Saturday December 15, 2007
December 15th 2007 – America has agreed to the so-called Bali road map at the world climate talks in Bali. It came at the last minute just as some of the Americans were packing up to leave. This will allow the talks to go forward on an agreement to fight global warming.
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Saturday December 1, 2007
Zhang Zilin, Miss China, won Miss World 2007, beating out women from 105 other countries. Miss Angola came in second, Miss Mexico came in third. Two billion watched on television.
She and Miss Domincan Republic were favoured to win.
At 1.82 metres, she was the tallest woman there. She is a secretary from Beijing, who grew up in Hebei province.
Her country will host the Olympics next summer.
The women were rated on beauty, style, dress, physical fitness and niceness.
The beauty pageant took place in the Beauty Crown Theatre in Sanya, China on the island of Hainan.
Miss China’s philosophy: “Where there is a will there is a way.”
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Sunday November 18, 2007
Today at noon in Japan (03.00 UTC) the Nisshin Maru set out for Antartic waters. It aims to kill a thousand whales before it returns early next year. It is being followed by ships from Greenpeace, Sea Shepherd and others. Greenpeace will try to stop the hunt by any means necessary short of outright violence.
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Saturday November 17, 2007
Today the United Nations issues a 20-page report on global warming. It was written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which won the Nobel Prize for Peace last month along with Al Gore. Al Gore took the IPCC findings and made a film, “An Inconvenient Truth”. The IPCC has taken the same findings and made it into a short report for policymakers. They will meet next month in Bali to talk about what the world should do next.
The report says that there is still time to do something, but time is running out. If nothing is done, then by 2100 it will be 1 to 6 C hotter and sea levels will rise by 18 to 59 cm. Some parts of the earth will be hit hard. By that time it will be too late to undo the damage and get back to the earth we have now.
The report is based on the work of thousands of scientists. Few scientists doubt its findings.
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Friday November 16, 2007
Deep in a mountain on the island of Spitsbergen near the North Pole they are storing seeds from food plants from all over the world. They are being put there to help save mankind in case something terrible destroys most of the world, like a nuclear war or a comet.
The mountain will be able to keep the seeds cold enough so that they could last a thousand years. Because it is so far north it is like a natural refrigerator.
It reminds me of the Clock of the Long Now.
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