The Ecologist is such a great magazine. But I'm sorry that they don't make any of their content freely available online for me to link to here, because the Dec/Jan issue has some really important reading. For one, the world's first (human) climate refugees are about to lose their islands (in the Sunderbans Delta, which straddles the border of India and Bangladesh and is the world's largest mangrove forest, due to increased flows of water from melting glaciers in the Ganges headwaters).
There's also a meaty discussion about the possible negative health effects of Wi-Fi. Whether or not Wi-Fi microwaves actually cause headaches, sleep disturbance, depression, memory loss, and worse, as some studies claim, it is pretty remarkable -- according to a physicist interviewed for the piece -- that this technology could come to market and become ubiquitous without having to undergo safety trials or scrutiny.
New interactive map shows devastating effects of global temperature rise
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JMG Posted 6:50 am
04 Jan 2008
First, there are technologies that are only harmful in aggregate or cumulatively, so the typical test regime doesn't flag them.
Second, a regulatory test regime typically can't find interactivity effects; e.g., we've only managed to actually test a few chemicals and we've done no multi-element testing.
Besides, why worry about things like Wi-Fi when the genetic tampering is trying to train e-coli (which populates mammal guts) to exude butanol and other fuels (poisonous to mammals). I'd be a lot more concerned about genetic drift along these lines than I would be about the vanishingly low energy levels in Wi-Fi exposures.
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Erik Hoffner Posted 10:25 am
04 Jan 2008
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6172257.stm
It's just straight up precautionary principle, at least in the case of kids, with their "thinner skulls" according to the report, until there's evidence in either direction.
Erik
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Colin Wright Posted 4:16 pm
04 Jan 2008
I don't know what to make of it. I have WiFi at home. As JMG cautions, there are probably more important things to worry about.
But it seems that the cell phone manufacturers have cut way back on the amount of radiation exposure, in response to health studies. I suspect WiFi could be made to be just as useful with a factor or 10 lower in radiated power.
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Schoneveld Posted 4:15 am
05 Jan 2008
Fist of all, water in a mangrove is in communication with the sea (it is situated in the tidal zone of the coastal strip). Since the melting of local glaciers has no measurable effect on sea level the submergence of these islands are unrelated to glacier melting.
Secondly, the Bengal delta is subject to isostatic crustal movement caused by increased sedimentary load, in turn causing the submergence of islands, a common geological phenomenon.
Maybe it is time to educate the readers of this blog about the concept of "relative sea level change" with the emphasis on "relative". The present-day worldwide "absolute" eustatic sea level rise of some 2 mm per year is a futile event compared to local sea level changes which are often more dramatic but unrelated to ice melt or thermal expansion of warming ocean waters.
Locally observed changes are always the result of tectonics or isostatic movements of the earth's crust and never due to eustatics. In contrast to the Bengal delta, Stockholm is experiencing a relative uplift of 10 mm per year due to glacial isostatic adjustments, a rebound from the disappearance of the last glacial ice load. Also the East Pacific coastline shows a relative uplift of 1 mm per year (or an absolute vertical crustal uplift of 3 mm per year). The recent earthquake in the Saloloms, a tectonic event, has even pushed up some islands by a couple of meters.
Furthermore, progressive upward coral growth around many coral islands will be able to compensate for relative sea level rise and therefore Tuvalu or the Maldives are not necessarily doomed by the projected maximum eustatic sea level rise of 58 cm in the next century (provided humans don't damage the fringing reefs). As we all know, an atoll exists by virtue of this process.
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