I love sea and shells

1 in 6 people on the planet don’t have access to safe, clean drinking water

Right now, 1.1 billion people on the planet don't have access to safe, clean drinking water. That's one in six of us.

Watch this video here
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Blue roses to debut in Japan

The rose has a very long history; it was first cultivated by ancient civilizations 5,000 years ago, and more than 25,000 varieties have been produced since then, in such colors as red, pink, white, and yellow. One color that had proved impossible, however, was blue. The pigment that makes some other flowers blue is called delphinidin, but roses lack the genes to produce it.

Santory makes it true at 3 November 2009 in Tokyo.

Greek fires

Here is another opinion from crystalclearforum that answers to Oliver Rackham' s opinion. See here

Dear friend Oliver,
Yes, nobody controls the tsunamis or the meteorites and of course wildfires is a natural (too) phenomenon that happens even where no human breaths. We cannot control the very existence of wildfires but we can handle them. In the case of the recent fires close to Athens a serious issue is that the disaster started after a small fire in the periphery of the final total burnt area, and that fire service although had the necessary tools (grand and air forces, paid from the blood of the Greek citizens) its reaction was (trying to stay polite) ridiculously slow. And that is beyond any doubt by the facts.
This is my first objection. But there are more. The same time Greeks are almost mad on the whole establishment of Greek political parties, and Greek state in general. They are sick and tired of paying and paying and receiving back a ridiculous state, extremely expensive, always impotent, and absolutely hostile to them. We Greeks feel sometimes that Greek state is an occupation army in our country, or even worse.
Third, the result of one more Greek state's silly errors, it was the death blow to any hope of remaking Attica and Athens a livable place. The environmental disaster is the worst in Greek modern history because it was concentrated to a small place, Attica, and (you mention in your letter the natural way of the renaissance of the forest and jungles) there is a very dangerous factor making difficult any natural recovery of the local environment; human presence, dense and hungry for build-able land.So understand our anger against our government for this Greek tragedy (or English black comedy?)

kvezdrevanis

P.S. We are not silly, we know that after the climatic change, and the other factors I already mentioned, mostly the huge demand for housing, this thing it was sure it will happen. It was just matter of time. We were expecting this death. But it is still a death. We need to mourn.

A post in crystalclearforum with a different point of view

Yet again the fire season comes round in Greece, and yet again journalists and politicians treat it as a tragedy and a disaster, followed by recriminations about pyromaniacs versus fire-fighters. Yet again a Prime Minister claims to be responsible for preventing the pines around Athens from burning, and yet again is blamed for failing to carry out that duty.

The real questions: What is it that makes the Greek landscape so very flammable? How can people live with wildfires? are not debated.

Most of the big Greek fires, the ones that get into the newspapers, involve pine-trees. The fact is that pines, and most other Mediterranean vegetation, are designed by Nature (or evolution) to burn. This is not a misfortune, but an adaptation. They burn because (like arbutus, laurel, palms etc.) they make flammable chemicals. It is their business in life to catch fire from time to time — by lightning if there is no other source of ignition — and burn up the less fire-adapted plants that would compete with them. Some kinds of pine survive the fire, protected by their fireproof bark; others die, but start again from seed released by their cones.

I don't like agreeing with official pronouncements, but Mr Antonaros is not wrong. Pines are indeed fire-promoting. Greece has had pine trees and high winds for millions of years, and for millions of years the pine trees have burnt.

Pine fires around Athens are not new. In the 1840s the British Ambassador reported: ˜All Attica was in lurid red smoke for several days; we could not breathe, for whole sides of forests near shrunk, without a hand to stop them, before the fire. However, there is no doubt that Greece has become more flammable in the last hundred years. Mountain cultivation has declined, and abandoned terraces and pastures have become overgrown with pines and other flammable vegetation.

On trips to the old Athens airport I used to look across at Mount Hymettos and see the pines, year by year, creeping up a mountain that had been treeless since the time of Plato; and, sure enough, there was the first pine fire about ten years ago.

Another property of fires is that, while there are some fires every year, the big ones are concentrated into particular years when the weather is favourable, like Spain in 1994. In Greece in 2007, the most fiery season for at least 50 years, only 2% of the entire country was reported as having burnt.

I doubt whether the answer is to have yet more fire-fighting equipment. Helicopters and planes seem not to make much difference to a big fire: it goes on either until it runs out of flammable vegetation or until the wind dies down. In Australia, which is more flammable even than Greece, I was told that Sydney had the world's biggest concentration of fire-fighting gadgets, and that the effect had been to lengthen the average interval between one fire and the next at any one point to seven years.

Anyway, putting out a fire doesn't solve the problem. It merely lets fuel go on accumulating, so that the next fire is hotter and more unstoppable. In a land of smokers, thunderstorms, and overhead electricity cables there will always be sources of ignition. Do the people of Athens really want fewer bigger fires rather than more frequent smaller ones?

However, there are three lessons to be learnt. First, although there will always be fires, people's actions aggravate the damage. It is folly to allow people to build houses in pinewoods, as so often happens around Athens and in other parts of the Mediterranean. There is nothing moral about this: it is simple cause and effect. If you build in a flood-plain you get wet the next time there is a flood; if you build under pine-trees, you get burnt the next time there is a fire. Even in the biggest conflagrations, traditional Greek villages usually escape, because they are surrounded by gardens and orchards and vines and plane-trees which don't carry fire.

Second, we hear the story that fires are started by developers in order to get round a ban on building on land designated as forest. They believe that a burnt forest is not a forest and can be built on. I don't know whether this is true, but if it is the law should be changed. It is folly to allow a fire to alter the legal status of land. A burnt forest is still a forest and should count as such.

Thirdly, politicians are not God: there are limits to their powers. They should not make themselves foolish by claiming responsibility for situations over which they have no real control, and journalists should not flatter them by accepting such claims.

A British Prime Minister can't control swine flu or foot-and-mouth disease, and shouldn't pretend that he can. A Greek Prime Minister can't control earthquake or tsunami: why should he claim to be able to control conflagrations?

Oliver Rackham
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Animal lovers

Hi, all you animal lovers! The Animal Rescue Site is having trouble getting enough people to click on it daily so they can meet their quota of getting FREE FOOD donated every day to abused and neglected animals. It takes less than a minute (about 15 seconds) to go to their site and click on the purple box 'fund food for animals for free'. This doesn't cost you a thing.

Their corporate sponsors/advertisers use the number of daily visits to donate food to abandoned/neglected animals in exchange for advertising.

Here's the web site: http://www.theanimalrescuesite.com/

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Cat adopting a teeny-weeny baby rabbit

Have a look at the super chameleons video's

The super chameleon shows his super camouflaging powers.

Big Dog motorcycle pulls up in front of a pet store and a chameleon is in the window and it doesn't know what color to change into so it explodes.

Pork Chops!

Take a look... you won't believe your eyes!

In a zoo in California, a mother tiger gave birth to a rareset of triplet tiger cubs. Unfortunately, due tocomplications in the pregnancy, the cubs were bornprematurely and due to their tiny size, they died shortlyafter birth.

The mother tiger after recovering from the delivery, suddenly started to decline in health, although physicallyshe was fine. The veterinarians felt that the loss of herlitter had caused the tigress to fall into a depression. The doctors decided that if the tigress could surrogate anothermother's cubs, perhaps she would improve.

After checking with many other zoos across the country, thedepressing news was that there were no tiger cubs of theright age to introduce to the mourning mother. Theveterinarians decided to try something that had never beentried in a zoo environment. Sometimes a mother of onespecies will take on the care of a different species. Theonly 'orphans' that could be found quickly, were a litter ofweanling pigs. The zoo keepers and vets wrapped the pigletsin tiger skin and placed the babies around the mother tiger.Would they become cubs or pork chops?

Now, please tell me one more time...

why can't the rest of the world get along?

...and then, we are called 'humans'!

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Global Warming

Global warming could do more than just melt polar ice. It could change our maps, and displace people from cities and tropical islands.

See this National Geographic video
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Earth Hour

2,140 cities, towns and municipalities in 82 countries have already committed to VOTE EARTH for Earth Hour 2009, as part of the worlds first global election between Earth and global warming.

http://www.voteearth2009.org/why/
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Shells Form Unique Climate Archive On The Ocean Floor

ScienceDaily (July 10, 2008) — Most people who find a seashell during their summer holiday on the coast will probably not be aware that they have found a unique record of the climate. For Professor Bernd Schöne, however, these hard calcium shells provide a profound insight into the history of our earth and especially into the climate of the past. "We are currently able to reconstruct the climatic history of the past 500 years from shells on a year-by-year basis. Thus we can demonstrate, for example, that the North Sea has become one degree warmer over the past hundred years, probably an effect attributable to humans," explains the palaeontologist from Mainz.

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WWF: Sweden sets climate goals example for EU

"If the Swedish government can convince other industrial countries to adapt Sweden’s ambitious climate package, the world would be better suited for combating destructive climate change." © WF-Canon / Hartmut JUNGIUS

The new climate and clean energy package proposed by Sweden should serve as an example for all EU countries ahead of crucial global warming negotiations, WWF says. If followed by other industrialised nations the deal could lead towards a low carbon future and help combat climate change.

Sweden is just preparing to take over the EU’s rotating presidency and it is likely to play a major role during important international meetings culminating in the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, in December, where leaders from about 190 countries will try to agree a global deal to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

Sweden’s Environment Minister Andreas Carlgren said that his country now aims by 2020 for renewable energy to comprise 50 percent of all energy produced, for the Swedish car fleet to be independent of fossil fuels 10 years later and for the country to be carbon neutral by 2050.

“We think it is fantastic that the government recognises the important role that eco-efficiency plays in improving the economy,” Lasse Gustavsson, Secretary general of WWF in Sweden said.
“If the Swedish government can convince other industrial countries to adopt Sweden’s ambitious climate package, the world would be better suited for combating destructive climate change,” he said.

Sweden, which now plans to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent from its 1990 levels within the next 11 years, was asked to cut CO2 output by just 17 percent.

The government said it would stay committed to the proposed goals and that they were independent of whether or not a global climate agreement is achieved.

It wants to reach these goals through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), Carlrgren said.

Unfortunately, according to WWF, CDM is currently an ineffective system in desperate need of reform. WWF’s concern is that unless serious reforms of the CDM system are enacted, there is a risk that the 40 percent goal will be watered down to a mere 27 percent.

“We would prefer to see a greater portion of these reductions made within Sweden’s own borders,” Mr Gustavsson said.
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