Thursday 3 November 2016

Air-conditioning treath and HFCs extremely powerful heat-trappers

Ozone layer gmt de
Ozone layer gmt de (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
One day the West had thought to have found the solution against an escalating threat to the climate and were pleased to change the refrigerators gases with hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) to save the ozone layer.

So when nations signed the Montreal Protocol in 1987 – which aimed to save the ozone layer by banning ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) from use in aerosols, refrigerators and air-conditioning units – few questioned the idea that ozone-friendly hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) would make a great substitute.

But although HFCs did not destroy the ozone layer, they were potent greenhouse gases.
After almost 30 years, and with the manufacture of HFCs rising globally by 7 per cent each year, that mistake is about to be put right.

Seven years and requiring many determined advocates — major Western governments, the small island nation of Micronesia, poor African nations that fear drought and even starvation and persistent environmental groups reached an accord in Kigali, Rwanda, in October following the ratification by enough countries of last year’s Paris agreement broadly reducing greenhouse gases to allow it to take effect, as well as a narrower agreement to limit emissions from aircraft. It completes a trifecta of diplomatic accords aimed at keeping the rise in global temperatures below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (two degrees Celsius) over the average preindustrial temperatures — a point beyond which the manifest consequences of climate change, including rising sea levels and droughts, are likely to become exponentially worse.

Despite obvious threats to their populations from rising sea levels and droughts, some developing countries like India pushed back hard, in part because their people were on the verge of being able to afford air-conditioners powered by HFCs.
Although they now make up only a small part of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, HFCs are extremely powerful heat-trappers and, if left unchecked, would make it hard not to exceed the 3.6 degree threshold. One factor driving the negotiations was the rapid growth of air-conditioning in nations like China and India.

HFCs were once seen as a technological godsend. They were developed in response to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, a global agreement requiring nations and manufacturers to find a substitute for chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, then the dominant refrigerant, which was destroying the planet’s ozone layer. The chemical industry replaced that chemical with HFCs, which don’t harm the ozone layer but, as it turned out, added greatly to global warming.

The richest countries, including the United States, will freeze production and consumption of HFCs by 2018; much of the rest of the world, including China, Brazil and all of Africa, will do the same by 2024; and a few nations, including India, will have until 2028. Several newer and less harmful refrigerants are available, although they may be more expensive in the short run. The timetable will allow poorer countries to wait until prices come down. But unlike the Paris agreement, which consists of voluntary pledges, this one will be mandatory, with trade sanctions for nations that do not comply.

Mattlan Zackhras, the minister-in-assistance to the president of the Marshall Islands, said in a statement
"It may not be entirely what the islands wanted, but it is a good deal," 
and expressed his hope
"We all know we must go further, and we will go further."
Erik Solheim, executive director of the UN Environment Program, said
"This is about much more than the ozone layer and HFCs. It is a clear statement by all world leaders that the green transformation started in Paris is irreversible and unstoppable."
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Declaration of war against Islam and Christianity

religions in Europe, map en. See File:Europe r...
religions in Europe, map en. See File:Europe religion map.png for details. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
In this world where different groups misuse their god/God and religion to enlarge their power many christians allow them selves pulled in a spiral of violence, not noticing they are used by their politicians to get their country in a severe political ban.

there are also groups which claim to focus on saving the lives of Christians whom are suffering from what they call " the ‘Blasphemy Laws’", aiding relatives of martyred families, women and children who are victims of rape. Such actions of help for the suppressed and persecuted Christians is something which we would applaud if there would not be an other agenda behind it.

There are Christians who want to do believe those living in West Europe that they are in danger of religious people who are going to steal their property and stir up violence against the Christians population. they also want to give the impression to the European population that those who want to conquer Europe are going to abduct women, rape them and force marriages as well as limiting how they may dress and appear in public.

Last week Marine Le Pen declared war against Christianity, saying that she will utterly ban all Christian crosses, symbols and clothing from public life, even going to so far as to say that she will abolish any Christian imagery from any all public schools. This would be an utter ban on Christianity, since the Faith, by its very nature, is suppose to be incarnational and public. 

The French political leader Francois-Xavier Peron, has declared that France is about to enter into a devastating war against Islam, and its going to be extremely violent.
He says
‘France Is About To Enter A Holy War Against Islam, Its Going To Be Extremely Bloody And Violent, Embrace Christianity As The True Faith And Never Accept The Religion Of Satan’

His solution to prepare?
 Embrace the Christian Faith and never accept the antichrist masonic religion.
You may find an interview with Mr. Peron by Walid Shoebat, who used to be a radicalised Muslim willing to die for the cause of Jihad until he converted, in 1994, to what he calls Christianity, but would be more to Christendom,  about this coming war, and why the Christian Faith must be the religion of the world.

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A vision of a very different future for Kandahar culture

It is not so long since Kandahar, the crucible of the Taliban’s rise to power in the mid-1990s, felt like a city defined by its tumultuous past. Today, for an aspirational parent, the debating competitions, Oxford University Press curriculum and fiercely contested games of musical chairs at Wesa Academy offer a vision of a very different future.

A local entrepreneur founded the school in 2011, when Kandahar province was the pivot for an influx of tens of thousands of US troops fighting to drive the Taliban out of their rural strongholds and secure the city. With those soldiers long gone and the urban centre in the iron grip of a feared police chief, the success of Wesa has triggered a proliferation of rivals.

The biggest city in southern Afghanistan, Kandahar is a focal point for the country’s ethnic Pashtun community, who see a woman’s place as either in the home or veiled behind an anonymising burka. Kandahar served as the seat of the Taliban theocracy, which banned women from work or study until it was overthrown in 2001. But for many years afterwards sympathisers maintained the movement’s repressive influence.

The surge in private education is a barometer of change. The provincial government says that, over the past five years, the number of private schools in Kandahar, a city of half a million, has grown more than tenfold to 31. The school, which educates girls up to the age of 14, and boys up to 18, is so inundated with demand for places that it opened a nearby feeder nursery in September. While only nine of Wesa’s first intake of 58 pupils in 2011 were female, girls now make up more than a third of the 620 students.

A pupil writes on a blackboard at the Malalai high school for girls, many of whom are reportedly setting their sights on higher education.
A pupil writes on a blackboard at the Malalai high school for girls, many of whom are reportedly setting their sights on higher education. Photograph: Kate Holt for the Guardian
The blossoming of private education in the one-time cradle of the Taliban could be seen as a potent symbol of how the west’s intervention in Afghanistan – undertaken at vast human and financial cost – has set the country on a more progressive trajectory. However, the departing foreign forces bequeathed a deteriorating military situation to the country’s embattled security forces.



Projecting the no-nonsense aura obligatory for all hard-pressed headmasters, Sher Ahmed Afghan favours a prompt 7.45am start to assembly at the Wesa Academy in Kandahar. At his command, the throng of pupils pouring through the gate quickly divides into two orderly lines. Boys in smart shirts and ties move to one side of the schoolyard, while a smaller but still sizeable contingent of girls, wearing headscarves in the red, black and green of Afghanistan’s national flag, files towards the other.

Read more about it:

Girls attend classes at the Wesa Academy where they now make up more than a third of the pupils at Kandahar’s first co-educational school.

Rise in maternal deaths likely in Haiti, and UN expert speaks out on cholera


Midwife tells of delivering babies by torchlight in flood waters, and fresh threat of cholera as row continues over 2011 outbreak


People carry a body at the entrance of a hospital after Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti.
People carry a body at the entrance of a hospital after Hurricane Matthew hit Haiti. The storm killed more than 500 people and caused widespread devastation. Photograph: Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

In the aftermath of Hurricane Matthew, there are fears of a huge rise in maternal deaths in Haiti. Karen McVeigh speaks to a midwife at St Antoine hospital in Jérémie, Grand’Anse – one of the country’s worst-hit towns – who tells of delivering babies by torchlight as she stood knee-deep in water, while the hurricane ripped through the south-west tip of the country.
The widespread devastation has also triggered fears of a fresh cholera outbreak; this comes at a time when the UN’s human rights special rapporteur has spoken out against the organisation’s actions over the epidemic that followed Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. As Ben Quinn reports, in a scathing evaluation at the UN general assembly, Philip Alston condemned as “a disgrace” the United Nations’ refusal to accept responsibility for the devastating cluster of cases that claimed more than 9,000 lives, after the deadly bacterium was brought into the country by peacekeepers relocated from Nepal.
- the Guardian

Teams from Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) are seeing deteriorating health conditions among people in the heavily hurricane-affected departments of Sud, Grand’Anse and Nippes.

There are signs of food scarcity: most of the crops are destroyed or flooded and the vast majority of the livestock is missing or dead. In Sud and Grand'Anse, MSF has started to monitor the nutritional status of children under five years old in its mobile clinics in order to provide treatment with ready-to-use therapeutic food if necessary.

As the cholera epidemic is unpredictable under the current conditions, it is crucial to monitor new cases, provide sufficient access to treatment centers and provide safe drinking water. While the number of patients in MSF's cholera treatment center (CTC) in Port-à-Piment decreased to six on Oct. 25, the neighboring town of Chardonnières reported 40 suspected cases.
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Related News & Publications

Saturday 29 October 2016

Marble cladded tomb uncovered

English: Tomb of Jesus, inside the Edicule. Ch...
English: Tomb of Jesus, inside the Edicule. Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem. Français : La tombe du Christ, église du Saint-Sépulcre, Jérusalem. Română: Mormântul Domnului (Sfântul Mormânt), Ierusalim. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Restorers working in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Israel uncovered a stone slab venerated as the tomb of Jesus Christ.

Since at least 1555 C.E., and most likely centuries earlier, the tomb has been covered by marble cladding.

Fredrik Hiebert, archaeologist-in-residence at the National Geographic Society, a partner in the restoration project was very surprised by the amount of fill material beneath it.
An analysis of the original rock may enable them to better understand not only the original form of the tomb chamber, but also how it evolved as the focal point of veneration since it was first identified by Helena, mother of the Roman emperor Constantine, in 326 C.E.. 

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