Letter-to-Pres-Obama-from-EJ-Representatives-02-09-2013

Environmental Justice http://courses.dce.harvard.edu/~envre145
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Chiapas and NAFTA Documentary Film

thefilmarchives

Published on Aug 9, 2012

The preparations for NAFTA included cancellation of Article 27 of Mexico’s constitution, the cornerstone of Emiliano Zapata’s revolution of 1910–1919. Under the historic Article 27, Indian communal landholdings were protected from sale or privatization. But under NAFTA this guarantee was defined as a barrier to investment. With the removal of Article 27, Indian farmers would be threatened with loss of their remaining lands, and also flooded with cheap imports (substitutes) from the US. Thus, the Zapatistas labeled NAFTA as a “death sentence” to Indian communities all over Mexico. Then EZLN declared war on the Mexican state on January 1, 1994, the day NAFTA came into force.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_Free_Trade_Agreement

Chiapas (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈtʃjapas]), officially Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas (Spanish: Estado Libre y Soberano de Chiapas), is one of the 31 states that, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into 118 municipalities and its capital city is Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Other important cites in Chiapas include San Cristóbal de las Casas, Comitán, and Tapachula. Located in Southwestern Mexico, it is the southernmost State of Mexico. It is bordered by the states of Tabasco to the north, Veracruz to the northwest and Oaxaca to the west. To the east Chiapas borders Guatemala, and to the south the Pacific Ocean.

In general, Chiapas has a humid, tropical climate. In the north, in the area bordering Tabasco, near Teapa, rainfall can average more than 3,000 mm (120 in) per year. In the past, natural vegetation at this region was lowland, tall perennial rainforest, but this vegetation has been destroyed almost completely to give way to agriculture and ranching. Rainfall decreases moving towards the Pacific Ocean, but it is still abundant enough to allow the farming of bananas and many other tropical crops near Tapachula. On the several parallel “sierras” or mountain ranges running along the center of Chiapas, climate can be quite temperate and foggy, allowing the development of cloud forests like those of the Reserva de la Biosfera el Triunfo, home to a handful of Resplendent Quetzals and Horned Guans.

Chiapas is home to the ancient Mayan ruins of Palenque, Yaxchilán, Bonampak, and Chinkultic. It is also home to one of the largest indigenous populations in the country with twelve federally recognized ethnicities. Much of the state’s history is centered on the subjugation of these peoples with occasional rebellions. The last of these rebellions was the 1994 Zapatista uprising, which succeeded in obtaining new rights for indigenous people but also divided much of the indigenous peoples of the state.

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Global Warming or a New Ice Age: Documentary Film

thefilmarchives

Published on Jun 22, 2012

Global cooling was a conjecture during the 1970s of imminent cooling of the Earth’s surface and atmosphere along with a posited commencement of glaciation. This hypothesis had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of a slight downward trend of temperatures from the 1940s to the early 1970s and press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding of ice age cycles. In contrast to the global cooling conjecture, the current scientific opinion on climate change is that the Earth has not durably cooled, but undergone global warming throughout the twentieth century.

Concerns about nuclear winter arose in the early 1980s from several reports. Similar speculations have appeared over effects due to catastrophes such as asteroid impacts and massive volcanic eruptions. A prediction that massive oil well fires in Kuwait would cause significant effects on climate was quite incorrect.

The idea of a global cooling as the result of global warming was already proposed in the 1990s. In 2003, the Office of Net Assessment at the United States Department of Defense was commissioned to produce a study on the likely and potential effects of a modern climate change, especially of a shutdown of thermohaline circulation. The study, conducted under ONA head Andrew Marshall, modelled its prospective climate change on the 8.2 kiloyear event, precisely because it was the middle alternative between the Younger Dryas and the Little Ice Age. The study caused controversy in the media when it was made public in 2004. However, scientists acknowledge that “abrupt climate change initiated by Greenland ice sheet melting is not a realistic scenario for the 21st century”.

Currently, the concern that cooler temperatures would continue, and perhaps at a faster rate, has been observed to be incorrect by the IPCC. More has to be learned about climate, but the growing records have shown that the cooling concerns of 1975 have not been borne out.

As for the prospects of the end of the current interglacial (again, valid only in the absence of human perturbations): it isn’t true that interglacials have previously only lasted about 10,000 years; and Milankovitch-type calculations indicate that the present interglacial would probably continue for tens of thousands of years naturally. Other estimates (Loutre and Berger, based on orbital calculations) put the unperturbed length of the present interglacial at 50,000 years. Berger (EGU 2005 presentation) believes that the present CO2 perturbation will last long enough to suppress the next glacial cycle entirely.

As the NAS report indicates, scientific knowledge regarding climate change was more uncertain than it is today. At the time that Rasool and Schneider wrote their 1971 paper, climatologists had not yet recognized the significance of greenhouse gases other than water vapor and carbon dioxide, such as methane, nitrous oxide, and chlorofluorocarbons. Early in that decade, carbon dioxide was the only widely studied human-influenced greenhouse gas. The attention drawn to atmospheric gases in the 1970s stimulated many discoveries in future decades. As the temperature pattern changed, global cooling was of waning interest by 1979.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_cooling

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Snowball Earth (BBC Horizon Documentary)

BBCHORlZON

Published on Jan 11, 2013

Snowball Earth describes a theory that for millions of years the Earth was entirely smothered in ice, stretching from the poles to the tropics. This freezing happened over 650 million years ago in the Pre-Cambrian, though it’s now thought that there may have been more than one of these global glaciations. They varied in duration and extent but during a full-on snowball event, life could only cling on in ice-free refuges, or where sunlight managed to penetrate through the ice to allow photosynthesis.

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Dr Emily Shuckburgh, British Antarctic Survey, on future climate change

!
CambridgeJBS

Uploaded on Dec 16, 2011

Dr Emily Shuckburgh spoke at the 3rd Annual Meeting of the Centre for Risk Studies in December 2011 on the subject of future-proof decisions and recommendations.

Dr Shuckburgh leads the Open Oceans research group at the British Antarctic Survey, which is focused on understanding the role of the polar oceans in the global climate system. She is also a fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge. She is a climate scientist who has worked at Ecole Normal Superieure in Paris and at MIT, as well as at the University of Cambridge.

The Centre for Risk Studies is part of the University of Cambridge Judge Business School.

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Increased Humidity From Climate Change Could Make It Harder To Tolerate Summers : NPR

http://www.npr.org/2013/02/25/172905430/increased-humidity-from-climate-change-could-make-it-harder-to-tolerate-summers

by Richard Harris

February 25, 2013 3:00 PM

Audio for this story from All Things Considered will be available at approximately 7:00 p.m. ET.

It’s not just the heat — it’s the humidity. Health experts actually apply that principle to workers, soldiers and sportsmen who toil outside and in places that lack air conditioning. A study in Nature Climate Change says that global warming will noticeably reduce the amount of time people can spend working and playing safely outside.

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Fall of Ancient Empire Linked to Crisis in Syria: Scientific American

February 22, 2013

Archaeologists are drawing comparisons between the fall of the Akkadian empire more than 4,000 years ago and the crises in contemporary Syria

By Moheb Costandi and Nature magazine

Image: MACMILLAN SOUTH AFRICA

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305440312005213
http://www.sciencedirect.com.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/science/article/pii/S0305440312005213

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=fall-of-ancient-empire-linked-to-crisis-in-syria

The current crisis in Syria parallels events that preceded the fall of the Akkadian empire in Mesopotamia more than 4,000 years ago, according to research published recently in the Journal of Archaeological Science.

The Akkadian empire flourished in the third millennium BC. Sometime around 2,200 BC drought hit, the lands dried and people migrated from urban centers. The government then collapsed, and the mighty empire began to falter in a series of calamities collectively referred to as the third-millennium Mesopotamian urban crisis.

Until now, our understanding of the Mesopotamian urban crisis had been based on archaeological studies of ceramic artifacts and changes in the size of archaeological sites along with what we know about farming practices popular at the time.

But archaeologist Ellery Frahm of the University of Sheffield in the UK and his colleagues used geochemical techniques and rock magnetic analyses to examine trade and the social networks associated with it instead.

The researchers used electron microscopy and chemical analyses to examine 97 obsidian tools excavated earlier from a site called Tell Mozan, dating from the early Akkadian empire to several centuries after its demise. Located in the foothills of the Taurus Mountains in northeastern Syria, the site was known as Urkesh in antiquity, and was densely populated at the height of the Akkadian empire.

The tools dating to before 2,200 BC were made of obsidian rock originally quarried from six sites in Eastern Anatolian. This variety suggests that Urkesh was a cosmopolitan city with complex, long distance exchange networks that linked it with civilizations in the Aegean and middle Euphrates.

The tools dated to after 2,200BC, however, came from only two local sources, suggesting that the late third millennium collapse disrupted these trade links.

“Urkesh might have specialized its economy in response to demand for certain commodities, such as metals from the nearby mountains,” says Frahm. “With climate shifts and the end of the empire, the inhabitants might have had to refocus their economy on local production and consumption, covering their own needs rather than engaging in specialized long-distance trade.”

Some parallels can be drawn to the situation in Syria today. “Some archaeologists contend that the Akkadian Empire was brought down by militarism and that violence ended its central economic role in the region, and a governmental collapse is a real possibility in Syria after nearly two years of fighting,” Frahm adds.

Furthermore, contemporary farming in northeastern Syria relies heavily on rainfall, just as farmers did in the Akkadian empire, and climate change is already taking its toll with several severe droughts.

“Those of us who study people and the past are in a unique position to consider what could happen after the immediate crisis ends,” says Frahm. “What happens to cities when a state falls? How do the residents sustain themselves if that infrastructure collapses? This is the type of contribution that archaeology can make towards improving the future.”

This article is reproduced with permission from Nature Middle East. The article was first published on February 18, 2013.

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One-Minute Speech by Rep. Henry Waxman, Safe Climate Caucus (February 25, 2013)

EnergyCommerce

Published on Feb 25, 2013

Rep. Henry Waxman spoke on the House Floor on February 25, 2013, on behalf of the Safe Climate Caucus.

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‘US nuclear power plants very vulnerable to cyber attacks’

RussiaToday

Published on Feb 25, 2013

The competition between the U.S. and China has gone digital – and the Western superpower isn’t feeling confident. Key intelligence figures think America is already losing a major cyber war, after accusing Beijing of hacking into Washington’s security. RT discusses this with former Pentagon offficial Michael Maloof.

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Book TV: Aaronson, “The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism”

BookTV

Published on Feb 25, 2013

Trevor Aaronson says that since 9/11, the FBI has built up a network of over 15,000 informants in Muslim communities around the U.S. He argues that these informants spearhead phony terror plots which are then exposed by the FBI with great fanfare to make it look like the bureau is doing a good job of keeping us safe. During this event, Mr. Aaronson is in conversation with Monika Bauerlein, co-editor of Mother Jones magazine.

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