1. SEA LEVEL RISE WILL BE MUCH LESS THAN PREDICTED BY THE IPCC AND SHOULD NOT DEPEND STRONGLY ON DECADAL-SCALE TEMPERATURE CHANGES. The main determinant appears to be the slow melting of Antarctic ice sheets, ongoing since the end of the recent glaciation. This thesis was presented at the 2002 Spring Meeting of the American Geophysical Union and in a colloquium at the University of Rome (La Sapienza) on June 17, 2002. This lower rate of rise, about 18 cm or less in this century, has relevance to the Italian government project to protect Venice from the occasional destructive flooding known as the acqua alta
.http://www.sepp.org/NewSEPP/PuzzleofGlobalSeaLevelRise.htm

2. COLUMNIST BOB HERBERT OF THE NY TIMES NEEDS TO BE EDUCATED ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE. Here are two letters to editor that try to do this.

3. ENDOCRINE DISRUPTORS WERE BIG NEWS A FEW YEARS AGO. NO EVIDENCE YET, BUT THEY KEEP EPIDEMIOLOGISTS BUSY LOOKING FOR EFFECTS

4. CHLORINE COMPOUNDS, ESP. ORGANO-COMPOUNDS LIKE DDT, HAVE BEEN A BUGABOO FOR REGULATORS, PARTICULARLY IN THE EU. RECENT RESEARCH SHOULD DISPEL SOME OF THE FEARS.

5. HUMANITY'S RESOURCE DEMAND EXCEEDS THE EARTH'S CAPACITY. Where have we heard this story before? Now Mr. Wacko and his obligatory team of international worriers have modeled the whole dreary business. But how did they get this into the Proceedings Of The National Academy Of Sciences? And what happens now that we have exceeded capacity?

6. AND FINALLY, FOR ALL YOU ENVIRONMENTALISTS WHO WANT TO GET RICH QUICK: 'VAST OPPORTUNITIES TO DEVELOP RENEWABLE ENERGY PROJECTS EXIST' -- in ZIMBABWE

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2. Letter to the Editor, NY Times:
[published in shortened form on June 9]

Bob Herbert ("Ignoring a Growing Peril," June 6) accepts the claim of a government report that the climate is warming and that human activities are responsible. But the balance of the observational evidence does not support such a claim.

The government report (US Climate Action Plan - 2002) to the United Nations is a routine document. President Bush called it "the report put out by the bureaucracy."

The E.P.A. compilers of the report have rehashed a study completed under the former administration. In fact, the acting director of the White House science office, a Clinton appointee, acknowledged last September that the study did not reflect "policy positions or official statements of the U.S. government."

S. FRED SINGER
Arlington, Va., June 6, 2002
The writer, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, is a former deputy assistant administrator of the E.P.A.
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Letter to the Editor, International Herald Tribune:

Bob Herbert's jeremiad about the putative impacts of Global Warming (For Coral reefs and ice sheets, time is running out" June 21) does not jibe with observed facts.

Ocean-bottom core data provide precise measurements of sea-surface temperatures; they show substantial warming intervals in the past several millennia due to natural climate changes with no observed deleterious effects on corals.

Similarly, the warming of the past 18,000 years, since the end of the last ice age, has caused the west Antarctic Ice sheet to shrink drastically. It will continue to shrink at the same rate for the next 6000 years unless a new ice age intervenes. Sea level will continue to rise about 10 centimeters per century - as it has in past

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3. Study Finds only "Weak Evidence" of ED Health Effects: The first worldwide survey of research on the relationship between human health and many endocrine disrupting chemicals (EDs) has found only weak evidence that humans have been adversely affected by exposure to these substances. According to Environment Watch: Europe, the UN's International Program on Chemical Safety concluded that the evidence for these substances damaging humans remains "inconclusive and inconsistent" but "sufficient to warrant concern." In response, the European Commission launched a new "cluster" research program that will include partners from 10 different countries and will work to find out more about how otherwise harmless levels of EDs may combine for ill effects.

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4. Fitting the Puzzle Pieces of the Natural Chlorine Cycle: Lack of communication among the scientific disciplines and guidance of perceptions by at least four erroneous, but generally accepted, statements or tacit understandings have obstructed an understanding of the natural chlorine cycle. Swedish researcher G. Oberg has fit the pieces of the "chlorine puzzle" together in an article in a recent issue of Applied Microbiology and Biotechnology (v.58, p. 565-81) by correcting the following four generally held impressions: (1) Chlorinated organic compounds are not found naturally in biological systems. (Fact: More than 1,000 naturally occurring chlorinated organic compounds have been documented); (2) Only a few, rather specialized, organisms are able to convert chloride into organochlorine compounds. (Fact: This ability appears to be more the rule than the exception among organisms.); (3) All chlorinated organic compounds are persistent and toxic. (Fact: The vast majority of naturally produced organic compounds are neither persistent nor toxic.); (4) Chlorine is mainly found as chloride in the natural environment. (Fact: Organochlorine compounds are equally if not more abundant than chloride in the soil.)

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Rethinking DDT: Stephen Milloy declares June 30, 1972 "a date that lives in junk science infamy," in his Fox News article on the insecticide DDT. Milloy argues that "Silent Spring," - the watershed book by Rachel Carson that led to global bans on the pesticide - "misrepresented the then-existing science on bird reproduction and was dead wrong about DDT causing cancer." While banned throughout the industrialized world, DDT is still used for malaria control in developing countries. U.S. government experts recently argued in the journal Emerging and Infectious Diseases that "DDT is still needed for malaria control. If the pressure to abandon this effective insecticide continues, millions of malaria cases worldwide will result."

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5. Humanity's Resource Demand Exceeds The Earth's Capacity.

OAKLAND, Calif. -- Humanity's use of natural resources, or Ecological Footprint, has exceeded the regenerative capacity of the Earth since the 1980s. The finding is outlined in a paper to be published this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Redefining Progress Sustainability Program Director Mathis Wackernagel is the lead author of the paper, "Tracking the ecological overshoot of the human economy." He and his colleagues reached this conclusion by comparing humanity's demand on the environment to the earth's supply of bioproductive areas over the past 40 years.

"Sustainability requires living with the regenerative capacity of the biosphere," write Wackernagel and his colleagues. "In an attempt to measure the extent to which humanity satisfies this requirement, we use existing data to translate human demand on the environment into the area required for the production of food and other goods, together with the absorption of wastes."

The researchers assessed the total area globally available for growing crops, grazing animals, harvesting timber, accommodating infrastructure, marine fishing, and absorbing carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels. They then calculated how much area would be required to sustainably meet human demand for these various activities.

According to this analysis, human demand (or Ecological Footprint) in 1961 was about 70 percent of the Earth's regenerative capacity. By the 1980s demand had risen to match total global supply, and by 1999 demand exceeded supply by at least twenty percent. It takes the biosphere, therefore, at least a year and three months to renew what humanity uses in a single year.

Other authors of the paper include: Niels B. Schulz of the Institute of Interdisciplinary Studies of Austrian Universities; Diana Deumling and Chad Monfreda of Redefining Progress; Alejandro Callejas Linares of the Centro de Estudios para la Sustentablilidad; Martin Jenkins and Valerie Kapos of the World Conservation Monitoring Centre; Jonathan Loh of WWF International; Norman Myers of Green College, Oxford University; Richard Norgaard of the Energy and Resources Group, University of California, Berkeley; and Jørgen Randers of the Norwegian School of Management.

Redefining Progress is a nonpartisan public policy organization that creates policies and tools to encourage accurate market prices, preserve our common assets, and foster social and economic sustainability.

http://www.redefiningprogress.org/programs/sustainability/ef/pnas_0602.html

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6. 'Vast Opportunities to Develop Renewable Energy Projects Exist'
Jun 26, 2002 - Africa News Service -

The Zimbabwe Power Company (ZPC) said there are vast opportunities to develop renewable energy projects and to market power in the country. ZPC key account executive Mr. Morgen Gomo said the major areas in which ventures could be undertaken were small-scale hydroelectric schemes, wood waste-based power stations, cane waste-based power stations and coal bed methane gas power generation. These environmentally friendly opportunities could be developed to ensure the efficient and sustainable utilisation of resources.
ZPC is a wholly owned subsidiary of the national utility, Zimbabwe Electricity Supply Authority (Zesa).
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