New Climate Change study shows Indonesia's disastrous deforestation

This photograph taken on February 24, 2014 during an aerial survey mission by Greenpeace in Central Kalimantan province on Indonesia's Borneo Island, shows cleared trees to make way for a palm oil plantation in a Borneo forest

Satellite images have found that Indonesia's ancient forests, a cradle of biodiversity and a buffer against climate change, have shrunk much faster than thought, scientists said on Sunday.

Between 2000 and 2012, Indonesia lost around 6.02 million hectares (14.4 million acres or 23,250 square miles) of primary forest, an area almost the size of Sri Lanka, they reported.

Primary or ancient forests are distinguished from managed forests, which are plantations of trees grown for timber and pulp.

The researchers found that primary forest loss accelerated during the period under review, reaching an annual 840,000 hectares by 2012, nearly twice the deforestation rate of Brazil, which was 460,000 hectares in the same year.

"Indonesia's forests contain high floral and faunal biodiversity, including 10 percent of the world's plants, 12 percent of the world's mammals, 16 percent of the world's reptile-amphibians and 17 percent of the world's bird species," said the study, published in the journal Nature Climate Change.

"Extensive clearing of Indonesian primary forest cover directly results in habitat loss and associated plant and animal extinctions."

Deforestation is also a blow to the fight against climate change, as ancient trees store more carbon emissions from the atmosphere than new ones do, and for a longer period, thus mitigating global warming.

The research, led by geographer Belinda Margono of the University of Maryland, looked at long-term satellite images.

During 2000-2012, total forest cover in Indonesia retreated by 15.79 million hectares, of which 6.02 million, or 38 percent, was primary forest, the investigation found.

Distinguishing between primary and managed forest is vital in the campaign to preserve biodiversity and combat climate change, the paper said.

"It is critically important to know the context of forest disturbance, whether of a high-biomass natural forest or a short-cycle plantation," it said.

"Similarly, the clearing of natural forest has very different implications on the maintenance of biodiversity richness."

It noted that in 2010, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) put Indonesia's overall forest loss at 310,000 hectares per year from 2000-2005, and 690,000 hectares annually from 2005-2010.

Indonesia itself, in a report to the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in 2009, estimated forest loss of 1.1 million hectares annually from 2000-2005.

Margono's study found the biggest losers were lowland and wetland forests in Sumatra and Kalimantan, where trees are typically chopped down by loggers for use in farming.

In other islands or island groups, Papua, Sulawesi, Maluku, Java and Bali and Nusa Tenggara, primary forest cover fell back only slightly or remained stable from 2000-2012.

More information: Nature Climate Change, dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2277

NASA Budget Minibus: Congress Poised To Approve $178Bn

Returning from recess today, the US Congress and White House is set to consider the $128 billion “minibus” approved by the Senate on November 1, HR 2112.

It covers FDA, NSF, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and sets their respective budgets at levels approved earlier this year by the Senate Appropriations Committee.

“Minibus” is a cute take on “omnibus,” the traditional all-agency budget bill that Congress hasn’t seen since FY 2010 when the House, Senate, and White House were in Democratic hands.

NASA Budget
NASA stands to receive $17.8 billion for 2012 under a $1 trillion compromise spending measure House and Senate budget negotiators released Nov. 14.

The NASA funding, which is $684 million below the agency’s 2011 level and $924 million less than the White House requested, is part of a must-pass spending package Congress is poised to adopt by Nov. 18.

The package, a so-called minibus combining three previously separate spending bills into one, was hammered out during a legislative conference committee House and Senate appropriators convened Nov. 3.

Lawmakers included in the minibus a clean four-week extension of the so-called continuing resolution that has kept the federal government operating since the new budget year began Oct. 1. Congress must pass this legislation by Nov. 18 to prevent a government shutdown.

Summary Breakdown
According to a summary of the final conference report posted Nov. 14 on the House Appropriations Committee’s website, the $17.8 billion for NASA would break down as follows:

•  $3.8 billion for Space Exploration, which is $30 million below the 2011 level. This includes funding above NASA’s request to meet congressionally mandated deadlines for the Space Launch System heavy-lift rocket (SLS) and Orion Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle.
• $4.2 billion for Space Operations, which is $1.3 billion below the 2011 level.
• $5.1 billion for Science programs, or about $155 million above the 2011 level. This includes additional funding for the overbudget James Webb Space Telescope program that will be offset by “commensurate reductions in other programs.”

The minibus also includes $4.9 billion for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), a 7 percent increase over 2011. 

Some $924 million of that amount is set aside for the Joint Polar Satellite System “to ensure the continuity of critical weather forecast data.” Lawmakers, however, denied NOAA’s request for $322 million to establish a new NOAA Climate Service.

Private Motive for Egypt’s Public Embrace of a Jewish Past

CAIRO — Egyptians generally do not make any distinction between Jewish people and Israelis. Israelis are seen as the enemy, so Jews are, too.

Khalid is pretty typical in that regard, living in a neighborhood of winding, rutted roads in Old Cairo, selling snacks from a kiosk while listening to the Koran on the radio.

Asked his feelings about Jews, he replied matter-of-factly. “We hate them for everything they have done to us,” Mr. Badr said, in apracticed way and as casually as if he had been asked the time.

But Mr. Badr’s ideas have recently been challenged, by hos own government. He has had to confront the reality that his neighbourhood was once filled with Jews — Egyptian Jews — and that his nation’s history is interwoven with Jewish history.

Not far from his shop, down another narrow, winding alley once called the Alley of the Jews, the government is busy renovating an abandoned, dilapidated synagogue.

In fact, the government is not just renovating the crumbling, flooded old building. It is publicly embracing its Jewish past — not the kind of thing you ordinarily hear from Egyptian officials.

“If you don’t restore the Jewish synagogues, you lose a part of your history,” said Zahi Hawass, general secretary of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, who in the past has written negatively about Jews because of the clash between Israel and the Palestinians. “It is part of our heritage.”

Egypt has slowly, quietly been working to restore its synagogues for several years. It has completed two projects and plans to restore about eight more. But because of the perception on the street — the anger toward Israel and the deep, widespread anti-Semitism — the government initially insisted that its activities remain secret.

“They told us ‘We are doing these things, but you can’t tell anybody about it,’ ” said Rabbi Andrew Baker, director of international Jewish affairs for the American Jewish Committee.

“This was such a reverse of what we experience in Eastern Europe, where governments don’t do much but want to present the picture they are doing things. In Egypt they were doing things, but, ‘Shhh, don’t let anybody know!’ ”

So why the sudden public display of affection for Egypt’s Jewish past? Clearly politics is at play and not street politics, but global politics.

Egypt’s minister of culture, Farouk Hosny, wants to be the next director general of Unesco, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization. In the context of this conservative Islamic society, Mr. Hosny, 71, is quite liberal, running afoul of Islamists when he criticised the popularity of women wearing head scarves, for example.

But to appease — or please — his local constituency, he said in 2008 he would burn any Israeli book found in the nation’s premier library in Alexandria. He has apologised, but that has done little to end the attacks on his candidacy to lead an organisation dedicated to promoting cultural diversity.

So his subordinates have increased the rate of the restoration process. After a year of study, the work began in June. They pitched a blue tent, and held a news conference — two, in fact — right inside the old synagogue around the corner from Mr. Badr’s shop. Mr. Badr said that was when he realized that the building with no roof and cemented-over windows was a synagogue.

It is a historic one, actually, named after Rabbi Moses Ben Maimon, a physician and philosopher who is considered among the most important rabbinic scholars in Jewish history. He was born in Córdoba, Spain, in 1135, moved to Alexandria and eventually to Cairo.

He is known in the West as Moses Maimonides, he worked and studied in the temple until his death. Mr. Hawass said it was last used in 1960 and then was allowed to crumble, even as a new mosque was built right next door.

But the news conference only seems to have stoked more skepticism, as charges arose that the work was ordered, only to silence Mr. Hosny’s critics.

The Internet: How easily could it be shut down?

How easy is it to SHUTDOWN the Internet?

The experts and geeks alike will tell you that it is impossible! "Almost, certainly not." They would say in their clearly doubtful manner.

Why not?, you ask. Well, much of the infrastructure, the servers, cabling, satellites, and the internet service providers (ISPs) that run them, is in private hands. A single government might be able to command ISPs in their territory to shut down, but people could still receive data through satellite links controlled by other companies not answerable to that government. Hmm! OK so far.

To extend that shutdown across national borders is barely conceivable. "One very powerful government could have strong effects on their own country, but it would be very difficult to do this on a worldwide basis," says Milton Mueller, and he should know, he represents the international Internet Governance Project.

Who would 'want' to shut down the internet? Even the biggest cyber-attacks cause much less economic damage than closing the internet would. What's more, the experts say, malicious attempts to disable the internet are testimony to the difficulty of the task: the biggest attack in history came in February 2007, and you probably didn't even notice.

This attack attempted to overwhelm the 13 "root name servers" that carry the directory of all the internet addresses in use worldwide - data vital to the smooth running of the net. Two servers, both in the US, were affected, but with 11 others untouched, the attack failed.

ICANN has now begun to implement a further safeguard system, known as Anycast, by which each of the internet's 13 root name servers also acts as a duplicate, or mirror, for some of the others. "A root server in California can be mirrored in Taiwan or the Middle East," Mueller says. "By playing tricks with the addressing, we effectively have hundreds of these root servers."

If cyber-assaults get nowhere in shutting down the net, physical attacks on the infrastructure are unlikely to fare any better. You would have to physically plant bombs to destroy undersea cables, before launching missile attacks on the root name servers that are spread around the planet. "Then the internet will be the least of your worries," says Mueller. "We're talking about full-fledged international war."

There is another question that puzzles me. Why would the cyber-criminals and hackers want to shut down the web? It is the source of all their revenue, thrills and raison d'etre. I believe that the 'manipulation' and 'control' of the internet is a more probably target and that again is only partly possible with or without government funding, allegedly.