Other stories below: Merkel Demands China, India and Brazil Reduce Emissions; China Says Economic Woes No Excuse for Climate Action

Science not politics must drive Durban climate talks

Global climate talks need to focus on the growing threat from extreme weather and shift away from political squabbles that hobble progress toward a tougher pact to rein in greenhouse gas emissions, the head of the U.N. climate panel said.

Negotiators from nearly 200 countries meet in Durban, South Africa, on Monday for two-week talks, with minimal expectations of major progress toward an agreement that will eventually bind all major economies to emissions caps.

Rajendra Pachauri warned the latest round of talks risked being bogged down by “short-term and narrow political considerations.”

“It is absolutely essential that the negotiators get a continuous and repeated exposure to the science of climate change,” Pachauri told Reuters in an interview late on Tuesday.

“If we were to do that it will definitely have an impact on the quality and outcome of the negotiations, after all these are human beings, they have families, they are people also worried about what is going to happen to the next generations.”

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UN Food and Agriculture Organization statistics illustrate a dire global problem: We squander nearly one third of our food through food waste (on the consumption side) and food losses (on the production side). In developed countries, over 40% of losses come from companies and consumers throwing out perfectly good food. And on the production side, we lose enough food to feed at least 48 million people due to inefficiencies in harvesting, storage and delivery, according to the FAO. The WorldWatch Institute is addressing the problem through its Nourishing the Planet project. Here are some holiday tips from them.

Reducing Food Waste During the Holiday Season

10 simple steps we all can take to help make this season less wasteful and more plentiful

Washington, D.C.—-The holiday season is a time for gifts, decorations, and lots and lots of food. As a result, it’s also a time of spectacular amounts of waste. In the United States, we generate an extra 5 million tons of household waste each year between Thanksgiving and New Year’s, including three times as much food waste as at other times of the year. When our total food waste adds up to 34 million tons each year, that equals a lot of food. With the holidays now upon us, the Worldwatch Institute offers 10 simple steps we all can take to help make this season less wasteful and more plentiful.

“Family, community, love and gratitude are all unlimited resources,” says Worldwatch President Robert Engelman. “Unfortunately, food and the energy, water and other natural resources that go into producing food are not. The logical strategy is to let ourselves go in enjoying the unlimited conviviality and communion of the holidays, but to avoid wasting the limited resources. Even simple shifts toward sustainability—-and reducing food waste is an easy one—-can have major impacts when multiplied by millions of people.”

According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, roughly one-third of all food produced for human consumption—-approximately 1.3 billion tons—-is lost or wasted each year. Consumers in developed countries such as the United States are responsible for 222 million tons of this waste, or nearly the same quantity of food as is produced in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

“With nearly a billion people going hungry in the world, including 17.2 million households within the United States, reducing the amount of food being wasted is incredibly important,” says Danielle Nierenberg, director of Worldwatch’s Nourishing the Planet project. “We need to start focusing on diverting food from going into our trashcans and landfills and instead getting it into the hands of those who need it most.”

The Nourishing the Planet (www.NourishingthePlanet.org) team recently traveled to 25 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, and soon will be traveling to Latin America, shining a spotlight on communities that serve as models for a more sustainable future. The project is unearthing innovations in agriculture that can help alleviate hunger and poverty while also protecting the environment. These innovations are elaborated in Worldwatch’s annual flagship report, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet.

As Americans prepare for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, here are 10 tips to help reduce the amount of food we waste:

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This remarkable video from the International Space Station captures the fierce fragility of everything we do and are:

Pulling back even farther, Carl Sagan’s musings on the “pale blue dot,” and the “responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the only home we’ve ever known.”

Please give thanks to each other.

What are you thankful for?

To be more precise, what are climate hawks thankful for?

It’s been another tough year for climate hawks, which is all the more reason to focus for one day on the positive things.

I am thankful for climate scientists, who toil away for long hours away from their family, sometimes in the most inhospitable parts of the world, for not much money (sorry disinformers) — and do so thanklessly, indeed they do so in the face of anti-science cyber-bullying and hostility from sorry-ass disinformers — all in a desperate attempt to avert the gravest of human tragedies.  They are like the hero of Henrik Ibsen’s classic An Enemy of the People — which someone should definitely modernize into a climate science parable.

Anyway, what are you climate hawks thankful for today (aside from not being turkeys)?

Thanksgiving dinner battled the elements in 2011. Scientists tell us that these sorts of extreme weather events are exactly what we’d expect to see in a changing climate.

Here’s the graphic from Resource Media [click to enlarge]:
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One thing we can’t be thankful for today is the UK police.  Once the paragon of criminologists, they utterly screwed up the investigation of phone hacking by Murdcoch’s News Corp for years.

They appear today more Inspector Clouseau than Sherlock Holmes.

That also seems to be the case in the ‘Climategate’ scandal, as Richard Black at the BBC explains in “Climate Emails, Storm or Yawn?“:

I have it from a very good source that it absolutely was a hack, not a leak by a “concerned” UEA scientist, as has been claimed in some circles.

The Norfolk Police clearly see it as a criminal act too, a spokesman telling me that “the contents [of the new release] will be of interest to our investigation which is ongoing”.

Groups like UCS are, however, beginning to ask where that investigation has got to.

I have been passed information stemming from an FoI request to Norfolk Police showing that over the past 12 months, they have spent precisely £5,649.09 [US$8,844]on the investigation.

All of that was disbursed back in February; and all but £80.05 went on “invoices for work in the last six months”.

Of all the figures surrounding the current story, that is perhaps the one that most merits further interrogation.

Precisely.

h/t DeSmogBlog

Related Post:

• Scotland Yard to Finally Investigate Murdoch’s NewsCorp for Computer and Email Hacking. Duh!