Since 1900, global sea levels have crept upward about seven inches. Rising temperatures are melting glaciers and ice sheets, as well as warming the oceans directly, which causes them to expand. Various researchers have attributed only a portion of the rise in water level to carbon dioxide (CO2)released by human actions—and blamed the rest on natural factors such as solar activity. The latest study goes much further, faulting people for more than three-quarters of the sea-level change during the past century.

Records of tide height have been kept for centuries at several seaports (Amsterdam since 1700, Liverpool since 1768, Stockholm since 1774, and many other places since 1850). Such long records have enabled Svetlana Jevrejeva, of the British government’s Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory in Liverpool, and two colleagues to statistically model the influence of various factors on sea level during the past three centuries, and to extrapolate the findings over the past millennium.

The team found that up until about 1800, sea levels actually fell owing to volcanic eruptions that periodically injected ash into the atmosphere, veiling the Sun and cooling the Earth. But as the waters rose after 1850, the biggest contributing factor was increasing atmospheric CO2.

Significantly, Jevrejeva’s team calculated that without the ongoing, mitigating effects of volcanic activity since 1880, sea levels would now be about three inches higher than they are.

This research was published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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The team included women in skirts shoveling for all it’s worth, but it barely made a dent in the mountain of debris that was once a shopping center in Haiti’s quake-devastated capital.

While it may not seem so, judging from the absence of heavy equipment at the site, removing rubble is an urgent matter, and not only because of the many bodies still trapped under buildings in ruin throughout Port-au-Prince.

Massive mounds of rubble are blocking drains and canals that are crucial in preventing floods when the heavy rains begin around May. Those made homeless by the quake who live in low-lying camps face more catastrophe if flooding occurs.

On top of that, potential new camp sites for the homeless need to be cleared of debris to relocate thousands of people now crammed in overcrowded, makeshift settlements.

Aid officials say clearing all the rubble from the quake will fill 1,000 trucks a day for more than 1,000 days. So why bother with shoveling?

“It’s just to help the unemployed,” said Robert Jean Louis, site supervisor where a cinema, pharmacy and grocery store once stood.

The goal is a worthy one, with so many people out of work in this impoverished country, and Louis said the shovelers, who earn five dollars a day, were only the initial phase of a plan that will later bring in heavy equipment.

It was unclear if aid officials have designated his site a priority, though it does contain some very large drains.

But asked when the heavy equipment would arrive, Louis thought for a moment, then said, “not yet.”

“Maybe in one month,” said the head of the digging team hired by aid group CHF International. “Could be longer, could be less.”

Pics Courtesy :Telegraph.co.uk

Rubble removal is another indication of the catastrophe’s daunting scale. Other urgent tasks include food and shelter distribution, as well as improving living conditions in the squalid camps that are home to more than a million people.

On top of that, Haiti’s badly crippled government faces a lack of heavy equipment to clear the rubble left by the 7.0-magnitude quake that killed more than 217,000 people.

US Colonel Gregory Kane said Monday he believed there were now enough trucks in the country and in the neighboring Dominican Republic to handle the job.

Kane said drains and canals will have to be unblocked quickly because of the coming rains.

“That will overwhelm the storm water mitigation system that they’ve got in Port-au-Prince if the rubble is not cleared out,” he said.

And up to 19 camps housing tens of thousands of people in and around Port-au-Prince are considered to be in low-lying areas, he said.

Canadian Deputy Commanding General Nicolas Matern of the Haiti Joint Task Force said because the demand for shelter is so urgent ahead of the rains, rubble removal will focus on what is needed for the camps.

That includes clearing space to create new settlements to ease overcrowded sites that are becoming a health risk, he said.

Matern said the quake created between 20 and 25 million cubic yards (meters) of rubble.

“Enough to fill five Superdomes,” he said, referring to the US stadium in New Orleans that housed thousands of people in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“Or put in other terms, 1,000 trucks (a day) for 1,000 days,” he said.

“What we’re doing to support the shelter initiative is we’re focusing our rubble removal in the immediate zero to three months on the settlements, as opposed to trying to do everything at once,” he added.

At the site of the crumbled shopping center, the workers picked away, wearing masks to keep from breathing in the clouds of cement dust and the rancid smells emanating from the pile.

Workers there said they were glad to be working despite the low pay. Louis, the supervisor, said it was only the beginning.

“We have several sites to clear out,” he said. “Overall, what is needed is to clear the canal to allow water to drain.”

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Europe acted on Monday to bring about a worldwide ban on commercial fishing of bluefin tuna, the king of Japanese sushi and sashimi, in a move that has already angered Tokyo.

However, the proposal unveiled by the European Commission, which has still to be agreed by national governments, is that any ban based on scientific evidence concerning falling stocks only comes into force in 2011.

Brussels also wants to boost what it called “artisanal,” or small-scale fishing, and both its environment and fisheries commissioners told a press conference that quotas could be re-allocated to boost jobs in coastal areas.

Crucially, they will allow small boats — as opposed to the super-trawlers employing dozens of crew that hoover up the majority of tuna caught in the Mediterranean — to keep fishing and to supply the EU market with tuna.

“Since there is a high risk that Atlantic bluefin tuna will soon be gone forever, we have no other choice than to act now and propose a ban on international trade,” EU Environment Commissioner Janez Potocnik said.

“Europe’s goal must be to find an international solution that ensures a sustainable solution for both Atlantic bluefin tuna and the fisheries industry.”

Governments across the European Union must now approve the commission’s proposal, ahead of a meeting in March in Qatar of the United Nations body that decides whether species are listed as endangered.

“What really matters here is our intention, the future for fish and fisheries concerns every country,” added EU fisheries commissioner Maria Damanki.

“We are well aware of the short-term cost, but I am sure we can guarantee a viable future for our fishermen.

“We have to try and persuade other Mediterranean countries of our intentions,” she added.

“An important part of the solution we are proposing today is a special arrangement for artisanal fishing vessels.”

The UN-backed wildlife trade agency supports a call to stop cross-border trade in the fish when 175 member nations to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) meet in Doha.

Marine wildlife experts say that, despite fishing quotas, bluefin tuna stocks have plunged by 80 percent in recent decades in the Western Atlantic and Mediterranean, threatening the predator species with extinction.

Japan — which consumes three-quarters of the global bluefin tuna catch from both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans — says it opposes such a trade ban and prefers other mechanisms to make the catch more sustainable.

Farm and Fisheries Minister Hirotaka Akamatsu said this month that Japan’s answer to the proposed trade ban is “a clear no”, and a fisheries official said Monday that Japan may “take a reservation” and ignore a ban if it is passed.

“We have been saying that is one of our options,” Shingo Ota, a senior negotiator for Japan fisheries, told AFP.

“We are not saying we will definitely reserve it. We are doing our best so that it won’t be adopted. Our final decision will come after the vote.”

France, the biggest producer of bluefin tuna for consumption, has spoken in favour of a ban, but for a limited duration and not for another 18 months.

Italy has voluntarily introduced a one-year moratorium and is keeping its trawlers in port, using existing European Union funding to cushion the blow. But Spain, Greece, Cyprus and Malta have opposed such a ban.

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NASA has launched a probe to study the sun and its dynamic behaviour “in greater detail than ever before”.

A rocket ‘Atlas V’ carrying the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) was on Thursday launched from Florida’s Atlantic Coast.

The SDO is the first-of-its-kind spacecraft designed to study the sun, the agency said.

It is expected to unlock the processes inside the sun, on its surface, and in its corona that result in solar variability which when experienced on Earth, is called space weather.

The five-year mission will disclose the sun’s inner workings by constantly taking high resolution images, collecting readings from its inside and measuring its magnetic field activity.

It “will determine how the sun’s magnetic field is generated, structured and converted into violent solar events like turbulent solar wind, solar flares and coronal mass ejections,” according to the agency.

This data is expected to eventually help researchers predict solar storms and other activity on the sun that can affect spacecraft in orbit, astronauts on the International Space Station and electronic and other systems on Earth.

This will further allow us to accommodate or mitigate the effects of space weather — which can disable satellites, cause power grid failures and disrupt GPS, TV and telecommunication signals, the agency said.

The mission — a part of the agency’s science program ‘Living With a Star’ developed to understand and address those aspects of the sun and solar system that directly affect life and society — will also measure the extreme ultraviolet irradiance of the sun that is a key driver to the structure and composition of Earth’s upper atmosphere.

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