Eeyore's News and Views

4th Bird Flu death reported in China in 2009
The Associated Press
Published: January 24, 2009
BEIJING: A woman in China's far west has died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu, the Health Ministry said Saturday, the country's fourth death from the virus this year as the biggest festive season approaches.
The victim, a 31-year-old woman from Urumqi, the capital of the Xinjiang region, had been to a live poultry market before she fell ill on Jan. 10, the official Xinhua News Agency reported, citing Wang Xiaoyan, a deputy director of the regional health department. She died Friday.
A woman in eastern China, a teenage boy in southwest China and a woman in Beijing have also died from the disease this month.
A 2-year-old girl was also sickened with H5N1 but recovered. The Health Ministry said her mother, who like the toddler went to a live poultry market, had died of pneumonia in early January. Doctors said they could not confirm the cause of death.
China launched a daily bird flu reporting system for poultry and human cases Thursday, underscoring its concerns about potential epidemics.
Provincial health and agriculture departments must report to the Health Ministry, Agriculture Ministry and the State Administration for Industry and Commerce every day on whether there have been infections in their areas.
The Agriculture Ministry has also ordered increased monitoring and management of live poultry markets, especially before next week's Lunar New Year holiday, when people will have more contact with chickens and ducks while preparing celebratory meals.
Despite the new cases, the Health Ministry has said there was no evidence of a large-scale outbreak of bird flu. It said the illnesses were isolated, unrelated and did not show significant mutations of the H5N1 virus.
They also occurred during the cold months, which experts have determined are high season for infections, it said.
According to the World Health Organization, bird flu has killed 251 people worldwide since 2003, including 22 in China. That number does not include the latest death.
While the disease remains hard for humans to catch, scientists have warned if outbreaks among poultry are not controlled, the virus may mutate into a form more easily passed between people, possibly triggering a pandemic that could kill millions worldwide.
http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2009/01/24/asia/AS-China-Bird-Flu.php

Ebola may have passed from a pig to a human
By Donald G. Mcneil Jr.
Published: January 23, 2009
In the first known case of what may be transmission of the Ebola virus from a pig to a human, a pig handler in the Philippines has tested positive for a strain of the virus, world health officials and the Philippine government announced Friday.
But the strain — Ebola Reston — is not known to be dangerous to humans, and the worker, who was infected at least six months ago, is healthy, officials said.
The development is worrying because pigs are mixing vessels in which other viruses from humans and animals exchange genetic material, possibly creating strains that are more lethal or more infectious.
But Dr. Juan Lubroth, chief of animal health at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, said there was "more need to investigate than to worry" and still many unanswered questions.
Ebola Reston, normally a monkey virus, was first found in pigs last year in the Philippines. Health authorities closed two farms and took blood samples from 6,000 pigs and 50 workers on the farms and in slaughterhouses. Only four pigs and the one worker tested positive, the Philippine health secretary, Francisco Duque, said at a news conference in Manila.
Dr. Lubroth said the first pigs tested were very sick, but turned out to have more than one infection, including a virulent reproductive and respiratory syndrome. ,The Ebola Reston may not have been what sickened them.
"But farmers, of course, would prefer to have pigs without Ebola," he said. "So we want to do more testing to see what they can do to protect them."
Broader sampling will determine, among other things, whether the disease is more common in pigs and humans than was known, whether it causes fever and how long its incubation period is.
Ebola Reston was first found in monkeys from the Philippines that died after arriving at a laboratory in Reston, Virginia, in 1989. Antibodies to it were found in workers in several laboratories, but it is not known to have caused more than a mild flu in any human.
By contrast, the Zaire, Sudan and Bundibugyo strains of Ebola, all found in African apes, cause fatal hemorrhagic fever in humans.
It is not known how the pigs were infected, but Dr. Lubroth noted that studies in Africa found Ebola viruses in fruit bats. Similar bats live in the Philippines, and fruit bats are thought to have transmitted Nipah virus to pigs, possibly through their droppings or dead bodies.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2009/01/23/healthscience/24ebola.php

They tried to forward their agenda with cow farts and now with OJ very stupid. Makes me want to go out and buy a bunch so more is grown.
How Green Is My Orange?
By ANDREW MARTIN
Published: January 21, 2009
BRADENTON, Fla. — How much does your morning glass of orange juice contribute to global warming?
PepsiCo, which owns the Tropicana brand, decided to try to answer that question. It figured that as public concern grows about the fate of the planet, companies will find themselves under pressure to perform such calculations. Orange juice seemed like a good case study.
PepsiCo hired experts to do the math, measuring the emissions from such energy-intensive tasks as running a factory and transporting heavy juice cartons. But it turned out that the biggest single source of emissions was simply growing oranges. Citrus groves use a lot of nitrogen fertilizer, which requires natural gas to make and can turn into a potent greenhouse gas when it is spread on fields.
PepsiCo finally came up with a number: the equivalent of 3.75 pounds of carbon dioxide are emitted to the atmosphere for each half-gallon carton of orange juice. But the company is still debating how to use that information. Should it cite the number in its marketing, and would consumers have a clue what to make of it?
PepsiCo’s experience is a harbinger of the complexities other companies may face as they come under pressure to calculate their emission of carbon dioxide, a number known as a carbon footprint, and eventually to lower it.
“The main thing is helping us figure out where the carbon is in the chain,” said Neil Campbell, president of Tropicana North America, a division of PepsiCo. While acknowledging that protocols for measuring greenhouse emissions are far from perfect, Mr. Campbell said, “you can end up doing nothing if you let that stop you.”
PepsiCo, a manufacturer of soda, salty snacks and cereal based in Purchase, N.Y., is among a growing number of companies that hope to get ahead of potential government mandates and curb their energy use as prices and long-term supply grow less certain.
They also want to promote supposedly low-carbon products to consumers anxious about rising global temperatures; such labeling has already appeared in Europe.
The list of companies that have taken steps to reduce carbon emissions includes I.B.M., Nike, Coca-Cola and BP, the oil giant. Google, Yahoo and Dell are among the companies that have vowed to become “carbon neutral.”
PepsiCo is among the first that will provide consumers with an absolute number for a product’s carbon footprint, which many expect to be a trend. The information will be posted on Tropicana’s Web site. The company has not yet decided if it will eventually put it on the package.
While carbon reduction efforts are generally welcomed by environmentalists, some complain that the marketing claims are backed by fuzzy numbers and dubious assumptions.
Standards exist for determining a carbon footprint, but companies can apply them in different ways. They can decide how rigorous they want to be in counting emissions in the supply chain, and what data sources they should use in the process.
“Any time people are making a legitimate effort to reduce emissions directly or indirectly with their product and services, most of us would think that is a good thing,” said Michael Gillenwater, dean of the Greenhouse Gas Management Institute, a nonprofit organization that teaches greenhouse gas management and accounting.
“The trick is when you try to put a strict label that has implications for comparing your product to another product, or implying that you have no climate change impact,” he said.
Nancy Hirshberg, vice president for natural resources at the yogurt maker Stonyfield Farm, said measuring a carbon footprint is a “fabulous tool” for pinpointing areas to reduce emissions. For instance, her company was surprised to learn that milk production was a far bigger contributor to greenhouse gas emissions than its factory.
But she said there were so many variables in determining a carbon footprint that an absolute number was meaningless as a marketing tool.
“I’m thrilled that people are thinking about their carbon footprint, but to put a number on a package is misleading at best,” she said.
PepsiCo’s interest in determining the carbon footprint of its products began in England, where carbon anxiety is further advanced than in the United States. In 2007, Walkers, a PepsiCo brand, published the carbon footprint of its potato chips on its Web site and on the package.
Mr. Campbell, who ran the Walkers brand, championed the idea when he came to Tropicana at the beginning of 2008. As was the case with Walkers, Tropicana hired an outside auditor, the Carbon Trust, to review its calculations and certify its footprint. The Carbon Trust was set up by the British government to accelerate progress toward a low-carbon economy.
Making orange juice is relatively straightforward: the oranges are picked by hand, trucked to the plant, squeezed, pasteurized and packed into cartons and shipped by train to distribution points around the country. Early on, company officials roughed out the carbon footprint of Tropicana juice. But when the Carbon Trust came back with its own calculations, that initial estimate was off by more than 20 percent.
Growing the oranges accounted for a larger share — about a third — than PepsiCo had expected, almost entirely because of the production and application of fertilizer.
Now, PepsiCo managers said they planned to work with their growers and with researchers at the University of Florida to find ways to grow oranges using less carbon. And they are starting to grapple with ways to teach the public how to interpret the carbon footprint of a product.
PepsiCo is scheduled to announce its Tropicana results on Thursday, and will publish carbon-footprint numbers for products including Pepsi, Diet Pepsi and Gatorade. Said Bryan Lembke, a PepsiCo manager on the project: “If you don’t measure it, you can’t improve it.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/22/business/22pepsi.html?_r=1

One last chance to save mankind
With his 90th birthday in July, a trip into space scheduled for later in the year and a new book out next month, 2009 promises to be an exciting time for James Lovelock. But the originator of the Gaia theory, which describes Earth as a self-regulating planet, has a stark view of the future of humanity. He tells Gaia Vince we have one last chance to save ourselves - and it has nothing to do with nuclear power
Your work on atmospheric chlorofluorocarbons led eventually to a global CFC ban that saved us from ozone-layer depletion. Do we have time to do a similar thing with carbon emissions to save ourselves from climate change?
Not a hope in hell. Most of the "green" stuff is verging on a gigantic scam. Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It's not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it'll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning. I am not against renewable energy, but to spoil all the decent countryside in the UK with wind farms is driving me mad. It's absolutely unnecessary, and it takes 2500 square kilometres to produce a gigawatt - that's an awful lot of countryside.
What about work to sequester carbon dioxide?
That is a waste of time. It's a crazy idea - and dangerous. It would take so long and use so much energy that it will not be done.
Do you still advocate nuclear power as a solution to climate change?
It is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems, but it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.
So are we doomed?
There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste - which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering - into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO2 down quite fast.
Would it make enough of a difference?
Yes. The biosphere pumps out 550 gigatonnes of carbon yearly; we put in only 30 gigatonnes. Ninety-nine per cent of the carbon that is fixed by plants is released back into the atmosphere within a year or so by consumers like bacteria, nematodes and worms. What we can do is cheat those consumers by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field. A little CO2 is released but the bulk of it gets converted to carbon. You get a few per cent of biofuel as a by-product of the combustion process, which the farmer can sell. This scheme would need no subsidy: the farmer would make a profit. This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference, but I bet they won't do it.
Do you think we will survive?
I'm an optimistic pessimist. I think it's wrong to assume we'll survive 2 °C of warming: there are already too many people on Earth. At 4 °C we could not survive with even one-tenth of our current population. The reason is we would not find enough food, unless we synthesised it. Because of this, the cull during this century is going to be huge, up to 90 per cent. The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less. It has happened before: between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2000 people left. It's happening again.
I don't think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing's been done except endless talk and meetings.
I don't think we can react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what's coming up
It's a depressing outlook.
Not necessarily. I don't think 9 billion is better than 1 billion. I see humans as rather like the first photosynthesisers, which when they first appeared on the planet caused enormous damage by releasing oxygen - a nasty, poisonous gas. It took a long time, but it turned out in the end to be of enormous benefit. I look on humans in much the same light. For the first time in its 3.5 billion years of existence, the planet has an intelligent, communicating species that can consider the whole system and even do things about it. They are not yet bright enough, they have still to evolve quite a way, but they could become a very positive contributor to planetary welfare.
How much biodiversity will be left after this climatic apocalypse?
We have the example of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event 55 million years ago. About the same amount of CO2 was put into the atmosphere as we are putting in and temperatures rocketed by about 5 °C over about 20,000 years. The world became largely desert. The polar regions were tropical and most life on the planet had the time to move north and survive. When the planet cooled they moved back again. So there doesn't have to be a massive extinction. It's already moving: if you live in the countryside as I do you can see the changes, even in the UK.
If you were younger, would you be fearful?
No, I have been through this kind of emotional thing before. It reminds me of when I was 19 and the second world war broke out. We were very frightened but almost everyone was so much happier. We're much better equipped to deal with that kind of thing than long periods of peace. It's not all bad when things get rough. I'll be 90 in July, I'm a lot closer to death than you, but I'm not worried. I'm looking forward to being 100.
Are you looking forward to your trip into space this year?
Very much. I've got my camera ready!
Do you have to do any special training?
I have to go in the centrifuge to see if I can stand the g-forces. I don't anticipate a problem because I spent a lot of my scientific life on ships out on rough oceans and I have never been even slightly seasick so I don't think I'm likely to be space sick. They gave me an expensive thorium-201 heart test and then put me on a bicycle. My heart was performing like an average 20 year old, they said.
I bet your wife is nervous.
No, she's cheering me on. And it's not because I'm heavily insured, because I'm not.
Profile
James Lovelock is a British chemist, inventor and environmentalist. He is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth's surface and atmosphere. Later this year he will travel to space as Richard Branson's guest aboard Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipTwo. His latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is published by Basic Books in February.
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html?full=true&print=true

Business usual in DC, nothing changes
Clinton Foundation's secret donor
Transparency pledge hits snag
Jim McElhatton (Contact)
Friday, January 23, 2009
Former President Bill Clinton's foundation, despite identifying more than 200,000 of its donors in recent weeks, will not say who paid it windfall prices for stock in a struggling Internet firm with links to the Chinese government.
The William J. Clinton Foundation has identified donors and promised unusual transparency in order to reassure critics who fear the foundation could become the object of largesse from foreign interests seeking to influence his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton, a former Democratic senator from New York, was confirmed by the Senate on Wednesday as President Obama's secretary of state and assumed her formal duties with a State Department ceremony Thursday.
However, Mrs. Clinton's office and the foundation have declined to answer questions about a lucrative 2006 stock transaction, details of which were reported by The Washington Times in March 2008.
Bill Clinton
The Accoona Corp. donated between $250,001 and $500,000 to Mr. Clinton's charity after he spoke at the company's launch in New York in 2004, according to donor information released by the foundation in December. The foundation sold its Accoona stock for $700,000 two years later, according to the charity's tax return for 2006.
Despite what the tax return suggests, Accoona struggled mightily to turn a profit.
In 2007, Accoona filed a prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission reporting more than $60 million in losses during three years. In the same prospectus, it listed the China Daily Information Corp., a subsidiary of China Daily, the official English-language newspaper of the Chinese government, as an official partner and 6.9 percent owner of the company.
Last year, the company's management posted a note on the Accoona Web site saying it no longer would be active, citing "an overwhelmingly competitive search market." Its Jersey City phone number has a busy signal. However, it was later announced that Accoona had been acquired by a Denmark-based business-to-business search engine.
While the Clinton Foundation voluntarily disclosed the original donation of the stock, it still is unwilling to say who was willing to pay so much for its holdings in the struggling company. Mrs. Clinton's office referred questions about the Accoona stock deal to Mr. Clinton's foundation, which declined to provide details.
"We have not disclosed that and have no plans to," foundation spokesman Matt McKenna wrote in an e-mail.
When The Times reported on the Accoona deal last year, former foundation spokesman Ben Yarrow said Accoona had donated 200,000 shares of stock to Mr. Clinton's charity after he gave the 2004 speech.
"The foundation sold its shares through a broker in 2006," Mr. Yarrow said at the time. "President Clinton gave a speech. He did not endorse a product. As a matter of policy, President Clinton does not promote products."
Charities are not required to disclose the identities of their donors or the buyers of any stock holdings, but some Republican senators have pressed for more disclosure about the former president's fundraising activities.
With his wife's new job, Mr. Clinton has agreed to apprise government ethics officials about his fundraising and increase transparency about the sources of his charity's donations. The former president's foundation, which financed the construction of his presidential library and various anti-poverty efforts, has received millions of dollars from overseas.
Massie Ritsch, a spokesman for the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, which tracks the influence of money in politics, said the foundation ought to consider the Accoona stock sale as a donation and disclose it if the deal was profitable.
"In a sense, whoever took the Accoona stock off the foundation's hands was making a donation, because the purchaser gave real value to something that was previously valuable only on paper," Mr. Ritsch said.
"That contribution, if you want to call it that, was all the greater if the company's stock continued downward after the foundation sold it to this unnamed buyer."
Because Accoona was not a publicly traded company, there is no way to determine a fair price for its shares before Mr. Clinton's foundation sold its interest for $3.50 a share in 2006.
Before calling off plans to raise money on the stock market in 2007, Accoona stated in its prospectus that it issued 200,000 shares of common stock to an undisclosed recipient for "marketing services."
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/23/clinton-foundation-mum-on-stock-buyer/?page=2