Thanks to Leta Finch for this article.  See http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2011/01/researchers-discover-way-to-reverse-immune-system-aging.aspx#

Researchers Discover Way to Reverse Immune System Aging

Copyright 2011 by Virgo Publishing

http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/

Posted on: 01/27/2011

Researchers at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have discovered a way to reverse the aging process by removing old B lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell in the vertebrate immune system) from old mice, and forcing the production of young, potent cells to replace them. The findings were reported in the January 2011 issue of the scientific journal Blood.

“As with every aging process in the body, it is generally thought that aging of the immune system – including that of the B cell population – is a progressive process that cannot be stopped and/or reversed,” says lead researcher professor Doron Melamed of the Technion’s Rappaport Faculty of Medicine. “But we have succeeded in showing that it is possible to turn back the aging process.”

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.infectioncontroltoday.com/news/2011/01/researchers-discover-way-to-reverse-immune-system-aging.aspx

The City Council of Boulder, Colorado recently acted to reduce the time an individual speaker could have to address the Council on an issue before the Council in a public meeting from three minutes to two minutes.  The letter below is Al Bartlett’s response to this reduction in democracy, which is a predictable consequence of local overpopulation.

February 9, 2011

Letter to the Editor

Boulder Daily Camera

THIS LETTER WAS PUBLISHED IN THE CAMERA February 13, 2011

Dear Friends,

Recent news stories have told about the Boulder City Council acting to reduce speaking times from 3 minutes to 2 minutes for citizens wishing to address the Council at public meetings.  This is a symptom of a deep illness, yet the reports indicated that the Council members addressed the symptom and not the illness.  The illness is overpopulation; the symptom is the large number of people seeking to speak at meetings of the Council.  The Council’s action is like prescribing aspirin for cancer.

In 1950 the population of Boulder was approximately 20,000 and there were 9 members of the Council.  In 2011 Boulder’s population is approximately 100,000 and there are still just 9 members of the Council.  Today there are five times as many constituents per member of the Council as there were 60 years ago.  As a consequence, we have only one fifth of the democracy that we had 60 years ago.  One can guess that today there are about 5 times as many people wanting to speak to Council on any given issue as there were 60 years ago.  Today’s crowded Council agendas and reduced speaking time per citizen are the direct consequence of actions of past Councils promoting population growth in Boulder, yet there was no hint in the news stories that any member of the Council identified continued population growth as being the driving force behind the Council’s need to reduce democracy in Boulder.

Continue Reading »

Thanks to Jack Alpert for this article.  See http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm where you can also watch a monologue by Jeremy Bentham on the global energy situation.

The Coming Misery That Big Oil Discusses Behind Closed Doors

By Steve LeVine

15 February, 2011
The Oil and the Glory

When big-thinkers at companies with the most skin in the energy game are behind closed doors and they discuss how the world really looks going forward, do they say that there are bumps in the road but that things will be fine, just fine, as they suggest publicly? Three years ago, we got a glimpse into the room when Royal Dutch/Shell issued a scenario forecasting the world in 2020. Based on current economic and energy-use patterns around the world, Shell said that energy supplies will be so tight that they will tip the world into a full-blown crisis in which governments will force their populations to reduce driving, use less electricity, and pay an extremely steep increase for what they do consume. There will be a massive, decade-long economic slowdown, and geopolitical power will shift dramatically to energy-producing nations, the company said.

Today, Shell returned with an update. The company said that the 2008 financial crisis interrupted the slide it predicted, but that the clock has begun ticking again. If the world does not change how it uses energy, its scenario will hold true.

In recent weeks, we’ve heard almost identical energy-consumption projections from ExxonMobil, BP and now Shell: The world will use about 40 percent more energy by 2030. The difference is that Exxon and BP more or less just toss out the numbers, while Shell suggests that one might consider running for the hills, oh, sometime around 2016 or 2017 before everyone else shows up. You all can plan to return home around 2030, Shell has said, when the world has come to its senses and adopted all the efficiency and price-signal mechanisms that some forward-thinkers are suggesting now.

To read the full article, click here: http://www.countercurrents.org/levine150211.htm

Thanks to Michael Tobias for this article.  See http://blogs.forbes.com/michaeltobias/2011/03/02/just-when-you-thought-you-could-bank-on-it/ It would be useful if you would create an account on Forbes (sixty seconds), click “recommend” and render relevant comments.  Let Forbes editorial staff and management begin to appreciate that people take the population issue very seriously.

Just When You Thought You Could Bank On It

Mar. 2 2011 – 2:43 am

By MICHAEL TOBIAS

I’m sitting with my friends William Shatner and his wife Liz having tea and discussing wildlife. Bill and I have been having an ongoing dialogue about the fate of the earth for over twenty years, a conversation that started in earnest beneath Mount Everest where he insisted on doing his own climbing stunts at about 19,000 feet for a television series we made together (“Voice of the Planet”.)

“We need to get more wolves into the wild,” he declares, mulling over the future for his kids and grandchildren.

Reintroduction of wolves, we both acknowledge, has been one of the most contentious of wildlife issues. But with over 2,000 Threatened and Endangered species (T&E’s) in North America wolves are iconic, just like the now extinct Passenger Pigeon was. We need to care about predators. They keep ecosystems healthy, without which, we’re all dead.

The number of T&Es is growing rapidly and this trend threatens to defuse our sense of urgency about the value of biology in general.

When Extinction Starts To Draw A Yawn

We’ve read the “Be Warned” headlines too many times. We’ve set our sights on Labradoodles, not Antarctic sea-pigs, Egyptian vultures or Borneo leopards. But as oil prices soar, and revolutions come and go, the value of threatened wildlife takes on increasingly dire dimensions. The 193 delegates to the Nagoya Summit in October 2010 for the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity journeyed to Japan in an effort to find ways to slow down the vast tragedy of extinctions occurring all around us.

Wish them luck. Polls among young people have shown they can recite hundreds of labels and brands – the latest cool gizmo – but know virtually nothing about other species.

To read the full article, click here: http://blogs.forbes.com/michaeltobias/2011/03/02/just-when-you-thought-you-could-bank-on-it/

From the National Council for Science and the Environment.

A new Multi-dimensional Research Program for Global Biodiversity is needed, according to the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE), The need for a decadal initiative is described in a new report “Creating a Ten-Year Global, Integrative, Multi-Dimensional Biodiversity Initiative” from NCSE and its partners the Encyclopedia of Life of the Smithsonian Institution, and the Committee on DIVERSITAS of US National Academy of Sciences.  The groups held an international workshop “Enabling Biodiversity Research: the Roles of Information and Support Networks” that brought together the leading biodiversity research-enabling institutions in based on a December 2009.

We conclude that the community of museums, databases and information systems, and other institutions that support biodiversity research is not sufficiently funded, organized nor large enough to meet the challenges of understanding biodiversity in time to avoid catastrophic losses of life’s richness. It is likely that much of life on Earth will vanish before it can be characterized, let alone understood. Vast storehouses of resources and the knowledge of those resources are endangered.

The world is experiencing unprecedented and accelerating losses of species, ecosystems and genetic resources (biodiversity). This situation has perilous consequences for humanity, which depends on life’s richness and variety for our very existence. Global trends of population growth, climatic disruption and unsustainable economic activity are driving major losses of irretrievable knowledge and resources.  A new generation of ‘multi-dimensional’ research is needed to understand the relationships and processes that link genes, gene expression, development, physiology, population and community ecology, speciation, ecosystem functioning, and other dimensions of biodiversity.

Continue Reading »

Thanks to Bruce Snyder for this article.  See http://rolandcclement.blogspot.com/ where you can read all of Roland Clement’s blog entries.

Reflections of a Naturalist

Roland C Clement

Friday, February 18, 2011

Human Overpopulation

Starting from different bases on different continents, and different cultural assumptions, all three major civilizations had nevertheless overpopulated their environments by the turn of the 20^th century.

Although biological evolution had given humans a high reproductive potential to compensate for the high mortality of hunter-gatherer life styles for the first 200 millennia, it was the advent of agriculture about 10,000 years ago that initiated our unbalanced relationship within Nature’s productive systems. Indeed, that is what  Nature is: a set of evolving, mostly living, and interdependent systems and their byproducts.

So long as our numbers and our technologies were modest, we were just one species among many, adding diversity and contributing innovations in the use of the same building blocks that the rest of the life process utilizes to maintain itself, the atoms and molecules.  At first nomadic, our demands were scattered and replenished in a few seasons of vegetative growth. In fact, native vegetation is the mainstay of all higher animal life on planet Earth, hence a principal index to Earth’s carrying capacity for animal populations.

Agriculture is a specialized form of exploitation for seasonal crops grown especially for human use. Such crops therefore contribute much less to the larger biotic community than native plants. Being seasonal, they also induce more erosion. And since we contest the tithe competing insects impose, we end up with impoverished biotic communities, a high price for the maintenance of one species, since we resorted to chemical pollution to do this.

To read the full article, click here: http://rolandcclement.blogspot.com/2011/02/human-overpopulation.html

Thanks to Randy Serraglio of the Center for Biological Diversity for this article from Treehugger.  Seehttp://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/population-growth-ecological-footprint-about-equity-environment-collapse.php?campaign=daily_nl

Population Growth and Ecological Footprint – It’s About Equity, Environment & Preventing Collapse

by Matthew McDermott, New York, NY on 02.15.11

Sometime later this year the human population will pass the 7 billion mark. As I write this we’re at 6.9 billion and ticking upwards by about one person a second, or so the population clock at Global Population Speak Out tells me. Even with the widely (widely) disparate levels of natural resource consumption across nations by the end of August each year our collective ecological footprint begins outstripping the planet’s ability to regenerate what we’ve taken–we start going into ecological debt. This depletion of natural capital is driven by a comparatively small percentage of the world’s people in wealthy nations, but the impact of billions of people living at subsistence levels is not insignificant as well.

In short, when talking about human’s environmental impact you simply can’t separate population growth and resource consumption–even if many people try to, pointing fingers at each other and carelessly invoking Malthus. When it comes down to it though the two play against one another, both bumping up against the hard ecological limits of the planet–as I’ve written about on a number of occasions.

There’s one part of this debate that is all too often not mentioned by the environmental community, but should be: Equity.

Without going into specifics of my income (along with population growth another taboo discussion for some), in the United States I earn very nearly the median income in 2010 for my writing. Nevertheless, compared to all of the people on the planet I am in the top 0.91% of the richest people in the world, as the image above from the Global Rich List shows. Surely if this is the case those of us living in wealthy nations can afford and manage to adjust our lives so that there is a more equitable distribution of wealth both domestically and internationally.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/02/population-growth-ecological-footprint-about-equity-environment-collapse.php?campaign=daily_nl

Thanks to Lester Brown for this news release.  See www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update91

World One Poor Harvest Away From Chaos
By Lester R. Brown

February 15, 2011

Today there are three sources of growing demand for food: population growth; rising affluence and the associated jump in meat, milk, and egg consumption; and the use of grain to produce fuel for cars.

In early January, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported that its Food Price Index had reached an all-time high in December, exceeding the previous record set during the 2007-08 price surge. Even more alarming, on February 3rd, the FAO announced that the December record had been broken in January as prices climbed an additional 3 percent.

Will this rise in food prices continue in the months ahead? In all likelihood we will see further rises that will take the world into uncharted territory in the relationship between food prices and political stability.

Everything now depends on this year’s harvest. Lowering food prices to a more comfortable level will require a bumper grain harvest, one much larger than the record harvest of 2008 that combined with the economic recession to end the 2007-08 grain price climb.

If the world has a poor harvest this year, food prices will rise to previously unimaginable levels. Food riots will multiply, political unrest will spread and governments will fall. The world is now one poor harvest away from chaos in world grain markets.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.earth-policy.org/plan_b_updates/2011/update91

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.  See http://www.thelocal.se/32138/20110218/

Sweden’s Population Nears 9.5 Million

Published: 18 Feb

Sweden’s population continued to grow at the end of 2010, despite a drop in immigration for the first time since 2004.

At the end of 2010, Sweden’s population stood at 9.42 million, 74,888 more than at the end of the previous year, according to Statistics Sweden (Statistiska centralbyrån – SCB) on Friday.
A total of 149 municipalities reported population increases in Sweden, while the number of residents decreased in 140 localities in the country in 2010 and remained unchanged in one municipality – Ydre in central Sweden.
In Norrköping, Lund and Nacka, the populations surpassed 130,000, 110,000 and 90,000 inhabitants, while Vallentuna north of stockholm passed a more moderate 30,000.
Over the last 40 years, 16 municipalities have recorded successive population increases every year, mostly larger towns or suburban areas. However, Filipstad in central Sweden northeast of Karlstad and nearby Hällefors have both experienced a population decrease for 40 straight years.
115,641 children were born in Sweden last year, a 3.4 percent increase from 2009, which also recorded a 3.4 percent increase on the previous year. Slightly more boys than girls were born.

To read the full article, please click here: http://www.thelocal.se/32138/20110218/

Thanks to Joe Bish for this article.  See http://www.norwaypost.no/news/high-population-growth-in-2010.html See an article on Sweden below.

The Norway Post

Written by Rolleiv Solholm

Friday, 17 December 2010 08:08

HIGH POPULATION GROWTH IN 2010