Shelburne, VT - On April 22nd, Population Media Center (PMC) will celebrate Earth Day. PMC is an international nonprofit organization that strives to bring about the stabilization of human population numbers at a level that can be sustained by the world’s natural resources, in order to improve the well-being of people around the world and lessen the harmful impact of humanity on the earth’s environment. PMC uses entertainment-education strategies, like serialized dramas on radio and television that encourage positive social and health behaviors, such as the use of family planning and the empowerment of women.

Please join us in celebrating Earth Day on April 22nd. William Ryerson, President and Founder of Population Media Center will be available for interviews.

Population and Environment
Currently, there is a great deal of concern in the media, government, business, and general public regarding the issue of global warming. However, the impact of rapid human population growth on global warming is often overlooked. Decreasing consumption levels will not be enough if the human population continues to rise. The United Nations Population Division estimates that by the year 2050 the world population will reach 9.2 billion, with most of this increase occurring in the developing world. It is estimated that by 2050 over 50% of carbon emissions will come from developing nations. Not only does population growth significantly contribute to an increase in carbon emissions, but it creates a strain on other resources such as water, food, and energy.

Make the Link Between Population and Environment
For more information about population and environmental issues, PMC’s founder and president, William Ryerson, will be available for interviews. Mr. Ryerson has a four decade history of working in the fields of population and reproductive health. As a graduate student, he was Founder and first Chairperson of the Yale Chapter of Zero Population Growth (ZPG). He also served on the Executive Committee of ZPG, as Eastern Vice President and Secretary of the national organization. In 1970, he was featured in Life Magazine’s Earth Day issue organizing student activities on the Yale campus for the first Earth Day.

During the last two decades, he has been working to adapt the Sabido methodology of entertainment-education for behavior change on family planning and family size issues to various cultural settings worldwide. He has also been involved in the design of research to measure the effects of such projects in a number of countries, one of which has led to a series of publications regarding a serialized radio drama in Tanzania and its effects on HIV/AIDS avoidance and family planning use. He received a B.A. in Biology (Magna Cum Laude) from Amherst College and an M.Phil. in Biology from Yale University (with specialization in Ecology and Evolution). He served as Director of the Population Institute’s Youth and Student Division, Development Director of Planned Parenthood Southeastern Pennsylvania, Associate Director of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England, and Executive Vice President of Population Communications International before founding Population Media Center. Mr. Ryerson is listed in several editions of Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the East. In 2006, he was awarded the Nafis Sadik Prize for Courage from the Rotarian Action Group on Population and Development.

This online document is a journalists’ resource guide devoted to climate. It is a collection of links, which are at this time primarily United States (US)-based, to various resources on climate from a wide range of sources, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, National Academies’ National Research Council, American Bird Conservancy and National Wildlife Federation, Evangelical Environmental Network, Sierra Club, and the Pew Center, among many other individuals and groups. Chapters group the links according to their field of expertise, and, in some cases, give tips, such as: “50+ Really Serious Scientist Sources on Climate (who would probably be glad to talk to a journalist).”

http://www.comminit.com/en/node/266739/306

Scientists from the federal National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Hawaii unveiled new research last week showing that steadily warming sea surface waters are causing the least biologically productive swaths of the world’s oceans—so-called “ocean deserts”—to expand at an unprecedented rate (some 15 percent on average) over a nine-year period ending in 2007.

“The warming increases stratification of the ocean waters, preventing deep ocean nutrients from rising to the surface and creating plant life,” the researchers said in a statement released by NOAA. The study was published last week in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Geophysical Research Letters. “These barren areas are found in roughly 20 percent of the world’s oceans and are within subtropical gyres—the swirling expanses of water on either side of the equator.”

For full article, visit:
http://www.emagazine.com/view/?4124

Warming temperatures and increasing storms are posing serious threats to Caribbean coral reefs and the people who depend on them for their livelihoods, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) said today. During the last 50 years many Caribbean reefs lost up to 80 per cent of their coral cover, according to the Paris-based agency, which noted that 2005 was especially disastrous for Caribbean corals.

For full article, visit:

http://www.earthportal.org/news/?p=837

Thanks to author Lindsey Grant for this NPG paper, Edge of the Abyss. It will also be posted at www.npg.org.

As Lindsey Grant said in his cover email, the paper “reports on what we have learned in the past year about energy and climate, following up on THE AGE OF OVERSHOOT. I run into a certain amount of family resistance with these books and papers, on the grounds I am pessimistic. Perhaps the close of this paper provides my answer. It is realism, not pessimism. The age of fossil energy was an aberration. We must relearn to live on the sun’s annual budget. That can be done, but not if we continue to pursue growth as our ideal. And the issues are closing faster than we expected.”

Lindsey Grant Edge of the Abyss (PDF, 252 KB)

Two words: airport runways. As scientists and policy types figure out what changes will be necessary to cope with global warming, it’s obvious that massive sea walls will be required to hold back rising oceans, that enormous new reservoirs will be needed to cope with the alternating droughts and deluges that many regions will suffer and that a crash program to develop heat- and drought-resistant crops would be a good idea if people are to keep eating.

But it’s the less-obvious yet no-less-necessary adaptations to climate change that are likely to wreak havoc. So, runways: hotter air, which we’ll have more of in a greenhouse world, is less-dense air (hence, hot air rises). In less-dense air, says Bernoulli’s principle, for planes to gain lift and stay aloft they need to take off faster. Ergo, airport runways will need to be longer to give planes the requisite ground speed before they’re wheels up. Will someone please tell O’Hare?

For full article, visit:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/81390

Thanks to Edward Levering for this link. The story ran on CNN on March 25.

http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/science/03/25/antartica.collapse.ap/index.html

Thanks to Lester Brown for the following article.
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The world is now facing a climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies. Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow, and the Yangtze river basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests.

The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia. China and India are the world’s leading producers of both wheat and rice — humanity’s food staples. China’s wheat harvest is nearly double that of the United States, which ranks third after India. With rice, these two countries are far and away the leading producers, together accounting for over half of the world harvest.
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Eco-Economy Indicator — ICE MELT

Eco-Economy Indicators are the twelve trends the Earth Policy Institute tracks to measure progress in building an eco-economy. Ice melting is one of the most visible indicators of climate change.

With atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations at new record highs and global average temperature now some 0.8 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the frozen regions of the earth are showing us just how rapidly climate change can take effect. Recent years have seen ice melt accelerate and spread to new, previously unaffected regions. In many areas, the pace of melting has surprised even the scientists studying it most closely, providing a strong early indication that the consequences of climate change could come faster and be more severe than previously believed.

For full article, visit:

http://www.earthpolicy.org/Indicators/Ice/2008.htm

Thanks to Katie Elmore for this link.
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Andrew Revkin maintains a blog for the NY Times on Climate Change and has a big section dedicated to population http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/population/.