Environment ministers from nearly 200 countries are arriving in the Polish city of Katowice to join haggling over ways to advance the 2015 Paris accord to curb climate change. National leaders have stayed away from this year’s climate change conference largely because it is devoted to agreeing the details of the implementation of the Paris agreement.

But as ever, the devil is in the details.

Ahead of the ministerial arrivals, climate activists from around the world marched Saturday in the Polish city to vent their frustration and to urge governments to “wake up” and “make the planet green again.”

“It’s time to save our home,” they chanted near the hall hosting the two-week U.N. Climate Change Conference.

Meanwhile, 1,500 kilometers away police in Paris battled Yellow Vest protesters mounting their fourth Saturday of action against the government of French President Emmanuel Macron, a revolt triggered initially by the imposition of higher taxes on fuel.

For Western governments, even environmentally-friendly ones, climate change poses a massive political dilemma the protests in France are bringing home.

Impose the tax hikes and costly regulations scientists say are needed to lower emissions and move economies away from dependency on fossil fuels and governments risk prompting a backlash, largely from lower-income workers and pensioners who can ill-afford to bear the expense. Or move slowly and risk blow back from climate activists and their supporters among largely middle-class and higher-income groups able to adapt with less hardship.

Squaring the circle between those who demand fast-track climate-friendly measures and those who want to slow down and mitigate the impact of moving towards a low-carbon future isn’t going to be easy, as the Paris protests demonstrate, say analysts.

Poland, which is hosting this year’s conference, used the opening last Monday of the 24th U.N. climate change conference to emphasize the dilemma and to try to temper ambitions when delegates come to finalize the rule book for the Paris agreement to make the accord operational.

Among other things Polish leaders called for a “just transition” for fossil fuel industries that face cuts and closures amid efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, warning a badly managed transition to a low-carbon, renewable-energy future will cause major disruption to industry, hardship for ordinary people and could trigger social unrest not just in France, but in other industrialized nations.

Many climate activists attending the conference dismiss warnings about social and political repercussions, seeing them as merely efforts to impede progress, apply the brakes and of providing specious justification for propping up fossil-fuel industries.

British naturalist and documentary-maker David Attenborough gave voice to their frustration last week at the conference, warning time is running out to avert irreversible disaster.

“If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilizations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon. The world’s people have spoken, their message is clear, time is running out, they want you, the decision-makers, to act now. They’re supporting you in making tough decisions, but they’re also willing to make sacrifices in their daily lives,” he said.

Climate activists remain furious that attempts to incorporate a key scientific study into the talks failed last week. U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, published in October, said the world is completely off track from curbing global warming and is heading towards a catastrophic three-centigrade jump in temperatures this century.

Four oil-producing countries, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Russia, opposed the inclusion of the IPCC report into the conference’s key negotiating text. The report is likely to resurface in the final week of bargaining.

The issue of a “just transition” is fast developing into one of the core climate-related issues governments are debating, and it is prompting the attention of investor organizations as well as organized labor.

“As the world begins its much-needed transition from high-carbon to low-carbon economies, investors will have to look beyond physical environmental issues and consider the social aspects of workers and their communities who will be impacted by the move away from carbon-intensive industries,” says Fiona Reynolds, chief executive of the Principles for Responsible Investment, an international network of major institutional investors.

 
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Many companies including McDonald’s and Kellogg are purging artificial colors from their foods, but don’t expect your cheeseburgers or cereal to look much different.

Colors send important signals about food, and companies aren’t going to stop playing into those perceptions.

 

What’s accepted as normal can change, too, and vary by region. Up until the 1980s, Americans expected pistachios to be red because they were mostly imported from places where the nuts were dyed to cover imperfections.

 

“People used to get all the coloring all over their fingers. We now kind of laugh at that,” said Richard Matoian, executive director of the American Pistachio Growers, a trade association.

 

Now most pistachios sold in the U.S. are grown domestically and come in their naturally pale shells.

 

McDonald’s announced in September that it had removed artificial colors from many of its burgers and Kellogg has pledged to remove them from its cereals by the end of this year.

 

Americans, however, apparently aren’t entirely ready to part with the technicolor pieces that float around in milk. After removing artificial colors from Trix, General Mills poured them back in last year to bring back a “classic” version in response to customer demand.

 

But it’s not just processed and packaged foods that create illusions with colors.

 

Cheese 

Boar’s Head, Cabot, Kraft, Tillamook. Check the packages of most cheddar cheeses, and they’ll likely list an ingredient called annatto, a plant extract commonly used for color.

 

The practice reaches back to when cheesemakers in England skimmed the butterfat from milk to make butter, according to Elizabeth Chubbuck of Murray’s Cheese in New York. The leftover milk was whiter, so cheesemakers added pigments to recreate butterfat’s golden hue, she said.

 

Another cheese that sometimes gets cosmetic help: mozzarella.

 

Sara Burnett, director of food policy at Panera Bread, said mozzarella sometimes gets its bright white from titanium dioxide, a widely used ingredient in products like mints and doughnuts.

 

Without it, mozzarella would be beige or off-white.

 

The whitening is done because most U.S.-made mozzarella starts with cow’s milk, which can have yellow hues, said Cathy Strange, global cheese buyer at Whole Foods.

 

In Italy, she said, mozzarella is traditionally made with water buffalo milk, which is whiter because the animal can’t digest beta carotene.

 

Egg yolks 

Many home cooks think darker egg yolks are fresher or more nutritious. But the color may be the result of marigold petals, alfalfa or coloring products in chicken feed.

 

Yolk color is primarily determined by the carotenoids — naturally occurring pigments in plants — that hens eat, according to Elizabeth Bobeck, a poultry nutrition professor at Iowa State University. It’s easy to change yolk colors by simply altering hens’ diet, she said.

 

Darker yolks aren’t necessarily healthier, Bobeck said. The belief that they are is likely rooted in the idea that yolks are darker when hens are fed a diet of fresh plants, which contain the pigments.

 

Marc Dresner, a spokesman for the American Egg Board, said yolk colors varied more when chickens were fed whatever was available in the barnyard. Commercial feed has made yolk colors more consistent, but synthetic color additives are not allowed for chicken feed, Dresner said.

 

Bart Slaugh, a representative for Eggland’s, noted mayonnaise and pasta makers may prefer paler yolks.

 

Salmon

 

Bright pink flesh may signal freshness to shoppers eyeing salmon fillets, which is why farmed salmon may have been fed synthetic astaxanthin, a version of a naturally occurring compound.

 

The Food and Drug Administration notes that manufacturers have to declare on labeling if color additives were used for salmon. At Costco, farmed salmon is labeled with the disclosure “color added through feed.”

 

It may not sound appetizing, but manufacturers know the difference color can make.

 

Salmon with a darker flesh can command an extra 50 cents to $1 per pound when offered side by side with lighter salmon, according to research by animal feed maker DSM.

 

To help producers size up the desirability of their salmon, the company offers a “SalmoFan” with varying shades of pink to help judge flesh colors.

 

Representatives for DSM did not respond to requests for comment.

 

 

 
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Efforts to boost global action against climate change are stuttering, as several key nations have objected to a key United Nations-backed report on the impacts of rising temperatures at the COP24 talks in Poland.

Many developing nations say they are already suffering from the impact of climate change, especially in south Asia and Africa, where water shortages and intense storms are putting lives and livelihoods in danger.

In Malawi in southern Africa, a bustling fish market stood at Kachulu on the shores of Lake Chilwa just five months ago. Now, hundreds of fishing boats lie marooned across the vast bay as vultures circle over the cracked, sun-baked mud. Water levels here fluctuate annually, but scientists say climate change is making the seasonal dry-out of the lake far more dramatic. Fishermen are being forced to leave and look for work elsewhere, says Sosten Chiotha, of the non-governmental organization ‘LEAD’ – Leadership for Environment and Development.

“Climate change contributes to the current recessions that we are experiencing, because you can see that in 2012 there was a recession where the lake lost about 80 percent of its water. Then it recovered in 2013, but not fully. So since then every year we have been experiencing these recessions,” Chiotha said.

Scientists gathering at the COP24 climate talks say it is developing countries like Malawi that are being hit hardest by the impacts of climate change.

The charity Water Aid has released a report ranking the countries worst-hit by water shortages, with Sudan, Niger and Pakistan making up the top three.

“There are people who are living with the impact of climate change right now. And they’re feeling those impacts not through carbon, but through water. And as we’ve seen over the past few years and will continue to see for many years to come unfortunately, is a huge increase in water stress and absolute water scarcity,” Water Aid’s Jonathan Farr told VOA from the climate talks currently underway in the Polish city of Katowice.

Richer nations have pledged $100 billion a year for poorer nations to deal with the consequences of climate change. Water Aid says they are failing to deliver the money.

Scientists say emissions of carbon dioxide would have to be reduced by 45 percent by 2030 to have any hope of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius – the target agreed in the Paris climate deal.

However, the number of coal-fired power stations – the most polluting form of energy generation – is growing. The German organization ‘Urgewald’ calculates that $478 billion had been invested into expansion of the coal industry between January 2016 and September 2018.

“In fourteen African countries now the first coal plants are being developed, it’s completely crazy. Economies that could just be leap-frogging to a renewable energy economy, that instead are having – largely by foreign companies – having coal plants being pushed on them as the solution to energy problems,” Urgewald’s director Heffa Schucking told reporters in Katowice this week

Meanwhile the World Health Organization warns that climate change will exacerbate the impact of some disease and health problems, including malaria, malnutrition and heat exposure.

There is little optimism at the talks that much concrete progress will be made, as several countries including the United States, Russia and Saudi Arabia have already voiced objections to a key scientific report from the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
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As the U.N. global climate conference in Katowice, Poland entered its second week Sunday, the non-governmental environmental organization Greenpeace demanded urgent action from world leaders to tackle climate change.

Greenpeace activists projected a message onto the roof of the “Spodek” arena where the COP24 is being held, saying “No Hope Without Climate Action: and “Politicians Talk, Leaders Act.”

Disappointing many of the scientists and delegates at the conference, the United States, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait refused to endorse a landmark study on global warming which was to be the benchmark for future action in curbing the global warming.

The four nations wanted only to “note” but not “welcome” the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that was released in October, in keeping with the views of the Trump administration. With no consensus on including the report, the idea was dropped.

U.S. President Donald Trump, who has announced he is pulling the United States out of the Paris climate agreement, tweeted Saturday that “people do not want to pay large sums of money … in order to maybe protect the environment.” 

The IPCC’ report said that drastic actions would be needed to achieve the Paris accord’s most ambitious target of keeping global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. The report warned that the world was far from that target and heading more towards an increase of 3 degrees Celsius.

On Monday, the environmental ministers arrive at COP24 and many delegates hope that they will make every effort to include the IPCC report in the conference agenda.
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According to the World Ocean Review, shipping by sea is responsible for about 3 percent of the world’s total carbon emissions. But one Norwegian shipping company is creating hybrid ships and planning for a carbon free future. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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A SpaceX Dragon cargo ship finally delivered more than 2,500 kilograms of holiday treats Saturday to the International Space Station after a communications drop-out delayed the shipment.

After two approach attempts, the Dragon locked onto the orbiting lab three days after launching from Cape Canaveral in the southeastern U.S. state of Florida.

NASA nixed the first approach because of a glitch in the communication network that serves the space station.

Mission Control ordered the Dragon to back up from the station before approaching again after NASA switched another communications satellite.

With the Dragon positioned about nine meters from the station, Commander Alexander Gerst locked the lab’s robot arm onto the cargo ship one-and-a-half hours later than planned.

In addition to holiday offerings — including smoked turkey, green bean casserole and fruit cake — mice and worms also were delivered for science experiments.

Three astronauts will be on board the station on Christmas, while three others will return to Earth on December 20. Until then, the station will be home to six astronauts: Gerst, who is German, two Americans, two Russians and one Canadian.
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U.S. health officials are concerned about the increasing number of American teenagers smoking electronic cigarettes, a practice commonly known as vaping. So many teenagers are taking up the habit that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is worried that it’s become an epidemic. Nina Vishneva reports from New York in this report narrated by Anna Rice.
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China launched a groundbreaking mission Saturday to land a spacecraft on the largely unexplored far side of the moon, demonstrating its growing ambitions as a space power to rival Russia, the European Union and the U.S. 

 

A Long March 3B rocket carrying a lunar probe blasted off at 2:23 a.m. from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan province in southwestern China, the official Xinhua News Agency said. 

 

With its Chang’e 4 mission, China hopes to be the first country to make a soft landing, which is a landing of a spacecraft during which no serious damage is incurred. The moon’s far side is also known as the dark side because it faces away from Earth and remains comparatively unknown. It has a different composition than sites on the near side, where previous missions have landed. 

 

If successful, the mission would propel the Chinese space program to a leading position in one of the most important areas of lunar exploration. 

 

China landed its Yutu, or “Jade Rabbit,” rover on the moon five years ago and plans to send its Chang’e 5 probe there next year and have it return to Earth with samples — the first time that will have been done since 1976. A crewed lunar mission is also under consideration.  

Chang’e 4 is also a lander-rover combination and will explore both above and below the lunar surface after arriving at the South Pole-Aitken basin’s Von Karman crater following a 27-day journey. 

 

It will also perform radio-astronomical studies that, because the far side always faces away from Earth, will be “free from interference from our planet’s ionosphere, human-made radio frequencies and auroral radiation noise,” space industry expert Leonard David wrote on the website Space.com. 

 

It may also carry plant seeds and silkworm eggs, according to Xinhua. 

 

Chang’e is the goddess of the moon in Chinese mythology. 

 

China conducted its first crewed space mission in 2003, making it only the third country after Russia and the U.S. to do so. It has put a pair of space stations into orbit, one of which is still operating as a precursor to a more than 60-ton station that is due to come online in 2022. The launch of a Mars rover is planned for the mid-2020s. 

 

To facilitate communication between controllers on Earth and the Chang’e 4 mission, China in May launched a relay satellite named Queqiao, or “Magpie Bridge,” after an ancient Chinese folk tale. 

 

China’s space program has benefited from cooperation with Russia and European nations, although it was excluded from the 420-ton International Space Station, mainly because of U.S. legislation barring such cooperation amid concerns over its strong military connections. Its program also suffered a rare setback last year with the failed launch of its Long March 5 rocket. 
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NASA’s new Mars lander has captured the first sounds of the “really unworldly” Martian wind.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory released audio clips of the alien wind Friday. The low-frequency rumblings were collected by the InSight lander during its first week of operations at Mars.

The wind is estimated to be blowing 10 mph to 15 mph (16 kph to 24 kph). These are the first sounds from Mars that are detectible by human ears, according to the researchers.

“Reminds me of sitting outside on a windy summer afternoon … In some sense, this is what it would sound like if you were sitting on the InSight lander on Mars,” Cornell University’s Don Banfield told reporters.

Scientists involved in the project agree the sound has an otherworldly quality to it.

Thomas Pike of Imperial College London said the rumbling is “rather different to anything that we’ve experienced on Earth, and I think it just gives us another way of thinking about how far away we are getting these signals.”

The noise is of the wind blowing against InSight’s solar panels and the resulting vibration of the entire spacecraft. The sounds were recorded by an air pressure sensor inside the lander that’s part of a weather station, as well as the seismometer on the deck of the spacecraft.

The low frequencies are a result of Mars’ thin air density and even more so the seismometer itself — it’s meant to detect underground seismic waves, well below the threshold of human hearing. The seismometer will be moved to the Martian surface in the coming weeks; until then, the team plans to record more wind noise.

The 1976 Viking landers on Mars picked up spacecraft shaking caused by wind, but it would be a stretch to consider it sound, said InSight’s lead scientist, Bruce Banerdt, of JPL in Pasadena, California.

The “really unworldly” sounds from InSight, meanwhile, have Banerdt imaging he’s “on a planet that’s in some ways like the Earth, but in some ways really alien.”

InSight landed on Mars on Nov. 26.

“We’re all still on a high from the landing last week … and here we are less than two weeks after landing, and we’ve already got some amazing new science,” said NASA’s Lori Glaze, acting director of planetary science. “It’s cool, it’s fun.”
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Gorillas at a zoo in England have demonstrated a distinctly human trait while attempting to solve a puzzle: cheating.
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The World Health Organization (WHO) is calling for urgent action to put a brake on road traffic crashes that kill 1.35 million people every year, mostly in poor developing countries.

In Geneva, the U.N. agency launched its global status report on road safety 2018.

The report found road traffic injuries to be the leading killer of children and young people aged five to 29 years, with a death occurring every 24 seconds. The report said more than half of those killed are pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcycle riders and passengers.

Etienne Krug, head of the U.N. Agency’s Department on Disability, Violence and Injury Prevention, called these deaths a huge inequality issue.

“Low-income countries have one percent of the vehicles in the world and 13 percent of all the deaths; while high-income countries have 40 percent of all the vehicles,” Krug said. “So, that is 40 times more, but only seven percent of the deaths.That is half of the deaths with 40 times more vehicles.”

The report said death rates are highest in Africa and lowest in Europe. Some of the key risk factors include speeding, drinking and driving, and failure to use seat belts, motorcycle helmets and child restraints.

Krug said putting the right measures in place will save lives. These include the right legislation and enforcement, creating special lanes for cyclists and improving the quality of vehicles.

“It is not acceptable that vehicles are being sold in developing countries that look the same as the vehicles that we see here in Switzerland or the U.S. or anywhere else, but that are not,” Krug told VOA. “Because to make them cheaper, they have been stripped of all of their safety features, such as air bags or electronic stability control, etc.”

WHO noted that 48 middle- and high-income countries that have implemented strong road traffic laws and other safety measures have made progress in reducing road deaths.

However, it said no such progress has been made in low-income countries where safety measures are lacking.
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When people get magnetic resonance imaging scans, known as MRI’s, they spend a long time in a tube with very little head room. The procedure is especially difficult for people who are claustrophobic. At the University of Missouri, researchers are working to make the experience better for both doctors and patients. More from VOA’s Carol Pearson.
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In the three months since the Ebola outbreak began in the volatile east of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the hemorrhagic fever has sparked debate in communities and become a talking point for politicians ahead of the Dec. 23 election. It is, they say, a war of information to persuade locals to take precautions and to trust health officials. So far, more than 420 cases have been reported. VOA’s Anita Powell accompanied Ebola awareness campaigners in eastern Congo and brings us this report.
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Divisions deepened at the U.N. climate talks Thursday, pitting rich nations against poor ones, oil exporters against vulnerable island nations, and those governments prepared to act on global warming against those who want to wait and see.

The stakes were raised by a scientific report that warned achieving the most ambitious target in the 2015 Paris climate accord to limit emissions is getting increasingly difficult. Fresh figures released this week showed that emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide jumped the highest in seven years, making the task of cutting those emissions one day to zero even more challenging.

Negotiators at the climate talks in Katowice, Poland, still disagree on the way forward but have just a few days to finish their technical talks before ministers take over.

“It’s going to be a big challenge,” said Amjad Abdulla, the chief negotiator for the Alliance of Small Island States. “We are going to forward the sticky issues to next week.”

Among the splits that need to be overcome before the conference ends on Dec. 14 are:

• The question of what kind of flexibility developing countries will have when it comes to reporting their emissions and efforts to curb them.

The issue is central to the Paris rulebook, which countries have committed to finalizing this year. Environmental activists insist that countries such as Brazil, with its vast Amazon rainforest, and China, the world’s biggest polluter, should have to provide hard data on emissions and not be treated like poorer nations who don’t have the ability to do a precise greenhouse tally.

Complicating matters, a group of rich countries that includes the United States and Australia is seeking similar leeway as developing nations.

• Several oil-exporting countries have objected to the idea of explicitly mentioning ways in which global warming can be kept at 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body made up of scientists from around the world, recently proposed “policy pathways” that would achieve this goal, which foresee phasing out almost all use of coal, oil and gas by 2050.

But Saudi Arabia and some of its allies say it would be wrong to cite those pathways in a text about future ambitions.

• Developing countries are frustrated that rich nations won’t commit themselves to providing greater assurances on financial support for poor nations facing hefty costs to fight the effects of climate change. European governments argue that they are bound by budget rules that limit their ability to allocate money more than a few years in advance.

What’s clear is that few countries are moving in the right direction to halt global warming.

“The first data for this year point to a strong rise in the global CO2 emissions, almost all countries are contributing to this rise,” said Corinne Le Quere, who led the team that published the emissions study this week.

“In China, it’s boosted by economic stimulation in construction. In the U.S., an unusual year, cold winter and hot summer, both boosting the energy demand. In Europe, the emissions are down but less than they used to be, and that’s because of growing emissions in transport that are offsetting benefits elsewhere,” she told the meeting in Katowice.

Le Quere, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia in England, noted some positive news.

“We have renewable energy,” she said. “It is displacing coal in the U.S. and in Europe, and it is expanding elsewhere.

“It’s not enough to meet the growing energy demand in developing countries in particular,” she said. “But the industry is growing.”

Host nation Poland, which depends on coal for 80 percent of its energy needs, is among those demanding help for workers in coal and gas industries who could lose their jobs as nations shift to cleaner energy.

In light of the deep divisions over how to best fight climate change, U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres is considering returning to Katowice to push for a strong declaration.

“It very much remains a possibility,” U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said Thursday. “If he feels his presence will be useful, he will go back. But no decision has yet been made.”
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The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has proposed rolling back a regulation for coal plants that would allow new plants a lower standard on carbon emissions.

The EPA made the announcement Thursday, saying the Obama-era ruling required new coal plants to produce no more than 1,400 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour. The change would allow new plants to produce up to 1,900 pounds of carbon per megawatt-hour.

Under the Obama regulation, plants were to cut their carbon emissions by using some natural gas, installing some carbon-capture equipment, or changing to more efficient technology that is not yet widely available.

EPA acting head Andrew Wheeler said Thursday at a news conference in Washington, “We are rescinding unfair burdens, leveling the playing field.”

Two new coal plants are planned in the United States over the next four years. President Donald Trump vowed during his campaign to shore up the coal industry, which has been facing competition in the past decade from cheaper and more plentiful natural gas.

Renewable resources like wind and solar power have also been growing in use, cutting into the energy market that coal once dominated.

Coal use in the United States has fallen 44 percent since its peak in 2007. The U.S. Energy Information Agency expects 2018 to mark the lowest level of coal consumption since 1979.

The rollback on regulations comes ahead of an international conference next week in Poland, where U.S. officials plan to host a panel on fossil fuel technology.
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Many car companies are looking at adding sensors to monitor your vital signs while you drive. The University of Southern California’s Center for Body Computing, which is focused on digital health and innovation, brings together experts to look at the benefits and dangers of this next step in automotive design and technology. VOA’s Elizabeth Lee has the details.
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Israel will likely allow exports of medical cannabis by the end of the year, a top lawmaker said on Thursday, a move that would boost state coffers and slow the growing number of firms establishing farms abroad.

Israeli companies – befitting from a favorable climate and expertise in medical and agricultural technologies – are among the world’s biggest producers of medical cannabis.

The finance and health ministries estimate exports could bring in about $1 billion a year – but some MPs have up to now stopped Israeli-grown cannabis going abroad, fearing more cultivation could push more drugs onto the streets at home.

Things changed when Yoav Kisch, chairman of parliament’s internal affairs and environment committee, submitted a bill to allow exports that imposed tougher regulations on exporters and threatened jail terms and hefty fines for violations.

That passed its first of three votes in parliament last week, and is back with Kisch’s committee for revisions. “I aim to finish the legislation by the end of the year,” Kisch told Reuters.

“We believe it’s medicine and it’s important … It’s a big potential for Israeli farmers and the economy,” added Kisch, who estimates the regulation could boost tax income by 1 billion shekels ($268 million) a year.

There are currently eight cultivating companies in Israel – many of whom have resorted to opening farms abroad to get into the international market. The government says there have been many requests form business owners awaiting authorization.

Cannbit – a newcomer which has a farm in southern Israel and this week signed a deal with local medical cannabis supplier Tikun Olam – said it was looking into opening a farm in Portugal if the new regulations do not go through.

“If there will be exports from Israel there is less tendency for investments in other places,” said CEO Yaron Razon.

Together, another Israeli cannabis grower, has already started up farms in Europe after signing a $300 million contract to supply cannabis products to a Canadian company.

“Exporting from Israel can have a big impact on the industry and economy,” said Alex Rabinovitch, controlling shareholder of InterCure, which recently bought medical cannabis firm Canndoc.

 
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It’s official: A team of faculty and students from Virginia Tech University has built what’s being billed as the world’s best solar home. The decision was made last weekend in Dubai when officials announced the winner of the Solar Decathlon Middle East competition. VOA’s Kevin Enochs reports.
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For experts in the field of ocean mapping, it is no small irony that we know more about the surfaces of the moon and Mars than we do about our planet’s sea floor.

“Can you imagine operating on the land without a map, or doing anything without a map?” asked Larry Mayer, director of the U.S.-based Center for Coastal and Ocean Mapping, a research body that trains hydrographers and develops tools for mapping.

“We depend on having that knowledge of what’s around us, and the same is true for the ocean,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

With their deep craters and mountain ranges, the contours of the earth beneath the waves are both vast and largely unknown.

Seabed 2030

But a huge mapping effort is underway to change that. 

The U.N.-backed project, called Seabed 2030, is urging countries and companies to pool data to create a map of the entire ocean floor by 2030. The map will be freely available to all.

“We obviously need a lot of cooperation from different parties, individuals as well as private companies,” said Mao Hasebe, project coordinator at the Nippon Foundation, a Japanese philanthropic organization supporting the initiative. “We think it’s ambitious, but we don’t think it’s impossible,” Hasebe said.

The project, which launched in 2017, is expected to cost about $3 billion. It is a collaboration between the Nippon Foundation and GEBCO, a nonprofit association of experts that is already involved in charting the ocean floor.

The result would be greater knowledge of the oceans’ biodiversity, improved understanding of the climate, advanced warning of impending disasters, and the ability to better protect or exploit deep-sea resources, Hasebe said.

​Recent advances

So far, the biggest data contributors to Seabed 2030 have been companies, in particular Dutch energy prospector Fugro and deep-sea mapping firm Ocean Infinity. Both were involved in the search for the Malaysian airliner MH370, which disappeared in 2014.

To map the ocean floor, high-tech multibeam echosounders transmit a fan of acoustic beams from a ship, which ping back depending on the depth and topography of the ocean floor. That creates data points, which can be converted into a map.

“With advanced sonar technology, it really is like seeing. I think we’ve come out of the era of being the blind man with the stick,” said Robert Larter, a marine geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey.

“We can survey much more efficiently, and, not only that, but in much greater detail,” he said, adding that the work was painstaking. “The ocean’s a big place!” he said.

The advent of new technology, such as underwater drones and robots, is also speeding up the mapping process.

A global competition hosted by energy giant Shell, the Shell Ocean Discovery XPRIZE, is also under way, offering $7 million to teams that can develop technologies to conduct ocean exploration autonomously, rapidly and to a high resolution.

A team from Seabed 2030 has reached the final stages of the competition with an idea based on remotely operated robots working in extreme depths to map territory independently.

Economic benefits

Exploring Earth’s final frontier will do more than satisfy scientific curiosity, it should bring economic benefits, too.

More than 90 percent of the world’s trade is carried by sea, according to the International Maritime Organization (IMO), a U.N. body, making safe navigation a key motivator for mapping.

“If a ship runs aground it’s a terrible day for the economy, it’s a terrible day for the environment and it’s a bad day for the captain, too,” Mayer said.

Seabed 2030’s map would have other benefits, experts said: In a warming world, it would provide a better idea of sea levels as ice melts and, importantly, warn about impending tsunamis that could devastate coastal communities.

They said it would also help the so-called “blue economy” as countries and companies seek to protect or exploit deep-sea resources, from exploring for oil and gas to installing wind farms or laying fiber-optic cables for the internet.

That is predicted to become more important in the coming years, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). It expects the ocean economy to contribute $3 trillion to the world economy by 2030, up from $1.5 trillion in 2010.

Political rifts

Some parts of the oceans — the East Coast of the United States, areas around Japan, New Zealand and Ireland — are relatively well-mapped, experts said. Others, including the West African coast or that off the Caribbean, remain largely blank.

The introduction of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), an international treaty, allowed countries to determine their continental shelves and exclusive economic zones, legitimate territorial claims off their coasts.

It also spurred a rush to map and claim land, Larter said.

“That’s the biggest land grab in recent history,” he said.

For Julian Barbiere of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission, it would be a “paradox” if, after collaboration at a scientific and technical level to share data, countries used that knowledge against each other in geopolitical spats.

“There are already tensions in some parts of the world, and one of the reasons for that is access to resources,” he said.

Some countries, he added, are reluctant to give up strategic proprietary data to the Seabed 2030 project, largely because of national security concerns or in areas with sensitive geopolitical tensions, such as the South China Sea.

“There is already a lot of data, which is sitting there but it’s not being released. We hope to change attitudes and to really get countries to contribute,” Barbiere said.

The next phase of the project, he said, is to encourage data donors and crowdsourcing, not just from exploration vessels but from cargo ships, recreational sea-users and fishing boats.

“(It) goes back to this principle: the ocean is an international space by definition … part of the common heritage of mankind,” he said.

Looking ahead, in a bid to meet the U.N. Sustainable Development Goal 14 — to conserve and sustainably use the oceans — mapping will take center stage during negotiations to be completed by 2020, as nations create a new, legally binding treaty to protect the high seas.

“There are so many benefits to knowing more about the ocean floor,” Hasebe said. “Humanity as a whole would be able to benefit.”
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Emissions of planet-warming gases will hit an all-time high this year, according to a new report.

The figures are the latest indication of how far the world is from meeting the goal set out in Paris in 2015 to avoid the worst impacts of global warming.

The report comes as U.N. negotiators meet in Poland for the latest round of talks on confronting climate change.

Emissions are projected to rise 2.7 percent this year, according to three studies released Wednesday from the Global Carbon Project, an international scientific collaboration of academics, governments and industry that tracks greenhouse gas emissions. That follows a 1.6 percent rise last year. However, emissions were stable for the three years before that.

“Possibly, this year is unusual,” said lead author Corinne Le Quere at the University of East Anglia. But probably not, she added. “We think that emissions are probably still going to go up for some years unless things change drastically.”

“I’m not that surprised,” said Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute research center, who was not involved in the research. “The world economy is growing, and the cheapest, most scalable easiest way to meet much of that growth still comes from incumbent fossil fuel technologies.”

Projected emissions from China, the world’s largest source of greenhouse gases, rose by 4.7 percent this year. Le Quere said a government effort to boost construction and stimulate the economy increased demand for emissions-intensive steel, aluminum and cement.

In the United States, coal continued to give way to cleaner natural gas. But a cold winter and a hot summer both raised energy demands, contributing to an estimated 2.5 percent increase in emissions.

Rising oil use for transportation also was a factor, as American consumers are once again buying bigger cars.

Emissions declined by 0.7 percent in the 28-nation European Union, though emissions from oil increased.

The transportation sector is the “biggest problem, I would say, worldwide,” Le Quere added. “We are really not making a dent in emissions from transport, in spite of the fact that the technology for electric cars is there.”

The good news is that renewable energy is growing by leaps and bounds. That should help take the edge off the emissions curve, even as growth picks up in another Asian giant — India.

“We’re not going to see what we saw in China in the early 2000s” when that country overtook, and then doubled, emissions of the previous leader, the United States, she said.

Trembath cautions, however, that Africa remains a question mark. “We see China- and India-like growth numbers, 5 to 10 percent annual GDP growth, coming from a lot of sub-Saharan African countries,” he said. “That could mean a lot more oil consumption, a lot more natural gas consumption.”

That’s not a bad thing on many levels, he added. “These are desperately poor countries that are just trying to achieve the same standard of living we enjoy in the United States.”
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“I’m not going to put the country out of business trying to maintain certain standards that probably don’t matter,” President Donald Trump told VOA when asked about the economic impacts of climate change.

When not denying its existence, the Trump administration’s approach to

climate change essentially comes down to three arguments: the United States has already cut its greenhouse gas emissions more than other countries, regardless of any international agreement; regulations to cut emissions come with high costs and few benefits; and those regulations would put the United States at a disadvantage because other countries will not follow.

“When you look at China, and when you look at other countries where they have foul air,” Trump added, “we’re going to be clean, but they’re not, and it costs a lot of money.”

As U.N. climate negotiations get under way in Poland to work out rules for implementing the Paris climate agreement — from which Trump intends to withdraw the United States — experts weigh in on the administration’s claims.

Emissions cuts

It’s true that the United States has reduced its greenhouse gas production more than any other country. U.S. emissions peaked in 2005. In the last decade, they have fallen by about 13 percent, according to the BP Statistical Review of World Energy.

But the United States was the world’s leading producer of greenhouse gases until 2006. And, others have made bigger cuts by percentage. Hungary’s levels, for example, decreased 14 percent.

U.S. emissions started to fall when the fracking boom took off.

The new technique of hydraulic fracturing turned the United States into a major natural gas producer. As the price of natural gas has dropped, it has been steadily replacing coal as the dominant fuel for electricity generation. Because burning natural gas produces far less carbon dioxide than coal, greenhouse gas emissions have decreased.

More recently, renewable sources such as solar and wind power have started to make inroads on the power grid.

While U.S. emissions have fallen since the 2000s, China’s have soared.

The country pursued astonishing economic growth with an enormous investment in coal-fired power plants. China is now the leading producer of greenhouse gases by far, roughly doubling U.S. output.

Cost-benefit

Trump has argued that regulations aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions would hobble the U.S. economy. He has moved to undo the Obama administration’s proposed rules on carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and efficiency standards for vehicles and appliances, among others.

Critics question whether those regulations would cost as much Trump suggests.

“None of these policies were going to have dramatic increases in the prices that consumers would see,” Duke University public policy professor Billy Pizer said. He added that normal price swings would likely swamp the cost of the regulations Trump targets.

The emissions reductions the Obama administration pledged in Paris “were built largely on a continuation of the coal-to-gas transition and a continuation of growth in renewable energy that’s already happening,” said Alex Trembath of the Breakthrough Institute research center. As such, he added, they “don’t imply a large cost. In fact, they imply a marginal increased benefit to the U.S.”

Those benefits come, for example, because burning less coal produces less air pollution, which lowers health costs.

Not to mention the direct results of climate change: wildfires, floods, droughts and so on.

“We have enough science and enough economics to show that there are damages resulting from us releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. We know that that is not a free thing,” University of Chicago public policy professor Amir Jina said. “And yet, we are artificially setting it as free because we’re not paying the price of that externality.”

He said economists nearly unanimously support a carbon tax, a cap-and-trade program or some other way to put a price on carbon emissions.

Collective action

Few nations have taken the necessary steps to meet the emissions reduction pledges they made in Paris, according to the most recent United Nations emissions gap report.

Even those pledges would fall far short of the Paris goal of limiting global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, the report adds. Reaching that target will take “unprecedented and urgent action.” A 2016 report said an additional $5.2 trillion investment in renewable energy will be necessary worldwide over the next 25 years.

Trump’s statement — “we’re going to be clean, but they’re not, and it costs a lot of money” — sums up why nations are reluctant to act: no one wants to take on burdens that they think others won’t.

“It’s the thing which has been dogging action on climate change for generations,” Jina said.

“We only really solve the problem if everybody acts together,” he added. “And if enough people are not acting, then we don’t.”

Paris depends on countries following through on increasingly ambitious emissions cuts.

Each country decides what it is willing to do. Every five years, countries come together and show their progress.

“You over time build confidence in each other,” Pizer said. “Ideally, you ratchet up the commitments as you see your actions reciprocated by other countries.”

Trump’s backpedaling on the U.S. commitment raises questions about the prospects.

However, the first of these check-ins is five years away. Trump can’t formally withdraw the United States from the agreement until 2020.

Pizer notes that the predecessor to the Paris Agreement, the Kyoto Protocol, failed in part because it imposed caps on countries’ carbon emissions, and most of the world balked.

“In my mind, this is the best we can do,” he said. “If there were a different way to do it, I’d be all over that.”
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Gorillas at a zoo in England have demonstrated a distinctly human trait while attempting to solve a puzzle: cheating. 

 

The gorillas were presented with a wall-mounted puzzle that requires the user to guide a peanut through a series of obstacles by poking a stick through various holes. Eventually, the peanut reaches the bottom of the device and drops out. 

Some gorillas, however, figured out an easier way to retrieve the nut. 

 

“We’ve seen a lot of cheating behavior where they’ve been putting their lips up against the device and sucking the nut out, which was not how we intended the device to be used. But it just shows you that they’re very flexible. They’re capable of creating new solving strategies to access the food,” Dr. Fay Clark from Bristol Zoo Gardens told Reuters. 

 

“They have some fascinating problem-solving abilities that have probably not been witnessed before,” she added. 

In addition, the endangered western lowland gorillas, which were introduced to a prototype device earlier this year, have shown that they quite like the game. They regularly returned to play with it, even when there were no more nuts to win, scientists said. 

 

Experts from the University of Bristol and Bristol Zoological Society developed the “Gorilla Game Lab” to encourage the gorillas’ cognitive and puzzle-solving abilities. The prototype device had to be strong enough to withstand a frustrated gorilla, which can be seven times stronger than humans. It also had to be engaging enough to keep them coming back for more. 

 

Each of the modules in the game “are removable, so we can take the modules out, redesign them and put in an additional module or change the actual structure. So it creates an endless stream of new and novel puzzles for them to solve,” said Dr. Stuart Gray of the University of Bristol. 

While the main aim of the project is to create a “positive psychological state of pleasure and satisfaction in the gorillas,” the researchers are already setting their sights on more advanced models that would help zookeepers better understand both the mental and physical conditions of the animals. 

 

“Things like eyesight, hearing, other cognitive functions — all of these could be measurable further on down the line,” Gray said. 
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The devastation caused by powerful storms is a growing threat to both poor and rich nations, propelling Caribbean islands to the top of a global index of countries most severely affected by weather disasters last year, researchers said Tuesday. 

 

The U.S. territory of Puerto Rico was ranked as the hardest-hit, and the island of Dominica came in third place after both were battered by Hurricane Maria last September, according to an annual climate risk index from Germanwatch, an environmental policy group. 

 

The United States ranked 12th in the 2017 index, with 389 fatalities and nearly $175 billion in losses from extreme weather. 

 

“Recent storms with intensity levels never seen before have had disastrous impacts,” said the index’s lead author, David Eckstein. 

 

Such weather disasters are likely to worsen further in coming years, the U.N. humanitarian agency warned Tuesday, creating significant new humanitarian needs. 

 

Floods, storms and droughts all are expected to strengthen, the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said in its Global Humanitarian Overview 2019 report. 

 

It cited World Bank data predicting 140 million people could be internally displaced by 2050 as a result of global warming. 

 

Among the countries being significantly hit by climate-linked extreme weather is the United States, whose President Donald Trump is one of the most prominent skeptics of man-made climate change, the agency said.  

Hurricanes and storms in the United States and Caribbean caused more than $220 billion worth of damage last year, representing nearly two-thirds of global losses caused by natural disasters in 2017, OCHA said. 

 

“Climate events are contributing to greater humanitarian problems than we have seen in the past,” said Jens Laerke, a spokesman for OCHA. “This is something the world has not yet adapted fully to.” 

 

As hurricanes and tropical cyclones intensify in strength, they are particularly hurting poor nations that are unprepared for the threat, researchers said on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in Poland. 

 

In the tiny island country of Dominica, Maria caused losses equal to more than twice its gross domestic product, damaging or destroying about 90 percent of housing.  

 

Lloyd Pascal, a Dominican climate negotiator whose home has yet to be fully repaired after being hit by the storm, urged the U.N. talks to pay more attention to “weaker countries.” 

 

Dominica, with 72,000 people, lacks the ability to prepare for the increasingly severe weather it is suffering, he said. 

 

Even though storm warnings are received, the state does not have resources to evacuate people into shelters, he said, nor understand clearly how heavy rainfall will boost river levels. 

 

“We are just not prepared to do that kind of work,” he told reporters. “We are like sitting ducks.” 

 

But rich countries, including the United States, also are seeing clearer climate impacts, and need to step up efforts to keep their people safe, Germanwatch said. 

 

“Effective climate protection, as well as increasing resilience, is … in the self-interest of these countries,” Eckstein said. 

 

The Germanwatch index highlighted other types of weather-related damage as well, from unusually heavy rainfall to landslides.  

Sri Lanka, the second most-affected country in 2017, saw dramatic floods that year that killed 200 people and left hundreds of thousands homeless. 

 

The U.N. climate negotiations should drum up more support for the poorest countries like Nepal, Vietnam, Sierra Leone and Madagascar to deal with rising losses linked to climate change, Germanwatch said. 

 

All four of those countries figured in the index’s top 10 of nations most affected by weather disasters in 2017. 

 

“They need predictable and reliable financial support for dealing with climate-induced loss and damage,” Eckstein said. 

 

Five years ago, the U.N. climate talks set up a mechanism to better understand the damage that now will be unavoidable as a result of the 1 degree Celsius hike in global temperatures that has already occurred. 

 

The mechanism also seeks to find ways to deal with the consequences as the world warms further. 

 

But industrialized countries — which have historically emitted the most climate-changing emissions — have refused to pay compensation to those who are less to blame for global warming yet find themselves on the front line of impacts. 

 

Instead, they are providing access to insurance. 

 

At the Dec. 2-14 talks in Poland, arguments are expected over how progress on dealing with “loss and damage” should be assessed in 2023, when countries measure their climate action against the goals of the Paris climate accord. 
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A woman in Brazil who received a womb transplanted from a deceased donor has given birth to a baby girl in the first successful case of its kind, doctors reported.

The case, published in The Lancet medical journal, involved connecting veins from the donor uterus with the recipient’s veins, as well as linking arteries, ligaments and vaginal canals.

It comes after 10 previously known cases of uterus transplants from deceased donors – in the United States, the Czech Republic and Turkey – failed to produce a live birth.

The girl born in the Brazilian case was delivered via caesarean section at 35 weeks and three days, and weighed 2,550 grams (nearly 6 lbs), the case study said.

Dani Ejzenberg, a doctor at Brazil’s Sao Paulo University hospital who led the research, said the transplant – carried out in September 2016 when the recipient was 32 – shows the technique is feasible and could offer women with uterine infertility access to a larger pool of potential donors.

The current norm for receiving a womb transplant is that the organ would come from a live family member willing to donate it.

“The numbers of people willing and committed to donate organs upon their own deaths are far larger than those of live donors, offering a much wider potential donor population,” Ejzenberg said in a statement about the results.

She added, however, that the outcomes and effects of womb donations from live and deceased donors have yet to be compared, and said the technique could still be refined and optimised.

The first baby born after a live donor womb transplant was in Sweden in 2013. Scientists have so far reported a total of 39 procedures of this kind, resulting in 11 live births.

Experts estimate that infertility affects around 10 to 15 percent of couples of reproductive age worldwide. Of this group, around one in 500 women have uterine problems.

Before uterus transplants became possible, the only options to have a child were adoption or surrogacy.

In the Brazilian case, the recipient had been born without a uterus due to a condition called Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome. The donor was 45 and died of a stroke.

Five months after the transplant, Ejzenberg’s team wrote, the uterus showed no signs of rejection, ultrasound scans were normal, and the recipient was having regular menstruation. The woman’s previously fertilized and frozen eggs were implanted after seven months and 10 days later she was confirmed pregnant.

At seven months and 20 days – when the case study report was submitted to The Lancet – the baby girl was continuing to breastfeed and weighed 7.2 kg (16 lb).
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