--> What if it's an "organic" product that's been flown half-way around the world, burning up fossil fuels that contribute to global warming? How do you decide what's better: A conventional apple grown locally with chemical pesticides, or an organic apple from another continent?
This is a common conundrum among consumers: How do you decide which grocery products are best for not just your own personal health, but also the health of the planet? It's a more complex decision than it might first seem. |
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 People in the know are, of course, pointing to the obvious: global warming. When you mess with the climate, the storms start becoming more severe and unpredictable. Before long, food production falls and you end up with skyrocketing prices at the grocery store. And while some areas are inundated with rain, others suffer severe droughts (like Australia right now). |
 This has even given rise to an idea to fight global warming that its originator calls the Geritol Solution. The notion is basically this—dumping billions of tons of iron solution into the ocean will stimulate massive plant growth that will suck enough carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere to counter the effects of all the C02 humans are releasing into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels. A test of the theory in 1995 transformed a patch of ocean near the Galapagos Islands from sparkling blue to murky green overnight, as the iron triggered the growth of massive amounts of phytoplankton. |
 The cause of asthma's continued rise over the years has researchers scratching their heads and looking at a wide spectrum of possible causes, including pollution, global warming, food additives, genetics, toxins, and allergens. Recently it has been discovered that large increases in the number of asthma sufferers in the American Southwest, the Caribbean, and Central American regions seem to have been brought on by drought-caused sub-Saharan dust and mold spores being swept across the Atlantic by prevailing winds—winds that have recently changed due to the effects of global warming. |
 The gases it sends into the atmosphere are the second most significant contributor to global warming after the United States.
"China is undergoing a wholesale reassessment of its environmental policies," Tseming Yang, a professor at Vermont Law School, told me shortly after returning from a spring semester in 2006 teaching environmental law at Beijing University. Yang has been traveling to China regularly to help with educating a new generation in the legal principles of environmental protection. |
| Rather, Europe is looking at the future—at the rising costs to public-health of chemical exposure; of the costs to society of waste disposal; of the ecological and political implications of addiction to oil; and of the potent impacts of excessive energy consumption, which it has led the world in fighting as a way to head off the massive ecological disruption and expense it fears will result from global warming. This is not Utopian; it's more like realpolitik for the twenty-first century. |
| Three weeks after Energy Secretary Bodman implored individual Chinese to reduce their energy use—and was uncertain as to whether Americans would do the same —the European Union's top diplomat, External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, announced at a summit with Chinese foreign minister Li Zhaoxing in Beijing, that the fight against global warming would henceforth be a "centerpiece" of EU foreign policy. |
 Take, for example, the fight over global warming. Its tactical popularity is not surprising, given its rich legal heritage and long track record of success, going back to at least the seventeenth century. |
 Ominously, the study concludes that with one degree of further global warming, more permafrost degradation in the Alps is unavoidable. 'Widespread rockfall and geotechnical problems with human infrastructure are likely to be recurrent consequences of warming permafrost in rock walls due to predicted climatic changes,' Haeberli and his colleagues warn. 'The extreme summer of 2003 and its impact on mountain permafrost may be seen as a first manifestation of these projections. |
| Once that threshold is crossed permanently, as it looks set to be as global warming accelerates, the entire Amazon ecosystem will collapse - with devastating and world-changing consequences. There is only an outside chance that this collapse will come in a world which is one degree warmer, but as temperatures move closer to three degrees above current levels - perhaps as early as 2050 if carbon dioxide emissions are not controlled - then this devastating conflagration will be all but certain. |
| Each burn pours huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, aggravating global warming. In 1998 a strong El Nino helped generate severe droughts in Amazonia and East Asia, leading to gigantic forest fires which blanketed whole continents in smog. In the Amazon basin alone, 400 million tonnes of carbon were released, equivalent to 5 per cent of human emissions from fossil fuel burning for that whole year.
Surprisingly, the Amazon forest ecosystem turns out to have been remarkably resilient to past climate changes. |
| Although these figures are based on global warming rates of higher than one degree by 2100, they do indicate the likely direction of change. As the land surface heats up, it dries out because of faster evaporation. Vegetation shrivels, and when heavy rainfall does arrive, it simply washes away what remains of the topsoil. It may seem strange that floods and droughts can be forecast to affect the same areas, but with a higher proportion of rainfall coming in heavier bursts, longer dry spells will affect the land in between. |
| So with one degree of global warming, this monsoon could begin to gain power and penetrate once again far into the African continent, greening the Sahara.
But will it actually happen? Before anyone makes plans to move large-scale food production to the central Sahara, a note of caution needs to be sounded. During the early Holocene, an additional monsoon driver was the difference in the distribution of solar heat between the two hemispheres. This time the whole globe is heating up, so the past is not a perfect analogue for the future. |
 There are plenty of other things to worry about as the newspaper reminds me: terrorism, war, global warming and murders in nearby Oakland. All true.
But I also can't help wondering about the two benign lumps in my body that required surgical removal and my four-year struggle with infertility in my 20s. I asked my doctor — a brilliantly talented surgeon who has removed the thyroids of thousands of young women in the Massachusetts area — why I developed a lump on my thyroid (the size of a lemon, it turned out) and why so many other young women are getting them too. |
| That philosophy is called uniformitarianism and, as the physicist Spencer Weart points out in his 2003 book The Discovery of global warming, it was the guiding principle among scientists of the time:
Through most of the 20th century, the uniformitarian principle was cherished by geologists as the very foundation of their science. In human experience, temperatures apparently did not rise or fall radically in less than millennia, so the uniformitarian principle declared that such changes had never happened in the past. |
 More CounterThink cartoons on health, environment and more
You've already seen a few dozen CounterThink cartoon published on NewsTarget, but throughout 2007, we're rolling out a steady stream of smart, hilarious cartoons on topics that really deserve some hard-hitting satirical humor: the FDA, global warming, drug companies, car companies, TV advertising, nutrition in schools and much more. And hopefully, you'll soon be able to vote on each comic so that we can determine what you like best. (Feature coming soon... |
 From the "debate" over global warming to the "debate" over the theory of evolution to the "debate" over occupational causes of cancer, his legacy of selling doubt and using science to undermine any proof of harm is all around us.
Little, who once had impeccable scientific credentials as a leading genetics researcher, proved invaluable to this strategy. The former managing director of the American Society for Cancer Control and the first head of the U.S. National Cancer Institute became the founding mastermind of the Tobacco Industry Research Council (TIRC). |
| What did nicotine withdrawal have to do with the NAS—an institution that most American presidents routinely tap for advice on nuclear weapons and global warming? The motto written on the gold-leafed dome of the academy's Great Hall is an ode to the powers of science: "To science, pilot of industry, conqueror of disease, multiplier of the harvest, explorer of the universe, revealer of nature's laws, eternal guide to truth. |
 Beyond the immediate effects on crop yields, global warming scenarios that project anywhere from a i°C to a 5°C temperature rise over the next century carry a far greater risk.
The world's three great regions of loess soils—the American Midwest, northern Europe, and northern China—produce most of the world's grain. The asrounding productivity of modern agriculture depends on the climate of these extensive areas of ideal agriculrural soils remaining favorable to crop production. The Canadian and American prairie is already marginal as agricultural land in its western extent. |
| Because we are already farming about as much of the planet as can be done sustainably, the potential for global warming to affect agricultural systems is alarming. The direcr effecrs of rising temperatures are worrisome enough. A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that an average daily increase in the growing season's minimum temperature of just i°C results in a 10 percent reduction in rice yields; similar projections hold for whear and barley. |
| No-till agticulture has another advantage; it could provide one of the few relarively rapid responses to help hold off global warming. When soil is plowed and exposed to the air, oxidation of organic matter releases carbon dioxide gas. No-till agriculture has the potential to increase the organic matter content of the top few inches of soil by about i percent a decade. This may sound like a small number, but over twenty to thirty yeats that can add up to 10 tons of carbon per acre. As agriculture mechanized over the past century and a half, U.S. |
 On top of that, it produces a whopping 10,150 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions which directly promote global warming and climate change. Mercury is also released into the atmosphere from all the energy usage, thanks to the fact that much of the electricity consumed in the world comes from coal-fired power plants that emit toxic mercury into the air.
So the Total Cost of Ownership for a 100-watt light bulb is well over $500 for producing 50,000 hours of light.
In contrast, what is the Total Cost of Ownership for our 10-watt EcoLEDs light bulb? The LED light itself costs about $100 up front. |
| We saw this in tobacco, and we've seen it in polluting industries and global warming. There are lots of people out there who'd rather have you not know what's really going on."8
The chemical industry, for instance: two notorious examples of "lying to us for years" are documented in the 2002 book Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution, by historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner.9 The book is based on internal industry documents, including company memos and minutes from trade association meetings. |
 Getting rid of meat in their diet is the single most powerful thing consumers can do right now to protect the planet against global warming and climate change."
For those consumers who still choose to purchase meat, Adams urges them to check the ingredients labels for "sodium nitrite" -- the chemical additive that many researchers believe to be responsible for much of the increased cancer risk of processed meat products. "Eating sodium nitrite is quite simply dangerous to your health," Adams said. |
 Being integrative means that a doctor should see the patient in a broader scope—as a person with a medical problem living in a community that produces both stress and pleasure, as a person living in an environment that could be pleasant or horrible, and as a person living in a world filled with challenges ranging from terrorism to global warming. Most of us don't think about these global problems every minute of every day, yet we hear about them every time we turn on the evening news or pick up a newspaper. |
 In fact, this single effort of his could be far more influential than all the efforts to censor science and deny global warming that are being fronted by the current administration.
I also admire Al Gore's presentation in "An Inconvenient Truth." It spells out what's happening with an array of animated illustrations that make a very convincing and scientifically sound argument about the imminent threat of global warming. |
| Indeed, an amphibian - the Costa Rican golden toad - is often cited as the first known case of a global warming extinction.
Once the 'jewel in the crown' of Costa Rica's Monteverde Cloud Forest (to paraphrase the scientist and author Tim Flannery), this Day-Glo orange amphibian was observed in its hundreds back in 1987, gathered around pools in the forest in preparation for mating. But there were already signs of danger: the amphibian expert Marty Crump, who witnessed this last golden toad mating frenzy, also watched the resulting eggs get left behind as the forest pools dried. |
 Others argue for the impact of global warming and hotter weather on growing rates of infectious diseases. In Al Gore's 2006 movie An Inconvenient Truth, a disturbing chart cites rising rates of illnesses, among them SARS, malaria, Ebola virus, and avian flu. The documentary's accompanying Web site states that with continued warming, deaths from climate-related illness are expected to rise sharply over the next two decades, according to projections by the World Health Organization. |
 If this becomes law, all free speech about health freedom, the crimes of the FDA, the crimes of the Bush Administration, America's role in global warming and any other topics could all be criminalized. YOU could be labeled a terrorist, kidnapped by government thugs, taken from your home, thrown in a secret prison, denied access to legal representation, denied due process and essentially "disappeared" into a system of such corruption and evil that it now begins to blatantly mirror Nazi Germany.
Think it couldn't happen here? It's happening right now! |
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