just as objectionable as Republicans do,” he said.

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