Landmark UN Nagoya biodiversity deal agreed to save natural world

A landmark deal to protect the world's most threatened species and environments has been struck after a marathon United Nations meeting.

Telegraph.co.uk, By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, 30 Oct 2010

Landmark UN Nagoya biodiversity deal agreed to save natural world (Photo: WWF)

Delegates from more than 190 countries meeting in Nagoya, Japan, agreed a programme to conserve global biodiversity and the natural habitats that support the most threatened animals and plants.

The last minute deal at the UN Convention on Biodiversity sets out 20 goals to be implemented by in the next 10 years to help tackle the mass extinction of species around the world.

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They include increasing the area of protected land in the world from 12.5% to 17%, and the area of protected oceans from 1% to 10%, by 2020.

Talks had been going on at the Convention for two weeks before the agreement was made.

After late-night negotiations, the conference also adopted a new treaty, the Nagoya Protocol, to manage the world's genetic resources and share the multi-billion benefits with developing nations.

Jim Leape, director general of WWF International, said: "This agreement reaffirms the fundamental need to conserve nature as the very foundation of our economy and our society.

"Governments have sent a strong message that protecting the health of the planet has a place in international politics and countries are ready to join forces to save life on Earth."

UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman, who was in Nagoya, said: "These have been long and hard negotiations, but we have successfully achieved a new global plan to help protect our natural environment.

"We have also agreed a historic protocol which has been 18 years in the making, establishing a regime where developing countries will allow access to their genetic and natural resources in return for a share of the benefits for their use.

"The new agreement states we will take effective and urgent action to halt the loss of habitats and species in order to ensure that by 2020 our natural environment is resilient and can continue to provide the essential services that we would otherwise take for granted.

"This will secure the planet's variety of life, our wellbeing and help eradicate poverty."

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UN Bans Chemtrails

Geoengineering Moratorium Agreed at UN Ministerial in Japan

Foodfreedom, October 28, 2010 , By ETC Group

Chemtrail Rainbow

Risky Climate Techno-fixes Blocked

NAGOYA, Japan – In a landmark consensus decision, the 193-member UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) will close its tenth biennial meeting with a de facto moratorium on geoengineering projects and experiments. “Any private or public experimentation or adventurism intended to manipulate the planetary thermostat will be in violation of this carefully crafted UN consensus,” stated Silvia Ribeiro, Latin American Director of ETC Group.

The agreement, reached during the ministerial portion of the two-week meeting which included 110 environment ministers, asks governments to ensure that no geoengineering activities take place until risks to the environmental and biodiversity and associated social, cultural and economic impacts risks have been appropriately considered as well as the socio-economic impacts. The CBD secretariat was also instructed to report back on various geoengineering proposals and potential intergovernmental regulatory measures.

The unusually strong consensus decision builds on the 2008 moratorium on ocean fertilization. That agreement, negotiated at COP 9 in Bonn, put the brakes on a litany of failed “experiments” – both public and private – to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide in the oceans’ depths by spreading nutrients on the sea surface. Since then, attention has turned to a range of futuristic proposals to block a percentage of solar radiation via large-scale interventions in the atmosphere, stratosphere and outer space that would alter global temperatures and precipitation patterns.

“This decision clearly places the governance of geoengineering in the United Nations where it belongs,” said ETC Group Executive Director Pat Mooney.

“This decision is a victory for common sense, and for precaution. It will not inhibit legitimate scientific research. Decisions on geoengineering cannot be made by small groups of scientists from a small group of countries that establish self-serving ‘voluntary guidelines’ on climate hacking. What little credibility such efforts may have had in some policy circles in the global North has been shattered by this decision. The UK Royal Society and its partners should cancel their Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative and respect that the world’s governments have collectively decided that future deliberations on geoengineering should take place in the UN, where all countries have a seat at the table and where civil society can watch and influence what they are doing.”

Delegates in Nagoya have now clearly understood the potential threat that deployment – or even field testing – of geoengineering technologies poses to the protection of biodiversity. The decision was hammered out in long and difficult late night sessions of a “Friends of the chair” group, attended by ETC Group, and adopted by the Working Group 1 Plenary on 27 October 2010. The Chair of the climate and biodiversity negotiations called the final text “a highly delicate compromise.” All that remains to do now is gavel it through in the final plenary at 6 PM Friday (Nagoya time).

“The decision is not perfect,” said Neth Dano of ETC Group Philippines. “Some delegations are understandably concerned that the interim definition of geoengineering is too narrow because it does not include Carbon Capture and Storage technologies. Before the next CBD meeting, there will be ample opportunity to consider these questions in more detail. But climate techno-fixes are now firmly on the UN agenda and will lead to important debates as the 20th anniversary of the Earth Summit approaches. A change of course is essential, and geoengineering is clearly not the way forward.”

Read More ....

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Volcanic eruptions leave town in Kamchatka buried in ash

RT.com, 28 October, 2010, 11:24

Two volcanic eruptions in Russia's Far East region of Kamchatka have covered the whole town of Ust-Kamchatsk in ash.

One volcano began erupting on Thursday and the other started spewing ash on October 22.

More than 5,000 people have been forced to stay at home with their windows shut, Interfax news agency reported.

Local authorities say the volcanic ash is not a major health threat to the town’s population, therefore they do not need to evacuate people from the area.

However, all public institutions and organizations remain closed on Thursday, except for essential services.

Due to almost zero visibility, roads in the region were closed, although some major ones have reportedly reopened.

The volcanoes are still spewing ash, while meteorologists say the situation should be back to normal by Friday.

A motorcycle lies covered by volcanic ash at a village that is hit by pyroclastic flows from Mount Merapi eruption in Kaliadem, Yogyakarta, on Wednesday. A volcanic eruption and a tsunami killed scores of people hundreds of miles apart in Indonesia, spasms from the Pacific "Ring of Fire," which spawns disasters from deep within the Earth. AP/Slamet Riyadi

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Solar Shield--Protecting the North American Power Grid: NASA

NASA Science, Oct. 26, 2010

Oct. 26, 2010: Every hundred years or so, a solar storm comes along so potent it fills the skies of Earth with blood-red auroras, makes compass needles point in the wrong direction, and sends electric currents coursing through the planet's topsoil. The most famous such storm, the Carrington Event of 1859, actually shocked telegraph operators and set some of their offices on fire. A 2008 report by the National Academy of Sciences warns that if such a storm occurred today, we could experience widespread power blackouts with permanent damage to many key transformers.

What's a utility operator to do?

The sun rises behind high-voltage
power lines in North America.

A new NASA project called "Solar Shield" could help keep the lights on.

"Solar Shield is a new and experimental forecasting system for the North American power grid," explains project leader Antti Pulkkinen, a Catholic University of America research associate working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center. "We believe we can zero in on specific transformers and predict which of them are going to be hit hardest by a space weather event."

The troublemaker for power grids is the "GIC" – short for geomagnetically induced current. When a coronal mass ejection (a billion-ton solar storm cloud) hits Earth's magnetic field, the impact causes the field to shake and quiver. These magnetic vibrations induce currents almost everywhere, from Earth's upper atmosphere to the ground beneath our feet. Powerful GICs can overload circuits, trip breakers, and in extreme cases melt the windings of heavy-duty transformers.

This actually happened in Quebec on March 13, 1989, when a geomagnetic storm much less severe than the Carrington Event knocked out power across the entire province for more than nine hours. The storm damaged transformers in Quebec, New Jersey, and Great Britain, and caused more than 200 power anomalies across the USA from the eastern seaboard to the Pacific Northwest. A similar series of "Halloween storms" in October 2003 triggered a regional blackout in southern Sweden and may have damaged transformers in South Africa.

While many utilities have taken steps to fortify their grids, the overall situation has only gotten worse. A 2009 report by the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) and the US Department of Energy concluded that modern power systems have a "significantly enhance[d] vulnerability and exposure to effects of a severe geomagnetic storm." The underlying reason may be seen at a glance in this plot:

Growth of the High Voltage Transmission Network and annual electric energy usage in the United States over the past 50 years. Credit: North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the US Dept. of Energy.

Since the beginning of the Space Age the total length of high-voltage power lines crisscrossing North America has increased nearly 10 fold. This has turned power grids into giant antennas for geomagnetically induced currents. With demand for power growing even faster than the grids themselves, modern networks are sprawling, interconnected, and stressed to the limit—a recipe for trouble, according to the National Academy of Sciences: "The scale and speed of problems that could occur on [these modern grids] have the potential to impact the power system in ways not previously experienced."

A large-scale blackout could last a long time, mainly due to transformer damage. As the National Academy report notes, "these multi-ton apparatus cannot be repaired in the field, and if damaged in this manner they need to be replaced with new units which have lead times of 12 months or more."

Permanent damage to the Salem New Jersey
Nuclear Plant GSU Transformer caused by
the March 13, 1989 eomagnetic storm.
Photos courtesy of PSE&G. [larger image]

That is why a node-by-node forecast of geomagnetic currents is potentially so valuable. During extreme storms, engineers could safeguard the most endangered transformers by disconnecting them from the grid. That itself could cause a blackout, but only temporarily. Transformers protected in this way would be available again for normal operations when the storm is over.

The innovation of Solar Shield is its ability to deliver transformer-level predictions. Pulkkinen explains how it works:

"Solar Shield springs into action when we see a coronal mass ejection (CME) billowing away from the sun. Images from SOHO and NASA's twin STEREO spacecraft show us the cloud from as many as three points of view, allowing us to make a 3D model of the CME, and predict when it will arrive."

While the CME is crossing the sun-Earth divide, a trip that typically takes 24 to 48 hours, the Solar Shield team prepares to calculate ground currents. "We work at Goddard's Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC)," says Pulkkinen. The CCMC is a place where leading researchers from around the world have gathered their best physics-based computer programs for modeling space weather events. The crucial moment comes about 30 minutes before impact when the cloud sweeps past ACE, a spacecraft stationed 1.5 million km upstream from Earth. Sensors onboard ACE make in situ measurements of the CME's speed, density, and magnetic field. These data are transmitted to Earth and the waiting Solar Shield team.

"We quickly feed the data into CCMC computers," says Pulkkinen. "Our models predict fields and currents in Earth's upper atmosphere and propagate these currents down to the ground." With less than 30 minutes to go, Solar Shield can issue an alert to utilities with detailed information about GICs.

Pulkkinen stresses that Solar Shield is experimental and has never been field-tested during a severe geomagnetic storm. A small number of utility companies have installed current monitors at key locations in the power grid to help the team check their predictions. So far, though, the sun has been mostly quiet with only a few relatively mild storms during the past year. The team needs more data.

"We'd like more power companies to join our research effort," he adds. "The more data we can collect from the field, the faster we can test and improve Solar Shield." Power companies work with the team through EPRI, the Electric Power Research Institute. Of course a few good storms would help test the system, too. They're coming. The next solar maximum is expected around 2013, so it's only a matter of time.

Author: Dr. Tony Phillips | Credit: Science@NASA

More Information:

• Solar Shield -- project home page
• Community Coordinated Modeling Center (CCMC) -- This is where Solar Shield calculations are done
• Severe Space Weather-Social and Economic Impacts -- (Science@NASA) A summary of the 2008 National Academy of Sciences report
• High-Impact, Low-Frequency Event Risk to the North American Bulk Power System -- A Jointly-Commissioned Summary Report of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation and the U.S. Department of Energy's November 2009 Workshop"
• Super Solar Flare -- (Science@NASA)
  

Solar Weather NASA/SDO

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ET council: We will increase UFOs, address U.N. in 2014, renew ecology in 2015

Examiner, October 23rd, 2010 10:20 pm PT

In an exclusive, in-depth interview on Exopolitics Radio with Alfred Lambremont Webre, former NORAD officer Stanley A. Fulham has stated that a regional galactic governance authority, (the ‘Council of 8’) made a dramatic decision in January, 2010 to put aside the law of non-intervention.

Former NORAD officer Stanley A. Fulham
(Photo: Stanley A. Fulham)

At a solemn meeting, the Council of 8 decided to intervene with their technology to clean Earth’s atmosphere before an environmental collapse occurs on Earth, as has happened on many other inhabited planets with civilizations similar to our own.

The Council of 8 did so, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, after reaching a conclusion that that our human technology could not now prevent an environmental collapse and species extinction on Earth from occuring.

According to Mr. Fulham, this is a rare decision by the Council of 8, and is partly a result of Council members wishing to preserve the unique positive qualities of our human population.

The Council of 8, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, consists of the intelligent civilizations of the Pleiades, Orion, Sirius, Bootes, Alpha Centauri, Comsuli, Zeta Reticuli, and Pouseti.

This cleanup of the Earth’s atmosphere will, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, commence in 2015 after a 2014 speech at the United Nations by the Council of 8’s Pleiadian representatives.

The Council of 8’s appearance in 2014 at the United Nation’s General Assembly may occur, according to Mr. Fulham’s information, following a collapse of the present world order and the emergence of a new way of living during the period 2010 – 2014.

This transitional 2010-14 period may be accompanied by possible earth changes, monetary collapse, and governmental and nation state collapse.

Mr. Fulham stated in his Exopolitics Radio interview that the regional galactic governance council (‘Council of 8’) had chosen New York City for an initial Oct 13, 2010 UFO 'decloaking' because it was a global, cosmopolitan city with a blasé population that would not be frightened of their appearance.

There are multiple, independent evidentiary sources that prove the Oct. 13, 2010 UFO sightings over New York City were the result of an intervention by a non-Earthly intelligent civilization, and not the result of other causes such as released balloons.

The original plan of the Council of 8, taken at a meeting in January 2010, had been for simultaneous UFO appearances on Oct 13, 2010 over major world cities.

The purpose of these Council of 8 UFO appearances, which are set to increase in the future, is to acclimatize Earth humans to the Council of 8's presence and decision to intervene.

The increased UFO sightings in the future are meant to lead up to a world speech by the Pleiadian representatives of the Council of 8 in the General Assembly hall at the United Nations in 2014.

Examiner.com readers can listen to this in-depth historic interview with Stanley A. Fulham in the Examiner.com article below.

The Council of 8

According to Mr. Fulham, the Council of 8 has had a caretaker role for our planet for about the last million years, and has effectively maintained Earth under protective quarantine following an attempted invasion and takeover of Earth.

Mr. Fulham has authored a book, Challenges of Change, containing the results of his 10 years investigation of the role of the Council of 8 and other entities in our galaxy and Universes.

Mr. Fulham writes that he obtained this information about the Council of 8 through an inter-dimensional intelligent civilization that monitors events in our galaxy and Universes.

Other experts such as Dr. Carl Johan Callemanhave independently predicted in interviews with Alfred Lambremont Webre an end to hierarchies and the value of money, and increased extraterrestrial and UFO contact in the 2010-14 period.

On Oct. 14, 2010 - a day after the New York City UFO sightings - Dr. Mazian Othman, director of the U.N. Outer Space Office, delivered a wide-ranging 28 minute video press conference at the United Nations in New York during which she stated that 'ET life is a possibility' and remarked that the United Nations must ready itself for ET contact. Examiner.com readers can view Dr. Othman's press conference here.

Historic 90 minute interview with Stanley A. Fulham on the Council of 8: ET contact, and ET environmental intervention

Examiner.com readers can listen to this historic 90 minute interview with Stanley A. Fulham and Alfred Lambremont Webre on the Council of 8, ET contact, and ET environmental intervention in 2015 by clicking here or below:

Listen to Exopolitics Radio interview now (MP3):

http://exopolitics.blogs.com/files/stanley.a.fulham.mp3

Read Stanley A. Fulham's Book:

Challenges of Change by Stanley A. Fulham

See also:

EXAMINER: Exopolitics founder: ‘Oct 13 2010 NYC UFO sightings confirm Exopolitics model’

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Blossom Goodchild channels White Cloud. Oct 22, 2010 - "Rapidly the visions that are ‘caught on camera' (on Oct 13, 2010) shall increase to a degree that everyone shall be discussing their own point of view on the matter."

Blossom Goodchild channels White Cloud. Sep 21, 2010 - "People of Earth, Brothers and Sisters … our Family of ONE IN LIGHT … WE ARE COMING" !!!

CERN scientists eye parallel universe breakthrough

Reuters, By Robert Evans, GENEVA | Wed Oct 20, 2010 11:21am EDT

The Carina Nebula, located 7,500 light-years away from Earth, in an image taken by the NASA Hubble Space Telescope in February 2010. (Credit: Reuters/NASA/Handout)

(Reuters) - Physicists probing the origins of the cosmos hope that next year they will turn up the first proofs of the existence of concepts long dear to science-fiction writers such as hidden worlds and extra dimensions.

And as their Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva moves into high gear, they are talking increasingly of the "New Physics" on the horizon that could totally change current views of the universe and how it works.

"Parallel universes, unknown forms of matter, extra dimensions... These are not the stuff of cheap science fiction but very concrete physics theories that scientists are trying to confirm with the LHC and other experiments."

This was how the "ideas" men and women in the international research center's Theory Group, which mulls over what could be out there beyond the reach of any telescope, put it in CERN's staff-targeted Bulletin this month.

As particles are collided in the vast underground LHC complex at increasingly high energies, what the Bulletin article referred to informally as the "universe's extra bits" -- if they do exist as predicted -- should be brought into computerized, if ephemeral, view, the theorists say.

Optimism among the hundreds of scientists working at CERN -- in the foothills of the Jura mountains along the border of France and Switzerland -- has grown as the initially troubled $10 billion experiment hit its targets this year.

PROTON COLLISIONS

By mid-October, Director-General Rolf Heuer told staff last weekend, protons were being collided along the 27-km (16.8 mile) subterranean ring at the rate of 5 million a second -- two weeks earlier than the target date for that total.

By next year, collisions will be occurring -- if all continues to go well -- at a rate producing what physicists call one "inverse femtobarn," best described as a colossal amount, of information for analysts to ponder.

The head-on collisions, at all but the speed of light, recreate what happened a tiny fraction of a second after the primeval "Big Bang" 13.7 billion years ago which brought the known universe and everything in it into being.

Despite centuries of increasingly sophisticated observation from planet Earth, only 4 per cent of that universe is known -- because the rest is made up of what have been called, because they are invisible, dark matter and dark energy

Billions of particles flying off from each LHC collision are tracked at four CERN detectors -- and then in collaborating laboratories around the globe -- to establish when and how they come together and what shapes they take.

The CERN theoreticians say this could give clear signs of dimensions beyond length, breadth, depth and time because at such high energy particles could be tracked disappearing -- presumably into them -- and then back into the classical four.

Parallel universes could also be hidden within these dimensions, the thinking goes, but only in a so-called gravitational variety in which light cannot be propagated -- a fact which would make it nearly impossible to explore them.

(Editing by Jonathan Lynn)

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