This New York Times OpEd covered PMC-Ethiopia’s soap operas, Yeken Kignit and Dhimbibba.
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A friend of mine, a physician who works the longest hours of anybody I know, makes only one exception from her demanding schedule in New York. Once a week, she returns home early to watch a new episode of her favorite soap opera.

I cannot think of a more unlikely fan. It goes to show that soap operas appeal across a broad spectrum, from the most intellectually sophisticated to people with little or no formal education.

So it should come as no surprise that soap operas, or telenovelas, are increasingly being used throughout the world to disseminate messages about health issues such as the need for contraception, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, nutrition, how to achieve peace between countries in conflict and how to elevate the status of women in developing countries. By identifying themselves with the protagonists’ dreams and problems the viewer establishes an immediate connection with them.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/04/opinion

From the Center for Biological Diversity’s June 24 newsletter. I saw Rachel Maddow give her talk on TV, and thought it was brilliant. Of course, it would have been better if she had mentioned population. If you missed it, you can link to it below.

If Rachel Maddow Were President — Watch Video of Fake Oval Office Gulf Speech

After hearing President Barack Obama’s Oval Office speech about the Gulf disaster last week, TV/radio host and political commentator Rachel Maddow couldn’t stop thinking of what she wished he’d said. So the next day, she made her own speech.
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AMID the alphabet soup and baffling procedures of last month’s climate-change conference in Copenhagen, it was easy to forget the overall aim: to move from a world in which carbon dioxide emissions are rising to one in which they are falling, fast enough to make a difference.

How fast is enough? A fair measure is carbon and other greenhouse emissions in 2050; if by that date they are only half their 1990 level, most people agree, then things would be on the right track. Another widely accepted calculation: if developing countries are to grow a bit between now and then, rich countries would need to slash emissions to a level at least 80% below what they were in 1990.

For full article, visit:
http://www.economist.com/world/international/displaystory

Thanks to Lester Brown for this overview of global temperature trends.

For a PDF of “A Planet on the Backburner” (courtesy of Eric Rimmer) see https://docs.google.com/a/populationmedia.org/fileview?id=0B5F-idWfw7TeYjU3YzQ2YzEtNzZlNS00OWI2LWEwOWQtMDFiMmY0ZWQ5ZmVm&authkey=COX_mpkJ&hl=en
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The first decade of the twenty-first century was the hottest since recordkeeping began in 1880. With an average global temperature of 14.52 degrees Celsius (58.1 degrees Fahrenheit), this decade was 0.2 degrees Celsius (0.36 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than any previous decade. The year 2005 was the hottest on record, while 2007 and 2009 tied for second hottest. In fact, 9 of the 10 warmest years on record occurred in the past decade.

Temperature rise has accelerated in recent decades. The earth’s temperature is now 0.8 degrees Celsius (1.4 degrees Fahrenheit) higher than it was in the first decade of the twentieth century, and two-thirds of that increase has taken place since 1970.

For full article, visit:
http://www.earth-policy.org/index.php?/indicators/C51/global_temperature_2010

Thanks to Edmund Levering for this chilling news.
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An iceberg the size of Luxembourg knocked loose from the Antarctic continent earlier this month could disrupt the ocean currents driving weather patterns around the globe, researchers said Thursday.

While the impact would not be felt for decades or longer, a slowdown in the production of colder, dense water could result in less temperate winters in the north Atlantic, they said.

The 2550 square-kilometre (985 square-mile) block broke off on February 12 or 13 from the Mertz Glacier Tongue, a 160-kilometer spit of floating ice protruding into the Southern Ocean from East Antarctica due south of Melbourne, researchers said.

For full article, visit:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/

Thanks to Andrew Glikson for this article from the Independent.
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The world is now firmly on course for the worst-case scenario in terms of climate change, with average global temperatures rising by up to 6C by the end of the century, leading scientists said yesterday. Such a rise – which would be much higher nearer the poles – would have cataclysmic and irreversible consequences for the Earth, making large parts of the planet uninhabitable and threatening the basis of human civilisation.

We are headed for it, the scientists said, because the carbon dioxide emissions from industry, transport and deforestation which are responsible for warming the atmosphere have increased dramatically since 2002, in a way which no one anticipated, and are now running at treble the annual rate of the 1990s.

For full article, visit:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment

The increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide taking place today could have a significantly larger effect on global temperatures than previously thought, according to a new study led by Yale University geologists. The team demonstrated that only a relatively small rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide was associated with a period of substantial warming between three to five million years ago. “This work and other ancient climate reconstructions reveal that Earth’s climate is more sensitive to atmospheric carbon dioxide than is discussed in policy circles,” said Yale geologist Mark Pagani.

For full article, visit:
http://opa.yale.edu/news/article.aspx?id=7168

Thanks to Joe Bish for sending me this editorial by Arthur Westing of Vermont.
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With the continuing failure of governments to reach agreements on combating climate change, the outlook for both humans and nature remains bleak.

And nowhere is the failure more conspicuous than in the avoidance of the subject of population growth. Population is a double-barreled environmental problem – not only is population increasing; so are emissions per capita.

In 1970, when worldwide greenhouse gas emissions had just begun to transgress the sustainable capacity of the atmosphere, the world population was about 3.7 billion; today it’s about 6.9 billion – an increase of 86 percent.

For full article, visit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/18/opinion/18iht-edwesting.html

Many thanks to Mark O’Connor for this article.
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ALL but the crankiest conspiracy theorists now accept that the world is warming and humans are causing it. But the baffling, illogical and scary thing is that political leaders seem blind to a critical element of the human causation – the more humans we have the more carbon emissions we will have.

A search of the 1300-word Copenhagen accord on climate change draws a blank for the words “population”, “people”, “growth” and “demography”.

Nor was there any mention of population growth in the earlier draft agreements and the matter hardly rated a mention in the whole two weeks of the conference, except by the Chinese.

For full article, visit:
http://www.crispinhull.com.au

Thanks to Doug La Follette for this article.
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BUSINESS: Chinese exec calls for limiting population, consumption (10/23/2009)
Debra Kahn, E&E reporter

SAN FRANCISCO — A leading Chinese industrialist called yesterday for worldwide population constraints and an end to government-sponsored consumerism as solutions to climate change and other environmental issues.
Speaking at a conference put on by Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), a group that helps businesses institute environment and social sustainability programs, Zhang Yue, chairman and CEO of Broad Air Conditioning, also said governments should stop stimulating the economy by appealing to consumers’ sense of patriotism.

“Encouraging folks to have kids is an encouragement to have more and more markets to buy more stuff,” Zhang said through an interpreter. “Some people say it’s a human rights issue [to control birth rates]: ‘My right to have kids is tied to my quality of life.’ I say it’ll take us in a direction that you have no right to take us in.”
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