There will be a sea of black cloth fluttering in the sky at the Occupy Balok-Gebeng rally at the Balok beach in Pahang on Saturday, with the organisers gearing up to prepare anti-Lynas banners using the colour of mourning.
FROM BLACKJACK ON SOMETHING FISHY IS GOING ON IN MALAYSIA #
Submitted on 2012/06/21 at 12:28 pm
this proposed march defies logic
if it goes ahead it will prove that Malaysians are cattle that are being led by the ring nose by gutter politicians
how can i say this = because the best most educated people in the World have inspected, written reports, written recommendations, ruled on it, set up committees to investigate, done everything above and beyond what is required, printed it and read it to you, set up meetings, educated people, etc etc and you still believe the gutter politicians that are purposely leading you to the wrong laksa shop.
stupid is stupid does!The government has tabled a motion to set up a parliamentary select committee (PSC) to look into health and safety concerns surrounding the disputed rare earths refinery in Gebeng, Kuantan.An since parliament is just another political wing of Umno headed by Nazri, the PSC conclusions will be obvious. The PM has already said that the … Read more
The ‘Occupy Balok-Gebeng 24 hours’ event will culminate with participants gathering at the gates of the Lynas rare earth refinery, said event organisers Himpunan Hijau. From Facts on A nation that cannot uphold its law cannot preserve its order.Voters in PEKAN, what say you now ? # What a load of rubbish. Good luck if you get sued for defamation. … Read more
 As world fishing stocks decline, less sustainable methods of fishing are becoming increasingly common [Reuters] |
| Worldwide, 90 per cent of large predatory fish stocks are now gone due to overfishing. |
MOSTI says no scientific justification to block Lynas licence why this video was pullout “BBC – One Night In Bh…” This video is no longer available because the YouTube account associated with this video has been terminated due to multiple third-party notifications of copyright infringement from claimant: National Geographic readmore http://suarakeadilanmalaysia.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/who-fuck-is-this-australian-nicholas-curtisgo-lick-rosy-pussy-trespassing-into-our-land-and-you-dare-sue-us/ PKR’s Fuziah Salleh has accused … Read more
Worldwide, 90 per cent of large predatory fish stocks are now gone due to overfishing.
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that 85 per cent of fish stocks are “overexploited, depleted, or recovering from depletion”.
Speaking on the occasion of International World Biodiversity Day on May 22, UN chief Ban Ki-Moon warned that over-consumption and rampant pollution was threatening the world’s oceans and marine biodiversity.
“Commercial over-exploitation of the world’s fish stocks is severe,” he said. “Many species have been hunted to fractions of their original populations. More than half of global fisheries are exhausted, and a further third are depleted.”
This critical convergence of rapidly declining fish stocks and a growing number of the planet’s inhabitants depending on seafood will be discussed at the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainability coming up next month in Brazil.
Are the talks it too late, or is this still a solvable problem?Japanese leaders did not know the extent of the damage in the wake of the nuclear crisis after the massive quake and tsunami hit the Pacific nation even as they tried to play down the risk in public, an independent investigation is set to report.Naoto Kan, the then-prime minister, and his staff began referring to … Read more
AIRHEADED LYNAS EXECUTIVE CHAIRMAN AUSSIE NICHOLAS CURTIS AND UNITED STATE’S ANDERSON DESCENDANTS OF HARDCORE CONVICTS ARE LAUGHING AT MALAYSIANS Don’t you have the knowledge of the govt policy, its just like scrapping rubbishes everyday. ‘Now you see’ ‘ Now you don’t’. How the hell this country’s policies can be trusted in the first place. You … Read more
A plague?
Dr Maria Salta, a biological oceanographer at the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom, gave Al Jazeera a bleak prognosis about the state of the oceans.
“It is clear that if we continue like this, in a few years time there is not going to be much left,” she said of the rampant over-fishing going on across the globe, along with the overall treatment of oceans at the hands of humans. “We are losing species every day without ever knowing about them. Sometimes humans can be like a plague to the environment.”
Dr Salta’s statement might be shocking to some, but there is ample scientific evidence to back it. Overfishing is simply a matter of taking wildlife from the sea at rates that are too high for the fished species to replace themselves. Atlantic cod and herring, along with California’s sardines, were overfished to the brink of extinction by the 1950s, and by the late 20th century, isolated depletions had become both global and catastrophic.YOUR JOKE IS NOT MY JOKE IT IS THE FUTURE OUR GENERATION IS AT STAKE Pahang Mentri Besar Datuk Seri Adnan Yaakob recently lost his temper and called a Chinese newspaper reporter “stupid”, creating an action and thriller movie effect. DEAR PROSTITUTING MALAYSIAN WRITERS… READYCASH AND YOUR MORALITY WHY DO WE SHAME OURSELVES? Posted by fawas on 09/03/2012 … Read more
The PSC hs no competence to do a study on Lynas. They are led by the nose by Lynas and taken for a ride.”The safest and the most advanced rare earth processing plant in the world ” so declared Khaled Nordin,the world’s foremost radiation expert and physicist.How many rare earth plant had this Khaled help …Read more
Fisheries for the most sought-after species have since collapsed. Boris Worm and Ransom Myers, both scientists with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, published a shocking paper in the journal Nature in 2003 explaining that the populations of all large predator fish in the oceans have declined by 90 per cent in the 50 years since modern industrial fishing became widespread.
Three years later the same scientists, along with colleagues from across the world, published an even more startling paper that predicted a total collapse of all fish that are currently caught commercially by 2048.
Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia, along with others, has calculated that the world’s total fish catch peaked in the mid-1980′s and has been in decline every since.THE MENTRI BESAR OF PAHANG, Dato’ Seri Adnan Yaakob, said The seat of the Dato’ Shahbander of Pahang, which two successive holders of the post, Malaysia’s second prime minister, Tun Abdul Razak, and his son, the prime minister, Dato’ Seri Najib, they had held for UMNO since 1955? The constituency was far larger in 1955 … Read more
Dr Simon Boxall, also with the University of Southampton, has been an oceanographer for over 30 years. He sees the three largest threats to the oceans as climate change, plastic, and overfishing.
“But the big problem is that we are overfishing,” Boxall told Al Jazeera. “The [fisheries] management isn’t working, and is in fact causing just as much destruction than if there was no management in the first place.”
Sharks are an example of this problem. The International Union for Conservation of Nature has listed about a third of all open-ocean shark species as currently threatened with extinction because of overfishing. “The oceanic white-tip shark populations declined by 99 per cent from 1950 to 1999, making it now an endangered species,” Salta said, giving an example. “Also, when sharks are removed from the environment you change the balance of the ecosystem and how it functions.” Gilbert Almeida poses some intelligent questions with distractingly theatrical affectation – while Fuziah Salleh is entirely credible and convincing with her clear, concise responses. This feisty level-headed MP for Kuantan is one of the brightest silver linings in the dark and ominous Lynas cloud that hangs over the people Pahang. This 30-minute interview presents an … Read more
An issue that works in tandem with overfishing is bycatch, which is sea life that is caught along with the fish being sought commercially. Dr Salta thinks bycatch could be one of the most worrying problems facing the oceans, and goes as far as saying that bycatch is “a mode of mass marine extinction”.
“From 1994 onwards, 27 million tonnes of bycatch are discarded every year,” she said. “Thirty per cent of marine catch is thrown overboard dead. For shrimpers, 80 per cent of everything caught is bycatch and thrown back for dead.”
Disturbingly, according to the Pew Environmental report Protecting Life in the Sea, nearly one-third of the world supply of commercially caught fish has already collapsed. About this source Living on One Dollar: The Promise of Good Stories The big shift for me occurred when I started volunteering on the things I cared about after my day job was over. With 24 hours in each day, even an extra hour a day on something that wasn’t a financial motivator, but made … Read more
Overfishing
Dr Salta explained how many of the problems besetting the oceans converge to create a cascading effect on sea life.
“If organisms drop out of the food chain, the entire ecosystem is impacted,” she said. “And temperature affects biodiversity and fish stock. Changes in this variable can impact the entire ecosystem and impact fish stocks.”
She cites copepods (tiny crustaceans) in the North Sea as an example. “There was a specific species that hatched in the spring, that was for cod, but during the 1990′s because of temperature change, these were replaced with a warmer weather copepod and these hatched too late,” she said. “So the cod have vanished there, coupled with exploitation by man.”
Dr Boxall also cites the North Sea cod fishery as an example of how climate change is affecting fisheries. “Those cod were overfished, but we also see climate change kicking in and warming the waters, and cod, which like a cooler climate, are being pushed further north,” he explained. “Our cod are migrating to Iceland.”
 |
| Many scientists believe that ‘artisan fishing’, using more fishermen in smaller boats as opposed to factory fishing ships, is one solution to the over-fishing crisis [Reuters] |
Salta said that 25 per cent of the planet’s biodiversity is in danger of extinction within the next 30 years due to commercial fishing.
“When fish become overfished, the human response is to fish down the species to smaller species, so this shifts the target group down, and this affects biodiversity and the ocean ecology,” she explained.
Another aspect of overfishing is trawling – a fishing method that involves pulling fishing net through the water behind a boat. Bottom trawling, when the net literally drags across the seafloor, has obviously negative impacts.
“It’s the equivalent of forest clear-cutting, but in the ocean, because when they [fishermen] trawl the entire bottom, whatever is there is removed from the environment and changes the entire ecosystem,” Salta said. “Biomass of the deep sea is in sharp decline because of trawling.” ABOUT ME M J Akbar Mobashar Jawed (MJ) Akbar : An Author and veteran Journalist with Several Books that have achieved international acclaim. For detailed Bio, click www.mjakbar.org Airheaded Lynas executive chairman Aussie Nicholas Curtis and United State’s Anderson Descendants of hardcore Convicts are laughing at Malaysians readmore http://suarakeadilanmalaysia.wordpress.com/2012/04/16/who-fuck-is-this-australian-nicholas-curtisgo-lick-rosy-pussy-trespassing-into-our-land-and-you-dare-sue-us/ Lynas executive chairman Nicholas Curtis an Airheaded … Read more
Salta said that by doing all of this, the commercial fishing industry is affecting evolution of sea life by causing many fish species to mature earlier, hence causing them to grow to smaller sizes, which causes females to produce smaller eggs of lower quality.
Dr Debora Iglesias-Rodriguez is a biological oceanographer at the UK’s National Oceanography Centre. She specialises in the study of how human impact on the atmosphere is changing the chemistry of the oceans and how this causes acidification. Her concern is that climate change plays a role in lowering fish stocks.
“Calcifying organisms are essentially chalk-producing organisms, and when seawater becomes more alkaline, this is impacted negatively by dissolving them,” Iglesias-Rodriguez told Al Jazeera. “Calcification affects fisheries because many fish’s diet is based on these organisms. So this has food security impacts as well.” PKR’s Fuziah Salleh has accused Lynas Corp of whitewashing safety concerns of its planned refinery in Kuantan by claiming there is a “concerted political campaign” against the plant’s construction, The Australian miner’s boss, Nicholas Curtis, attributed persistent opposition to the rare earths plant as a political campaign, saying last week it was based on “misinformation”, … Read more
Solutions
Boxall, like many scientists, is distressed about the current state of the oceans. “The sea is over 73 per cent of our world. The scale of it means that anyone actually trying to go out and clean them is not physically possible. We have to find ways to change our impacts, because we can’t change what has been done already.”
But he believes there are solutions to many of these problems.
“A sustainable fishery looks like an artisan fishery,” he said. “Small vessels with small nets, catching what might be considered commercially unviable is what we need. 100 small boats would be better than one large factory ship that is scraping the seabed and taking everything out of an area. On small boats, after the sorting, much of it is alive when it goes back into the water.”The fact that AELB approved a TOL for Lynas to operate, even when a storage facility was yet to be unidentified has come as a shock to the people . Four government ministries has been roped in to help Lynas find a suitable storage site in the country is not only amusing but downright deploring. … Read more
Boxall suggests we start thinking more about an environmentally driven market, as opposed to a commercially driven market.
“Fishing as it’s running at the moment isn’t sustainable,” he explained. “The industry will collapse because there won’t be fish to catch. But if we manage it properly now, and come to agreements driven by science and not commerce and politics, we’ll have fisheries in the future. But it’s almost becoming not viable to fish anymore because there are fewer and fewer fish to catch every day.”
I salute the men, women and youngsters who have worked untiringly for more than a year to stop this hideous project – from which no genuine benefit can possibly come (except for Lynas investors and those whose pockets have been lined) – but which will most definitely destroy the ecosystem, not only around Kuantan, but quite possibly impinge on an area far beyond what is expected. For continuing to gouge out huge chunks of Mother Earth for short-term profit, Australian mining companies deserve to be shut down, along with other evil corporations like Monsanto. Why did BN adamantly to go ahead with Lynas ? This is because some selected few has comi$$$$$$ssion to earn. Wonder what did you get Amen, bodoh punya orang !!! BN pawns the health of the nation away and bodoh bodoh support it The head of the parliamentary select committee (PSC) on the Lynas Advanced Materials Plant (Lamp) , Mohamed Khaled Nordin, should be asked to contest for the state/parliamentary seat that covers the plant so that if he is elected, his whole family can be re-locate next to the plant.
Rio de Janeiro: It’s rarely that one sees history unfolding before their eyes. And history does change rarely. It often repeats itself, sometimes as tragedy and sometimes as farce. We are at a conference, which will make make history – either by success or by failure. At Rio+20, the UN summit on sustainable development which opened here on Wednesday, there is now a draft in place – a document which will be adopted by more than 120 world leaders as a blueprint for future policies on growth.
I have been here since June 16 and in the past five days so much has happened and I have heard so many words and seen so many statements that it leaves no doubt in my minds that the whole world, barring some exceptions, is paying a lot attention to this meeting.
Let’s see what is at stake here? The Rio+20 document will become a framework for all policies about growth, poverty, equity and climate. It’s not a binding treaty, but it will have a major impact on how people live, grow their food, what cars they drive, what kind of things they eat, what types of houses they live and where they live. It’s been sometime that the world realized that our growth leads to pollution which leads to global warming which leads to climate change and that leads to changes in agriculture and weather patterns which can lead to freaky weather and send the food availability and food prices out of control.
An agreement between all 190 nations, which are member of the United Nations, on green economy and sustainable development goals would mean that the whole world is going to adopt new technologies and new models of development, which may change the way they have been growing so far. And that’s the reason this meeting became contentious, with US and EU on one side and the group of developing nations, known as G-77+China, on the other side. So strong was the difference of opinion between the two groups that each and every terms such as “poverty”, “green”, “sustainable”, “water”, “ocean” and even “food” were discussed and debated again and again before the draft was finalized.
In the end, after long rounds of talks and negotiations, it was the view of the developing nations that prevailed. Credit must be given to the team of Brazilian diplomats, led by Ambassador Figueiredo, handled the situation so well that matters never went out of hand. Though naysayers and cynics have been saying that Rio+20 would be another Copenhagen (where the world failed to reach an agreement on climate change), there was no agreement to be signed here, only adoption of a declaration. And the draft of that declaration was out on Tuesday. It was delayed by a few hours but it was in place.
Now, this draft proves one thing very clearly that the balance of global power is indeed shifting, if it has not shifted already. The way the BRICS nations – Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – stood by each other and pushed their common agenda, it was clear who was calling the shots. The Americans, Canadians and Europeans just kept trying pushing their agenda, which actually translates into new trade barriers and denial of technology to developing nation, but in the end they failed to prevail.
At Rio+20, if there was a conflict it was between the rich nations, which want to revive their sinking economies by selling new green economy stuff to the developing countries, and the emerging powers like Brazil, India and China, which want to keep their growth rate up so that they can tackle poverty and equity issues in a better way.
With leaders like President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron deciding to sulk by skipping the meet, the stars of this conference are President Dilma Rousseff of Brazil and Prime Ministers Manmohan Singh of and Wen Jiabao of China. Even if Obama was here, he would have made no difference as the US president wouldn’t have contributed to the debate in a positive way.
In the end it was nice to see India siding with G-77 countries, something we have not seen in a long time.
There couldn’t be better place than Rio for this historical change.
| What is sustainability? |
| Sustainable development meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. (Source: Rio+20 conference website) |
| What is climate change? |
| A change of climate that is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods. (Source: IPCC) Since the early 20th century, the Earth’s average surface temperature has increased by about 0.8 °C, with about two thirds of the increase occurring since 1980. Scientists are more than 90 per cent certain that this warming is caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases produced by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels and deforestation. Climate model projections from the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is the most recent of the agencies reports, indicate that during the 21st century the global surface temperature is likely to rise a further 1.1C for their lowest emissions scenario and 6.4 °C for their highest. Many scientists believe an even higher scenario is possible. These findings are recognised by the national science academies of all major industrialised nations. I’ve been asked by a few journalists in Rio this week whether I was pessimistic about the chances of meaningful agreement. Media coverage has — to a certain point understandably — included stories about negotiators quibbling over punctuation, subliminally painting images of Roman emperors, lyres, and blazing urban backdrops. But success comes in many forms. Right now, Rio is bustling with sessions, panels, conferences and forums. Perhaps Rio+20′s real headlines lie here, away from the convoluted communiqués? One example in point: last Sunday The Climate Group hosted a session with Phillips where they launched a report about LED lighting technology. It unveiled the results of a massive trial involving LED street lighting in a dozen of the world’s biggest cities. It showed you could reduce energy consumption by up to 85%. Almost one fifth of all the world’s electricity – and therefore a major slice of CO2 emissions — is linked to lighting. The two organizations went on to issue a call for an international low carbon lighting standard. OK, maybe light bulbs alone are not going to save the world. But in the United States alone, cutting the energy used by lighting by an entirely feasible 40% would save US$53 billion in annual energy costs. Plus it would reduce the energy used by the equivalent of nearly 200 mid-size power stations. The low carbon lighting standard would help get us there – globally – in double-quick time, and we’d all save a lot of money too. That’s not a bad headline. Here’s another headline. Five years ago The Climate Group’s network of State and Regional Government partners promised to plant a billion trees. Yesterday we learned that they are already half way there. Half a billion trees is the equivalent of several years of deforestation at the Amazon. Now that’s a real success story. Interestingly, the UN tells us that as much as 80% of the actions needed to tackle climate change will be taken not by national governments but by regional and state ones. National governments may be debating split infinitives right now. Regional governments are getting on with it. Exclamation point. Among the myriad reports, sessions and forums, the picture can certainly seem fragmented. But there is a lot going on that’s all pointing in the right direction. There is real change happening. As Tony Blair said in a speech screened at Rio this week: “Because of the current financial crisis, acting on climate change is more than ever before an opportunity to lead the world out of recession and to tackle the increasing geopolitical tensions created by the lack of energy security.” Agreed, it all needs to happen a lot faster. But it’s certainly worthy of a few headlines. And maybe they could be the impetus we need to help us move from grammatically perfect texts to really meaningful actions — such as scrapping subsidies on fossil fuels. |
| Climate Change Impacts: |
| Increasing global temperature will affect every area of the planet. The most pronounced changes are happening at the poles, where retreating glaciers and loss of sea ice and permafrost are accelerating. Sea levels are rising, and estimates range from a 1m to 6m increase by the end of this century. Expansion of subtropical deserts is already occurring, along with an increases in both frequency and intensity of extreme weather events that include heat waves, droughts, and heavy rainfall. Many scientists conclude that if the global mean temperature rises 4C above preindustrial levels, human adaptation limits in much of the world will be exceeded, as will natural systems ability to adapt. |
| Solutions: |
| Most countries are parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), whose goal is to prevent dangerous anthropogenic climate change. Parties to the UNFCCC have agreed that deep cuts in emissions are required, and that future global warming should be limited to 2C below the pre-industrial level. |
No comments:
Post a Comment