Nestlé: Malevolent Corporation Capitalizes on Global Water Crisis

I have just returned from a week in Switzerland to promote the right to water and to challenge the giant Swiss bottled water giant Nestlé. My visit was arranged by Franklin Frederick, an activist and leader in the global fight against Nestlé Waters, who is originally from Brazil, but now lives and works in Switzerland. Franklin is an extraordinary man. He is fiercely committed to global water justice and has been a thorn in the side of the water privateers for years. I also reconnected with Rosmarie Bar, a former Green Member of the Swiss Parliament and former senior member of the Swiss development network, Alliance Sud. Rosmarie and I worked together to form an international group called Friends of the Right to Water and worked for many years to lay the groundwork for the recognition of this right at the UN.

I spoke at the universities of Bern and Lucerne and in a beautiful 500 year-old church located in the heart of Bern. In the magnificent wood paneled Swiss Parliament, I also met with a delegation of MPs from every party who are committed to protecting public water and the human right to water. In all these venues, I met wonderful, committed people working for economic and social justice.However, it is very clear that Nestlé is a powerful presence in Switzerland and its influence in the halls of power goes deep. Everyone I talked to said so in one way or another. Switzerland has no law limiting political donations from corporations, or requiring transparency in campaign financing. Given that the marketing department of Nestlé has a larger annual budget than the World Health Organization, it is widely understood that the company has great political influence.

Of special concern is the partnership that the Swiss Federal Agency for Development and Cooperation - SDC - has entered into with the company. Nestlé is a charter member of the newly formed Swiss Water Partnership, along with civil society groups and aid agencies, that will advise the Swiss government on water policy in the Global South. The stated desire is to come to a set of “shared values” so that governments, NGOs and the private sector are promoting common policies and world views when giving aid money for water development, or what the SDC calls “speaking with one voice.” But what is this voice?

Nestlé was one of the first companies to commodify water. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, seeing what it did to the groundwater supplies of the surrounding regions, the company bought up huge quantities of mineral water deposits in Switzerland. Nestlé is the biggest bottled water company in the world and is scouring countries all over the planet for new supplies of water.

Nestlé has consistently promoted public-private partnerships whereby private water companies run water services on a for profit basis. Company head Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, referred to often in the Swiss media as the “Water Man,” repeatedly promotes the full commodification of water (although after much criticism, now admits that the poor need some water too.) He has proposed setting aside 1.5 per cent of the planet’s water for human rights, the rest going into the market. Nestlé also promotes GMO crops, which are voracious users of pesticides.

So these policies are the ones that the company will promote to the Swiss government in its development work. It is a travesty that this is the water face to the world of Switzerland. The country has one of the finest public water systems anywhere. SDC defends this partnership and publicly states that a key goal is to promote the interests of Swiss water companies abroad.

But what does Nestlé know about delivering water and sanitation services? Nothing! It is involved with this partnership to gain credibility and to have the Swiss government open doors to new private water markets in the developing world. It is the same reason the company is deeply involved with the funding arm of the World Bank. In fact, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe chairs a new advisory board called the 2030 Water Resources Group that helps set policy models and priorities for water and sanitation programs around the world.

This is a disaster in a world where demand for water is outstripping supply at an accelerating rate. As Wenonah Hauter from Food and Water Watch says, Nestlé’s goal is to shift government policy away from providing public municipal water supplies to people, and toward a dependency on bottled water to provide basic drinking water. And of course, it is about capitalizing on the global water crisis.

It is time to call out Nestlé and the governments that partner with them. I will return to Nestlé’s home base again soon where we will shout out against this malevolent water hunter.

BOLIVIA GIVES LEGAL RIGHTS TO THE EARTH

Developed by grassroots social groups and agreed by politicians, the Law of Mother Earth recognises the rights of all living things, giving the natural world equal status to human beings.

Once fully approved, the legislation will provide the Earth with rights to: life and regeneration; biodiversity and freedom from genetic modification; pure water; clean air; naturally balanced systems; restoration from the effects of human activity; and freedom from contamination.

The legislation is based on broader principles of living in harmony with the Earth and prioritising the “collective good.” At its heart is an understanding that the Earth is sacred, which arises from the indigenous Andean worldview of ‘Pachamama’ (meaning Mother Earth) as a living being. An initial act outlining the rights – which was passed by Bolivia’s national congress in December 2010 and paves the way for the full legislation – defines Mother Earth as a dynamic and “indivisible community of all living systems and living organisms, interrelated, interdependent and complementary, which share a common destiny.”

Bolivia’s government will be legally bound to prioritise the wellbeing of its citizens and the natural world by developing policies that promote sustainability and control industry. The economy must operate within the limits of nature and the country is to work towards energy and food sovereignty while adopting renewable energy technologies and increasing energy efficiency.Preventing climate change is a key objective of the law, which includes protecting the lives of future generations. The government is requesting that rich countries help Bolivia adapt to the effects of climate change in recognition of the environmental debt they owe for their high carbon emissions. Bolivia is “particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change,” according to an Oxfam report in 2009, with increasing drought, melting glaciers and flooding.

On the international stage, the government will have a legal duty to promote the uptake of rights for Mother Earth, while also advocating peace and the elimination of all nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Following a change in Bolivia’s constitution in 2009, the law is part of a complete overhaul of the legal system. It represents a shift away from the western development model to a more holistic vision, based on the indigenous concept of Vivir Bien (to live well). 

The proposal for the law states: “Living Well means adopting forms of consumption, behaviour and and conduct that are not degrading to nature. It requires an ethical and spiritual relationship with life. Living Well proposes the complete fulfilment of life and collective happiness.”

Unity Pact, an umbrella group for five Bolivian social movements, prepared the draft law. They represent over 3m people and all of the country’s 36 indigenous groups, the majority of whom are smallscale farmers with many still living on their ancestral lands. The bill protects their livelihoods and diverse cultures from the impacts of industry

Undarico Pinto, a leader of the social movement Confederación Sindical Única de Trabajadores Campesinos de Bolivia, said: “It will make industry more transparent. It will allow people to regulate industry at national, regional and local levels.”Signifying a fundamental shift away from exploitation of nature, the draft law referrers to mineral resources as “blessings” and states that Mother Earth, “is sacred, fertile and the source of life that feeds and cares for all living beings in her womb. She is in permanent balance, harmony and communication with the cosmos.” 

A Ministry of Mother Earth is to be established to promote the new rights and ensure they are complied with. But with its economy currently dependent on exports of natural resources, earning nearly a third of its foreign currency – around £300m a year – from mining companies, Bolivia will need to balance its new obligations against the demands of industry.

The full law is expected to pass within the next few months and is unlikely to face any significant opposition because the ruling party, the Movement Towards Socialism, has a considerable majority in parliament. Its leader, President Evo Morales, voiced a commitment to the initiative at the World People’s Conference on Climate change, held in Bolivia in April 2010.  

The Law of Mother Earth includes the following:

The right to maintain the integrity of life and natural processes.

The right to not have cellular structure modified or genetically altered.

The right to continue vital cycles and processes free from human alteration.

The right to pure water.

The right to clean air.

The right to balance, to be at equilibrium.

The right to be free of toxic and radioactive pollution.

The right to not be affected by mega-infrastructure and development projects that affect the balance of ecosystems and the local inhabitant communities

The law also promotes “harmony” and “peace” and “the elimination of all nuclear, chemical, biological” weapons.

Scientific Consensus on GM is an Illusion

The assumption is that a global scientific consensus has formed around the value of patent-protected transgenic crops, analogous to the general agreement around human-induced climate change. Yet that is clearly false.

Let’s start by looking at the International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science, and Technology for Development (IAASTD), a three-year project to assess the role of agricultural knowledge, science, and technology in reducing hunger and poverty, improving rural livelihoods, and facilitating environmentally, socially, and economically sustainable development.

Widely compared to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which definitively established a scientific consensus around climate change on its release in 2007, the IAASTD engaged 400 scientists from around the globe under the aegis of the World Bank and the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. According to the Executive Summary of the Synthesis Report, the effort was originally “stimulated by discussions at the World Bank with the private sector and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) on the state of scientific understanding of biotechnology and more specifically transgenics.”

If transgenic-crop technology had captured the broad approval of the global agricultural-science community, here was the place to show it. But what happened? According to the Executive Summary of the Synthesis Report:

   "Assessment of biotechnology is lagging behind development; information can be anecdotal and contradictory, and uncertainty on benefits and harms is unavoidable. There is a wide range of perspectives on the environmental, human health and economic risks and benefits of modern biotechnology; many of these risks are as yet unknown.

   The application of modern biotechnology outside containment, such as the use of genetically modified (GM) crops, is much more contentious [than biotechnology within containment, e.g., industrial enzymes]. For example, data based on some years and some GM crops indicate highly variable 10 to 33 percent yield gains in some places and yield declines in others."

The report goes on to call for a whole new framework for crop-biotechnology research—an implicit rebuke to the current one:

   "Biotechnologies should be used to maintain local expertise and germplasm so that the capacity for further research resides within the local community. Such R&D would put much needed emphasis onto participatory breeding projects and agroecology."

Thus, whereas the IPCC revealed broad agreement among the global scientific community around climate change, the IAASTD—arguably the "IPCC of agriculture"—showed deep ambivalence among scientists over transgenic crops.

The real question becomes: How can serious publications like Seed claim that skepticism toward GMOs reflects a “scientific flip-flop”? To be sure, the illusion of a broad consensus holds sway in the United States, and the IAASTD has clearly failed to correct it. The US media greeted its release with near-complete silence—in stark contrast to its reception in the European media.

So, how did this spectral scientific consensus for GMOs come into being? In a two-part article called ” The Genetic Engineering of Food and The Failure of Science,” recently published as a “work in progress” by the peer-reviewed International Journal of the Sociology of Food and Agriculture, the agroecologist Don Lotter ventures to answer this.

Lotter's paper traces the history of the rise of plant transgenics, convincingly arguing that political and economic power, not scientific rigor, have driven the technology’s ascent. He shows that the hyper-liberal US regulatory regime around GMOs stems not from an overwhelming weight of evidence, but rather from close, often revolving-door ties between the industry and US administrations dating back to Reagan. Take the assumption that transgenic foods have been proven to have no ill effects on human health. Far from being exhaustively studied, it turns out, that question has been largely ignored—left by US regulators to be sorted out by the industry itself.        When there have been long-term trials by independent researchers, the results have hardly been comforting.

For example, writes Lotter:

   "In a 2008 report (Velimirov et al., 2008) of research commissioned by the Austrian government, a long-term animal feeding experiment showed significant reproductive problems in transgenic corn-fed rats when all groups were subject to multiple birth cycles, a regimen that has not hitherto been examined in feeding studies comparing transgenic and non-transgenic foods."

Thus in the first-ever multi-generational study of the effects of GMO food, evidence of serious reproductive trouble comes to light: reduced birth weight and fertility. If the reproductive system can be viewed as a proxy for broad health, then the Austrian study raises serious questions about the effects of consuming foods derived from transgenic crops—i.e., upwards of 70 percent of the products found on U.S. supermarket shelves. Yet, as in the case of the IAASTD, the Austrian study dropped with a thud by the US media.

The Austrian results raise an obvious question: why did the first multigenerational study of the health effects of GMOs emerge more than a decade after their broad introduction in the United States? Lotter devotes the second half of his paper, "Academic Capitalism and the Loss of Scientific Integrity," to answering that question. 

Lotter traces the generally blasé approach to GMO research to "the restructuring of research university science programs in the past 25 years from a non-proprietary 'public goods' approach to one based on dependence on private industry." He teases out the following ramifications:

   • tolerance by the scientific community of bias against and mistreatment of non-compliant scientists whose work results in negative findings for transgenics, including editorial decisions by peer-reviewed journals, as well as tolerance of biotechnology industry manipulation of the information environment

   • monopolization of the make-up of expert scientific bodies on transgenics by pro-industry scientists with vested interests in transgenics

   • deficient scientific protocols, bias, and possible fraud in industry-sponsored and industry-conducted safety testing of transgenic foods

   • increasing politically and commercially driven manipulation of science within federal regulatory bodies such as the FDA

Lotter delivers well-documented examples to support each of those charges. He shows, for example, that the USDA dispersed $1.8 billion for crop biotechnology research to universities between 1992 and 2002, of which one percent ($18 million) went to "risk-related research.” He cites another peer-reviewed study showing that university biotech research has "'overwhelmingly been targeted at plants and traits that are of interest to the largest firms," and that "research on non-proprietary solutions which benefit the wider public has been lacking…This arena should be central to the mission of universities and other non-profit research institutions.”

It's worth noting that the IAASTD points out similar concerns in the industry-dominated research agendas at public universities:

   "An emphasis on modern biotechnology without ensuring adequate support for other agricultural research can alter education and training programs and reduce the number of professionals in other core agricultural sciences. This situation can be self-reinforcing since today’s students define tomorrow’s educational and training opportunities." 

A recent event reported by the New York Times illustrates the lack of independence—and thus, arguably, rigor—that surrounds too much GMO research. A group of 23 US scientists signed a letter to the EPA declaring that, “No truly independent research [on GMOs] can be legally conducted on many critical questions.” The Times reported that because of draconian intellectual property laws, scientists can’t grow GMO crops for research purposes without gaining permission from the corporations that own the germplasm—permission which is sometimes denied or granted only on condition that the companies can review findings before publication.

Stunningly, "The researchers … withheld their names [from the EPA letter] because they feared being cut off from research by the companies," The Times reports. 

So this is the sort of scientific consensus around GMOs that environmentalists should bow to—one literally based on fear among tenured faculty?

Ultimately, scientific responses to the advent of climate change and the rise of GMOs make a poor comparison. The consensus around climate change developed in spite of a multi-decade campaign by some of the globe's most powerful and lucrative industries—the petroleum and coal giants—to protect markets worth hundreds of billions of dollars. The consensus around GMOs—or at least the specter of one—arose through the lobbying and support of an industry desperate to protect its own multibillion-dollar investments. I predict this bought-and-paid-for consensus will prove short-lived. 

50 Years After 'Silent Spring' We Have Ignored Rachel Carson’s Findings to Our Peril

Fifty years ago, a Johns Hopkins–educated zoologist did something that few at the time thought was possible. With the publication of one book, she started a national debate about the universally accepted use of synthetic pesticides, the irresponsibility of science, and the limits of technological promise. She also challenged the metastatic growth of the synthetic chemicals industry that grew out of World War II.

Silent Spring [6] was Rachel Carson’s third book, following The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea. The Sea Around Us had won the 1952 National Book Award for nonfiction and remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 21 months. Yet it is unlikely that Carson, who had spent most of her career as an editor for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, had any idea of what the publication of Silent Spring would engender.

Carson became interested in the harmful effects of pesticides, especially DDT, in the late 1950s. DDT was first commercially produced just prior to World War II, and was used to reduce the threats posed by insects to U.S. troops overseas. After the war, DDT was promoted as a great scientific advance and was widely and successfully used as an insect killer in the United States. The chemical was considered to be so benign that parents casually watched their children running in billowing white DDT clouds sprayed from trucks in residential neighborhoods.

Carson’s research focused on organic pesticides like chlordane, heptachlor, and aldrin, as well as DDT. She documented the widespread death of birds that had been exposed to the chemicals, as well as reproductive, birth, and developmental abnormalities in mammals. All life, she wrote, is a “chemical factory” dependent upon oxygen to power the cell machinery. Citing the work of Nobel scientist Otto Warburg, she explained in clear terms why repeated small exposures to pesticides and nuclear radiation change the ability of the cell to carry out normal activities, resulting in malignancy or defective offspring—the reason there is no “safe” dose of a carcinogen. Many scientific experts shared her concerns.

The New Yorker ran three excerpts [7] of Silent Spring in June 1962, before the official September 27 publication date. The response was swift and resounding. CBS began preparing a nationally broadcast special on the book. Page one of the July 22 New York Times featured a story entitled “Silent Spring Is Now a Noisy Summer [8].” On August 29, a reporter attending President Kennedy’s press conference asked if the federal government was examining the growing concern about DDT and other pesticides. Kennedy responded: “Yes...I think particularly, of course, since Miss Carson’s book.” A month before the publication date, Houghton Mifflin had advance orders for 40,000 copies and had a 150,000-copy contract with the Book-of-the-Month Club.

The chemical industry didn’t wait to read the book. Carson’s short but devastating treatise was a threat to their bottom line, and the industry that manufactured DDT and other pesticides Carson had described reacted angrily to her scientifically sound arguments that their products were harmful. They attacked Carson’s expertise. They attacked her methods. They attacked her motivations. They attacked her conclusions. They threatened to sue Houghton Mifflin and The New Yorker.

In a relentless campaign to destroy her character, the industry distributed pamphlets, published articles, and vilified Carson in media interviews. They described her as “fanatic” and “hysterical,” yet almost all international scientists agreed with Carson. A Scientific Advisory Committee assembled by Kennedy issued a supportive report in May 1963. In response to the shrill attacks of her industry critics, Carson calmly stuck to the facts. She died at age 56 from breast cancer, 18 months after Silent Spring was published.

Many regard Carson as the founder of the American environmental movement. Yet the movement had already begun. Albert Schweitzer, well-known scientists such as Linus Pauling, pediatrician Benjamin Spock, and Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas had already been speaking out against the dangers of above-ground atom-bomb testing. Citizen groups like Women Strike for Peace organized increasingly large demonstrations against such tests.

But to a large extent, Silent Spring sparked the movement that endures today. In 1967, scientists and activists founded the Environmental Defense Fund. On April 29, 1970, one week after widespread demonstrations on the first Earth Day, President Nixon’s Advisory Council on Executive Action proposed the Environmental Protection Agency, which became a reality later that year. And in June 1972, after three years of federal hearings and scientific inquiries into the question Carson raised in Silent Spring, EPA Director William Ruckelshaus issued an order that banned the use of DDT in the United States. The environmental movement was in full swing.

Despite the efforts of Carson and others who followed, a long list of chemicals is still in daily use—arguably more than ever. It includes pesticides, herbicides, industrial agents, fuels, preservatives, food additives, dyes, household products, medicines, and more.

The benefits of chemicals must always be weighed against their risks—but those risks must be objectively calculated. As Carson wrote in Silent Spring:

The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable: the chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life but also in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the very nature of the world—the very nature of its life.

Fifty years after the publication of the book, the corporations that produce and market the chemicals are far larger. Their lobbyists and PR machines are more well-funded and sophisticated and exert unprecedented influence over regulators, the media, and, most critically, elected officials.

A Congressional resolution introduced by Maryland Democratic Senators Ben Cardin and Barbara Mikulski, honoring Carson on what would have been her 100th birthday in 2007, was blocked by Senator Tom Coburn (R-OK), who complemented his vote with disparaging remarks about the author. “Millions of people in the developing world, particularly children under 5, died because governments bought into Carson’s junk-science claims about DDT,” he said in response to the resolution.

Today, the industry and its trade associations echo Coburn’s remarks and depict Carson as the leader of a mass-murder campaign that today allows diseases such malaria to proliferate because there is no chemical check on mosquitoes. In 2009, Todd Seavey of the industry-backed American Council on Science and Health wrote on World Malaria Day: “We need DDT Day.... Anti-chemical greens (inspired by Rachel Carson’s fear-mongering book Silent Spring) may already be humanity’s most prolific killers.”

The EPA never banned DDT for use against malaria, and Carson herself never supported a universal ban on pesticides. Instead, she wrote, “Practical advice should be ‘Spray as little as you possibly can’ rather than ‘Spray to the limit of your capacity.’”

Man-made chemicals will always be a part of life on earth. The volume of chemicals is massive, and the slow decay of many means they will be part of the biosphere for decades and centuries. The legacy of Silent Spring is that much can and should be done to reduce the health risks they pose, without sacrificing progress. About 41 percent of Americans will develop cancer. The current generation of children, compared to their parents or grandparents, has higher rates of disorders including low weight births, cancer, asthma, diabetes, autism, and ADHD. While multiple factors influence disease risk, exposure to toxic chemicals is one factor.

We have ignored Carson’s findings to our peril.

Record Arctic Snow Loss May Be Prolonging North American Drought

Melting Arctic snow isn’t as dramatic as melting sea ice, but the snow may be vanishing just as rapidly, with potentially profound consequences for weather in the United States.

Across the Arctic, snow melted earlier and more completely this year than any in recorded history. In the same way ice loss exposes dark water to the sun’s radiant heat, melting snow causes exposed ground to heat up, adding to the Arctic’s already super-sized warming.

This extra heat retention appears to alter the polar jet stream, slowing it down and causing mid-latitude weather patterns to linger. It’s even possible that the ongoing North American drought, the worst since the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, was fueled in part by climate change in the Arctic, making it a preview of this new weather pattern’s ripple effects.

“In the past, whatever happened in the Arctic stayed in the Arctic. But now it seems to be reaching down from time to time in the mid-latitudes,” said climatologist James Overland of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. “When you combine the new influence of the Arctic with other effects, such as El Niño, we’re seeing the more extreme weather events.”

Over the last several weeks, public attention has been seized by the disappearance of ice in the Arctic Ocean, which in September covered a smaller area than at any other time in the climate record, a fitting exclamation point to its 50 percent decline since the late 1970s.

Variation from the post-1967 historical norm in June snow cover, June 2012. Dark orange corresponds to between 75 and 100 percent below average. Image: Rutgers University Climate Lab

In June, Arctic snow cover also reached historic minimums. At the time, the news received little attention. Though the snow has retreated for several decades, and has even declined as precipitously as the sea ice, freshly exposed ground simply lacks the visual impact of open water.

It’s also harder to put the decline into context: Scientifically useful Arctic snow records only date back to the beginning of satellite photography in the 1960s, a relatively short period of time. The role of snowmelt has received less research attention than sea ice, and scientists are just starting to understand the interactions between climate patterns in the Arctic and lower North America.

“This is cutting-edge science,” said climatologist David Robinson, who runs the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University. The research is maturing, however, and the implications are troubling.

To understand what snow loss could do, it’s instructive to study what happens when sea ice melts, a process described in a Geophysical Research Letters paper published in March by climatologists Jennifer Francis of Rutgers University and Stephen Vavrus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As the sea, now deprived of its reflective cover, absorbs heat, surface temperatures rise. That heat returns to the atmosphere during fall and winter, reducing the difference in temperature between the Arctic and latitudes below. This difference is what propels the northern hemisphere’s polar jet stream, the globe-spanning atmospheric current that pushes vast amounts of cold air south and warm air north.

“Think of it like a hill. Normally the Arctic is much colder than areas to the south. Because warm air takes up more space than cold air, the atmosphere to the south is thicker. If you’re sitting on top of one of these layers, you’ll slide down the hill to the Arctic. Earth’s spin turns you towards the right, and that’s what generates the jet stream,” explained Francis. “If you’re warming the Arctic more, the hill is less steep, and you won’t roll as fast.”

The jet stream loses speed. As this happens, say Francis and Vavrus, its path also changes, dipping far to the south and reaching to the north. This is what happens in fall and winter after Arctic sea ice melts in the summer. In the summer, after snow melts in spring, “we think a similar mechanism is going on with the snow,” Francis said. “If you lose all the snow earlier on high latitude land in the spring, when the sun is strongest, you’ve got dark soil exposed earlier, warming up earlier. It’s another way to make the Arctic warm faster than the rest of the hemisphere.”

'People talk about the new normal. There's nothing normal about this. It's going to continue to change.'

For now, Francis says, this is still a hypothesis, albeit supported by North American climate patterns in recent years and similar observations from Siberia. “There’s just basic physics behind it. We’re dealing with a very different energy budget up in polar regions than previously, because we’re exposing the land earlier in the season to the warming rays of the sun,” Robinson said. “The physics are indisputable.”

Indeed, it’s reasonable to speculate about the effects of the jet stream’s new patterns — and that’s where things get really interesting. In another Geophysical Research Letters paper now in press, Francis and Overland describe how atmospheric pressure patterns generated by extreme spring snowmelts in the last several years seem to have channeled warm air across the central Arctic Ocean.

The winds accelerate the sea ice’s melt and push it into the Atlantic Ocean. They also seem to have hastened Greenland’s ice sheet melt, which reached unprecedented rates this July. “The winds used to be light,” said Overland. “Now we have more steady winds that blow from the Bering Strait across the north pole and out into Atlantic.”

The connection between snowmelt and the new winds hasn’t been directly proven, Overland said, but the pieces fit. “In the last three years, we’ve had a real major loss in snow cover. That’s why we think there may be a tie between the loss of snow, higher atmospheric pressure and the changes in the winds,” he said.

As the polar jet stream slows and meanders, the regional weather patterns it influences could end up persisting longer than usual, rather than being carried away by the stream. Whether this would extend to temperate latitudes during the summer isn’t certain, said Francis, since the polar jet stream tends to be weaker in summer than in winter, but it’s plausible.

“It’s harder to show in summer, because the waves are more amorphous, but the same mechanisms should happen,” Francis said. If so, that could at least partly explain why the North American drought, which started in the spring, is so severe. In a year without such an extreme Arctic snowmelt, it might have been a dry spell dispelled by the jet stream. Instead it stuck around.

Northern hemisphere snow coverage, in millions of square kilometers, as compared to the post-1967 average. Image: Rutgers University Climate Lab

More research is needed to be certain this hypothesized cascade of snowmelt, jet stream changes and drought lockdown in fact happened — Overland cautioned that “it’s very, very difficult to say” — but it raises the possibility that the Arctic climate is even more intertwined with lower-latitude weather than most researchers thought.

If so, extreme lower-latitude weather events will become more likely. “As the waves work more slowly, the weather wherever you happen to be will tend to change more slowly,” Francis said. “If that goes on long enough, you have extreme weather. If you have a cold snap for a day or two, it’s not a big deal. If it goes on for weeks, it’s an event. Same with drought.”

The next question is whether the extreme Arctic snowmelt is a result of human-caused warming. According to Francis, that’s likely the case. “There’s nothing else that can explain it. It’s so dramatic. It’s almost certainly mostly anthropogenic,” she said.

Robinson said climate scientists generally agree that some Arctic warming is human-forced, but would disagree as to precisely how much. As for himself, “I believe we see the fingerprint of man in it,” he said, saying there is a “preponderance of evidence” that greenhouse gases are to blame. “We see multiple changes going on there. These things are happening just as the models suggest they should happen.”

Even a small amount of unnatural Arctic warming is a problem. “That little bit of warming starts all these physical processes, like loss of snow and ice, so you start absorbing more solar energy rather than reflecting it to space. That amplifies the signal,” said Overland, who says people are responsible for an Arctic uptick of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit. “It’s not just the initial warming. It’s the cascade of events.”

Some researchers have also linked the drought to an intersection of human-caused warming in the Indian Ocean, where warmer temperatures are historically associated with mid-latitude droughts, and natural La Niña cooling in the central Pacific, which generates dry spells in southern North America. Add this “perfect ocean for drought” to the Arctic snowmelt, and the combination may have been catastrophic.

That, of course, remains a hypothesis. “I wish we had years more data. I wish we had models that could give us order-of-magnitude improvements in temporal and spatial resolution. But that’s science. You put the pieces together, and you conduct your investigation,” Robinson said.

In a few years, scientists may have a better idea. In the meantime, the Arctic will continue to melt. “We are seeing changes that most of us never imagined we would see in our careers,” Robinson continued. “People talk about the new normal. There’s nothing normal about this. It’s going to continue to change.

William Malaurie -- Yes, GMOs are poisonous!

*French researchers studied privately for two years, 200 rats fed GM corn. Tumors, serious diseases ... a massacre. And a bomb [for the] GMO industry. 

This is a real bomb that launches this September 19 to 15 hours, the very serious American journal "Food and Chemical Toxicology" - a benchmark for food toxicology - publishing the results of the experiment conducted by [the] team [of] French Gilles-Eric Seralini, professor of molecular biology at the University of Caen. A cluster bomb [for] scientific, medical, and industrial policy. It sprays indeed an official truth: the safety of genetically modified maize. 

Heavily toxic and often fatal

Even at low doses, the GM study proves heavily toxic and often lethal to rats. So much so that, if it were a drug, it should be suspended forthwith pending further investigations. Because it is the same GMO found on our plates through the meat, eggs or milk.

In 2006, this is a true thriller that begins this research, the project manager, Gilles-Eric Seralini discloses itself conclusions in a book to be published next week ("All guinea pigs", Flammarion, in bookstores September 26).
Codenamed Vivo

Until 2011, the researchers worked under conditions of quasi-underground. They have their encrypted emails and the Pentagon, have banned all phone conversation and even launched a study decoy as they feared a coup de Jarnac multinational seed.

The story of the operation - codenamed Vivo - [involves] the difficult recovery of GM maize seeds NK 603, owned [and] patented [by] Monsanto, through an agricultural college in Canada. Then harvested and the repatriation of "big jute bags" [via]the port of Le Havre in late 2007, before making croquettes in total secrecy and the selection of two hundred lab rats called "Sprague Dawley". [The result?] Chilling: "After less than a year of genetically modified maize menus differentiated says Professor Séralini, it was a slaughter among our rats, [of] which I had not imagined the magnitude." 

Serious diseases, mammary tumors

All groups of rats, whether fed with GM maize treated or untreated with Roundup herbicide, Monsanto, or fed with water containing low doses of herbicide found in GM fields are hit by a multitude of serious diseases in the 13th month of the experiment. In females, this is manifested by explosions chain mammary tumors that reach up to 25% of their weight. Males, are purifiers organs, liver and kidneys, which are marked with abnormalities or severe. With a frequency of two to five times greater than for rodents fed non-GM corn.

Comparison implacable rats GMO therefore trigger two to three times more tumors than non-GMO rats whatever their sex. At the beginning of the 24th month, that is to say at the end of their lives, 50% and 80% of females are affected GMOs against only 30% among non-GMO.

Above all, tumors occur much faster in rats GM: twenty months earlier in males, three months earlier in females. For an animal that has two years of life expectancy, the difference is considerable. For comparison, one year for a rodent is roughly the equivalent of forty years for a man ... 

Demand accountability

It is these strong conclusions Corinne Lepage , in a book that seems to Friday, September 21 ("The truth about GMOs, is our business", Editions Charles Léopold Mayer), intends to demand accountability from political and experts, French and European health agencies and the Brussels Commission, which have so long opposed by all means and the principle of a long-term study on the physiological impact of GMOs.

This battle, the former Minister of Ecology and First Vice-President of the Committee on Environment, Public Health and Food Safety in Strasbourg, the leading fifteen years in the Criigen (Committee for Independent Research and Information on genetic engineering) with Joel Spiroux and Gilles-Eric Seralini. A simple association 1901 which has yet been able to meet end to end funding of this research (3.2 million euros) that neither INRA, CNRS neither, nor any public agency had judged advisable to undertake.
A study funded by Auchan and Carrefour

How? Another surprise by asking the Swiss Foundation Charles Léopold Mayer. But the owners of the supermarkets (Carrefour, Auchan ..), who gathered for the occasion together. Since the mad cow disease, in fact they want to protect themselves from any new food scandal. So much so that it is Gérard Mulliez, founder of the Auchan Group, which provided the initial funding. 

The study by Professor Séralini portend a new murderous war between pro and anti-GMO. Health agencies they require urgently similar studies to verify the findings of French scientists? It would be the least. Monsanto, the largest seed firm global transgenic leave she do? Unlikely: its survival would be at stake for a single plant GMOs, there are hundreds of varieties. Implying at least a dozen studies from 100 to 150 million euros each!
The time of truth

Except that in this new confrontation, the debate can no longer be bogged down by the past. September 26 dice, everyone can see the film in the cinema shock Jean-Paul Jaud, "All guinea pigs?", Adapted from the book by Gilles-Eric Seralini, and the terrible images of rats stuffy in their tumors. Images that will go around the world and the Internet, as it will be broadcast on Canal + (the "Grand Journal" September 19) and France 5 (October 16 in a documentary). For GM, the era of doubt ends. The time of truth begins.

Read more.. http://bit.ly/UngEH0

Protect Parental Vaccine Choice!

TO CONTACT YOUR LEGISLATORS AND OPPOSE BILL, VISIT: 

http://TinyURL.com/StopForcedVax

OPPOSE STATE LAWS LIMITING PARENTAL RELIGIOUS AND PHILOSOPHICAL EXEMPTIONS!

California legislators struck a decisive blow at parental rights.  

WILL THE GOVERNOR VETO THIS BAD LAW?
We anticipate other states will follow rapidly.  

Similar Law Now Introduced in New Jersey: S.1759
http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2012/Bills/S2000/1759_I1.HTM 
This is of enormous concern to us all, whether we have children or not.

 If parents do not have the right to make health decisions for their minor children, how long will it be before they - and you - no longer have the right to make these same decisons for yourself? The battle being waged on the bodies of these children is an essential health freedom battle.  We simply cannot affort to lose this right.  Please take the Action Item below to preserve parental - and personal - rights.  We urge you to modify the form letter so that our intended recipients do not recieve it as a form letter.  Then, for your own health's sake, please forward this to everyone you can reach, urging them to take the action as well.

Gary Null, Ph.D. and Jeremy Stillman - Shilling for Big Agra: Challenging the Stamford Report’s Conclusions

Mainstream news outlets have widely covered the results of a recent meta-analysis by researchers at Stanford University which claims to offer proof that organic produce is not any healthier than conventional foods. Most Americans, if they believe the media, would no longer be interested in spending a little more money at a local farmers market or health food store and buying organic produce. They would believe, based upon the review by Stanford scientists, that there is no difference between organic and conventional produce. However, there is a backstory that recasts this entire discussion.

New evidence has emerged that Big Agra, including those that support or benefit from genetically modified (GMO) foods, were behind this review and this is nothing more than a PR effort; especially since, there is a November election in California to decide whether to label GMO foods or not. The pro-organic food and GMO labeling movements have little funds and no PR campaign, only concerned citizens using common sense. On the other hand, the pro-GMO camp has tens of millions of dollars and is waging an aggressive campaign to disseminate their propaganda. They know that if consumers vote yes to labeling GMO foods in California, it will spread throughout the country. Therefore, they are trying their hardest to keep our politicians and health safety organizations from speaking out on the side of public health and real, independent science, which shows that GMOs are dangerous and unproven in safety.

Click to read more ...

S. D. Wells -- The $3 billion Human Genome Project was supposed to find the root causes of all diseases, but turned out to be a scientific boondoggle

To ferret out the genetic roots of common diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's and then generate treatments" was the true goal of the 10-year, $3 billion human genome project, or was it? Geneticists who were paid a very pretty penny to study the genetics of disease are claiming they are "back to square one" in knowing where to look for the roots of these diseases, including heart disease and diabetes. But are any of them really diseases at all?

Most diseases are actually contagious, infectious and/or genetic defects, but the four leading causes of death in America, for the most part, are not. So what's the real deal? In June 2000, President Clinton announced that the genome project would "Revolutionize the diagnosis, prevention and treatment of most, IF NOT ALL, human diseases." He then added, "You will see a complete transformation in therapeutic medicine." Remember that Clinton is the man who balanced the national budget.

"Genomics is a way to do science, not medicine," said Harold Varmus, former president of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York, who became director of the National Cancer Institute (NCI). Both organizations pay their presidents and CEO's massive salaries and bonuses, using up most of the public donated monies for administrative costs, all while burying cures for disease (http://just-say-no-to-chemo.blogspot.com). Varmus claims the findings have explained only a small part of the risk of getting a disease, and that scientists now fear even those could be "statistical illusions." (http://www.cancer.gov/aboutnci/director)

Read more.. http://www.naturalnews.com/037167_Human_Genome_Project_scientific_failure_disease.html

Mapping a genetic world beyond genes

Most of the DNA alterations that are tied to disease do not alter protein-coding genes, but rather the "switches" that control them. Characterizing these switches is one of many goals of the ENCODE project - a sweeping, international effort to create a compendium of all of the working parts of the human genome that have not been well studied or well understood.

The function of the vast majority of the human genome has remained largely unknown, but the Encyclopedia of DNA Elements (ENCODE) project, launched in 2003, set out to change that. Comprised of more than 30 participating institutions, including the Broad Institute, the ENCODE Project Consortium has helped to ascribe potential biochemical function to a large fraction of the non-coding genome.

This work has revealed elements that act like dimmer switches, subtly turning up or down a gene's activity and influencing what parts of the genome are utilized in different kinds of cells. The team characterized and mapped out the locations of thousands of these switches and signals. More than 30 papers detailing these results appear online in Nature, Science, Genome Research, and Genome Biology this week.

"With these maps in hand, we can begin to understand why genetic variants that land in the annotated regions may predispose people to disease," said Brad Bernstein, a senior associate member at the Broad Institute and an associate professor of pathology at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and Harvard Medical School. Bernstein is also a principal investigator in the ENCODE Consortium.

Read more.. http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Mapping_a_genetic_world_beyond_genes_999.html