James Lovelock, one of the most respected and scientifically credible figures in the green movement, has urged a rethink on nuclear power.
Writing in the Independent, he says that nuclear power is now the only practical way to stop global warming.
"Global warming, like a fire, is accelerating and almost no time is left to act. We have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear."
Lovelock is the original proponent of the Gaia hypothesis, first put forward in book form in 1979. This posits that the organisms of the Earth together form a self-regulating system that maintains conditions suitable for life. Although at first controversial and not taken seriously outside of green circles, over time the theory has gained scientific respectability and has proved highly productive in sparking scientific research.
MORE...Interesting background facts (and maps) from the independent US defence analyst Chuck Spinney. He thinks it's going to be very hard to have peace in the Middle East without dealing with the water issue, but at the moment the roadmap has little to say about it.
The problem is that Israel consumes more water than it can replenish within its pre-1967 borders. The West Bank and Golan are both crucial recharge areas, and Israel also uses water from Lebanon. Even if Israel had normal relations with its neighbours, water would still be a potential source of conflict.
Spinney suggests that Israel may ultimately have to rethink how it's using the water - over 50 percent goes on agriculture, but agriculture contributes no more than three percent of the country's GDP.
Industrialised fishing has changed the world's oceans to such an extent that the sea can no longer be considered a natural system, according to a major 10-year-long study published in the science journal Nature. Stocks of the large predatory species have literally been decimated - only 10 percent remain.
"The impact we have had on ocean ecosystems has been vastly underestimated", says co-author Boris Worm of Kiel University in Germany. "It could bring about a complete re-organization of ocean ecosystems, with unknown global consequences."
According to the study's lead author Ransom Myers of Dalhousie University in Canada "We are in massive denial and continue to bicker over the last shrinking numbers of survivors, employing satellites and sensors to catch the last fish left. We have to understand how close to extinction some of these populations really are. If present fishing levels persist, these great fish will go the way of the dinosaurs."
Authors' press release
Plenty more fish in the sea? - Guardian
Great Fish Going the Way of the Dinosaurs - Environmental News Service
Burning household waste may be better for the environment than recycling, according to an influential group of Swedish campaigners.
They dismiss the time-consuming practice of separating out plastic, cardboard and glass from other domestic rubbish as a waste of time and money.
Keeping the refuse together and burning it in a modern incinerator is best for the environment, the economy and the management of natural resources, they write in a Swedish newspaper.
People should still keep hazardous materials such as batteries and unwanted medicines out of the general rubbish and dispose of them properly by other approved routes. And metals can be cheaply removed at the incinerator. But the bulk of household waste should be burnt, not dealt with in costly landfill or recycling schemes.
The claims have sparked a fierce debate, but indicate that the pendulum may be swinging back towards incineration after a period when it has been heavily out of favour in most European countries.
Swedes trash myth of refuse recycling - Telegraph (UK)
Original article in Dagens Nyheter (in Swedish)
China still plans to go ahead with a manned space flight later this year, despite the US shuttle disaster two weeks ago.
"China will stick to its schedule without being distracted," a top Chinese space official says in this interview in China Daily.
China is reported to have 14 ex-fighter pilots in training to become the nation's first astronauts. If the Shenzhou ("Heavenly Ship") programme succeeds China will become only the third nation to have an independent capability to put human crews into orbit.
Finally adapting to the post-Cold-War world, the US army wants to be able to get into action in distant theatres more quickly, and is turning to technology to help achieve its goal.
The aim is to get a combat-ready division deployed anywhere in the world within five days, and a substantial force of five divisions in place within a month.
The latest ideas on how this can be achieved were discussed at the Army Science Conference in December, as Scientific American reports.
Key to the whole project are much lighter fighting vehicles that can be more easily airlifted into position than existing tanks and armoured personnel carriers.
Work has already started on developing the so-called Future Combat System (FCS), which has at its heart a family of approximately fifteen different vehicles based on a common 16-ton platform. By comparison the army's current main battle tank weighs 75 tons.
The lead contractor for FCS is Boeing, which emphasises that air mobility is seen as the key.
A lighter-weight robotic unmanned ground vehicle nicknamed a mule is also envisaged. Several of the papers at the conference discussed how man and mule might work together in battlefield units.
Other topics included smarter and lighter munitions and hi-tech ways of reducing the physical quantity of supplies needed to sustain a force in the field. Many of the papers given at the conference are available online.
Whether even the US can really afford all this replacement kit is another matter. Maverick defence analyst Chuck Spinney argues that even on present plans "the defense budget will explode just as the baby boomers head for the old folks homes and Medicare and social security go through the roof".
Spinney points out that the average age of US weapons is actually increasing, and will continue to do so at least till 2010 - even if Congress approves the huge increase in spending the Bush administration has asked for, of which FCS forms only a part.
Meanwhile America's major weapon-making allies France, Germany and the UK are not participating in the FCS programme to any significant degree. Indeed, both France and the UK are going ahead with different lightweight fighting vehicles of their own. Germany is still committed to heavy tanks, according to Jane's Defence Weekly.
What's happened to the quality of journalism in US newspapers in the 30 years since the heyday of investigative reporting at the time of Watergate? Matthew Engel argues in the Guardian that it's in devastating decline.
The papers are verbose, formulaic and wretchedly designed. "And political courage is especially rare", he writes. "The supposedly liberal American press has become a dog that never bites".
Worse, the papers have got boring. Even the best reporting tends to be of the plodding "he said, she said" variety, with the paper itself, still less the individual journalist, reluctant to express a viewpoint. It's no accident that newspaper sales are in decline while opinionated talk show hosts light up the airwaves and attract huge audiences.
"Amid the glorious patchwork of creativity in the American media - in Hollywood, TV, magazines, the net, advertising, even publishing - the newspapers are a drab and unimaginative exception." And there's little incentive to make newspapers more interesting - US newspapers operate pretty much as a series of regional monopolies.
Engel concludes that if there's a new Watergate scandal waiting to be unmasked today, it is unlikely to be discovered by America's newspapers. "If it emerges, it will probably come out on the web."
Any war in Iraq is likely to prove fatal to large numbers of the region's civilians, according to a report by UK health charity Medact.
In its worst-case scenario, the organisation considers what would happen if nuclear weapons are fired on Iraq in response to a chemical or biological attack on Kuwait or Israel. The answer: nearly four million dead. But even in the best-case scenario of a rapid Iraqi surrender 10,000 people would die during the period of hostilities.
One reason Medact expects civilian casualties to be so much higher than in the first Gulf War a decade ago is that the general health of the Iraqi population has deteriorated, making the hardships of war more lethal. The report's authors also think that the risk of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons being used is now greater.
Even in a conventional war between 48,000 and 261,000 people can be expected to die on all sides - in the fighting itself and in the period of disruption that follows. If civil war breaks out things get worse for Iraqis - according to Medact around 375,000 would die. And if the war goes nuclear ten times that number would end up dead - Medact puts the toll at 3,900,000.
What happens to all the surplus customs agents, freight forwarders, border guards and so on when the ten new member states join the European Union?
Clecat, a Brussels-based organisation that represents such people, is pointing out a problem with the transitional arrangements for EU enlargement.
Why should Clecat members wait around to be made redundant? What happens if they instead drift off to other jobs well before mid-2004 - when the borders are due to come down? In the absence of sufficient staff won't trade with Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Cyprus and Malta descend into chaos well before the great day?
At least 30,000 jobs are affected, according to the organisation, which has written to various EU bodies to protest. Although it's likely that some kind of retention bonus or golden handcuffs can be negotiated, what's surprising that this problem seems to have been overlooked until now.
More than 20 million Americans are driving gas-guzzling sport utility vehicles (SUVs), and the number is rising fast. These large four-wheel drive vehicles have been the great success story of the US auto industry over the last decade, and while ordinary cars have been getting steadily more fuel efficient, the switch to SUVs is a move in the opposite direction.
In a new book Keith Bradsher argues that this is bad news for both energy consumption and people's safety. The vehicles are heavy, aerodynamically inefficient and consume more fuel than the cars they are replacing. US models are often based on pickup truck components, and do between 14 and 25 miles per gallon. There's a long extract from High and Mighty: SUVs the World's Most Dangerous Vehicles here.
According to Bradsher "the replacement of cars with SUVs is currently causing close to 3,000 needless deaths a year in the United States - as many people annually as died in the terrorist attacks at the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. Roughly 1,000 extra deaths occur each year in SUVs that roll over, compared to the expected rollover death rate if these motorists had been driving cars. About 1,000 more people die each year in cars hit by SUVs than would occur if the cars had been hit by other cars. And up to 1,000 additional people succumb each year to respiratory problems because of the extra smog caused by SUVs."
What's more, Bradsher expects the number of SUVs to double in the next few years simply on demographic grounds. Since SUVs are a new product category most of the vehicles out there are still quite new. But as their owners replace them, cheap second-hand SUVs become available, enabling growing numbers of less-affluent Americans to get their hands on the oil-burning monsters.