Comments on: Wednesday Night #1324 - Anne Sophie, Cleo & Kimon

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 23:01:51 +0000

China, Filling a Void, Drills for Riches in Chad
… In January, they bought the rights to a vast exploration zone that surrounds this rural village, making the baked wilderness here, without roads, electricity or telephones, the latest frontier for their thirsty oil industry and increasingly global ambitions.
The same is happening in one African country after another. In large oil-exporting countries like Angola and Nigeria, China is building or fixing railroads, and landing giant exploration contracts in Congo and Guinea. In mineral-rich countries that had been all but abandoned by foreign investors because of unrest and corruption, Chinese companies are reviving output of cobalt and bauxite. China has even become the new mover and shaker in agricultural countries like Ivory Coast, once the crown jewel in France’s postcolonial African empire, where Chinese companies are building a new capital, in Yamoussoukro, paid for by Chinese loans.

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 12:46:05 +0000

OTTAWA: SENATOR CRITICIZES CHINA IN AFRICA
Senator Roméo Dallaire says as he monitors what’s happening in Sudan, he considers the Chinese the vultures of Africa. He calls China the worst of any of colonial powers in the world. He also accuses China of trying to rip away Africa’s natural resources for its own needs with no consciousness of human rights or support for African countries. Sen. Dallaire also says China did not want to pressure Sudan into accepting a UN peacekeeping force because of its lucrative oil deal with Sudan. Sen. Dallaire spoke during an interview on Canadian national television about the UN decision to send 26,000 peacekeepers and police to quell the violence in Darfur. (RCI Cyberjournal, August 2, 2007)

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 03:43:20 +0000

Pacific islanders battle to save what is left of their country from rising seas
Veu Lesa, a 73-year-old villager in Tuvalu, does not need scientific reports to tell him that the sea is rising. The evidence is all around him. The beaches of his childhood are vanishing. The crops that used to feed his family have been poisoned by salt water. In April, he had to leave his home when a “king tide” flooded it, showering it with rocks and debris.
For Tuvalu, a string of nine picturesque atolls and coral islands, global warming is not an abstract danger; it is a daily reality. The tiny South Pacific nation, only four metres above sea level at its highest point, may not exist in a few decades. Its people are already in flight; more than 4,000 live in New Zealand, and many of the remaining 10,500 are planning to join the exodus. Others, though, are determined to stay and try to fight the advancing waves.
The outlook is bleak. A tidal gauge on the main atoll, Funafuti, suggests the sea level is climbing by 5.6mm a year, twice the average global rate predicted by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/article2773149.ece

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 22:22:09 +0000

Russia is sending a mini-submarine to explore the ocean floor below the North Pole and find evidence to support its claims to Arctic territory.The ship is following a nuclear powered ice-breaker, setting sail from Murmansk.
[The team is] planning to dive 4,200m (14,000 ft) below the Arctic Ocean on Sunday.
Russia’s claim to a vast swathe of territory in the Arctic, thought to contain oil, gas and mineral reserves, has been challenged by other powers, including the US. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6914178.stm

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 06:20:05 +0000

Gwynne Dyer has just published The Mess They Made: The Middle East after Iraq in which he espouses a cut and run policy that would also imply withdrawal from any form of intervention in the Middle East, leaving the inhabitants to sort things out for themselves. “Outsiders to the region have no solutions left to peddle any more (nor any credibility even if they did have solutions), and they no longer have the power or the will to impose their ideas”.

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Wed, 18 Jul 2007 17:19:11 +0000

Lake Superior is the biggest of any freshwater lake on Earth, and the deepest and coldest of the Great Lakes, which together hold nearly 20 per cent of the world’s fresh surface water. Yet over the past year, its level has plunged more than 30 cm in the past year. Its average temperature has surged about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit since 1979, significantly above the 2.7-degree rise in the region’s air temperature.
Low water has cost the shipping industry millions of dollars. Vessels are carrying lighter loads of iron ore and coal to avoid running aground in shallow channels.
Precipitation is nearly 15 cm below normal in the Superior watershed the past year. Water evaporation rates are up sharply because mild winters have shrunk the winter ice cap - just as climate change computer models predict for the next half-century. Those models also envision more precipitation as global warming sets in. Instead there’s drought, suggesting other causes.

By: Diana Thébaud Nicholson

Diana Thébaud Nicholson — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 21:41:31 +0000

17 July 2007
Re: A Short History of China’s Fragile Environment
I personally can attest to the poor conditions that the massive development has caused over here; it took me a little over two weeks to get rid of my pollution-induced sore throat. A little longer then it did last year in Peking. The smog in Shanghai is unbelievable; today is the first day that I have seen a semi-blue sky. However, the environmetal issues here are not all bad. I recently visited the Shanghai urban planning museum and found a number of interesting [proposals]; by 2010 the prefecture of Shanghai plans to eliminate all carbon power plants, and all new cars are intended to meet European emission standards (this may be plausible, but the quality of the cars is so poor that it is a regular occurrence to see buses and cars spewing black smoke). The Chinese know that this is a problem, and are trying to fix it, but it needs to be cost effective…. unless highly advanced countries like Switzerland and Japan, who have reached maximum efficiency in regards to per capita energy consumption are given an incentive to give carbon curbing technologies to countries like China and India, the world’s carbon emissions are going to go through the roof. It takes about one year for carbon dioxide to circulate the globe. Pretty scary stuff if former future president Al Gore is correct.
On a less contemporary note, if we go back even further in China’s history, we see [a] level of comfort with altering the landscape, the Grand Canal being the most concrete example, as well as theories that rhinos used to inhabit land north of Shanghai during the Song or Zhou dynasty (the closest one in a natural environment is in Sumatra).
The cooling of the climate can in part be blamed on the over-farming of the land around the Yellow River, the soil is very fertile but fragile, and if it is over used it all blows away. hopefully China can look at its past and ready itself for the future because now everyone is worried and watching, including the Chinese.
Richard