Martin Fisher (KickStart) Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers

PBS's Spencer Michels reports on the story of how a California social entrepreneur sees the chance to increase access to clean water in Kenya through the use of foot-pumps. In this segment, there are many lessons for us on how to achieve our goals in the field. I recommend you watch this report:

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• I always wondered why we were poor (osocio.org)
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2009: a great year for open access

2009 has been a good year for open access; for details, see my December 11, 2009 Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Happy Holidays!

Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization

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Last Friday's edition of NOW on PBS asks, "Is a coastal catastrophe approaching, and what should we be doing about it?" It specifically addresses the issue of flooding in Bangladesh, currently the 7th most populous country on the planet and one of the most densely populated (1063 per sq km). (The next most populous country is Russia with a mere 8.4 per sq km!) Featured is Dr A. Atiq Rahman, the Executive Director of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) and a Lead Author of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) Chapter-19 on “Assessing Key Vulnerabilities and the Risk from Climate Change”, co-winner of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. Dr Rahman says terms like Global Warming and Climate Change are deceptively euphemistic, and says Irreversible Catastrophic Climate Destabilization is much more accurate and impactful. Where I come from, people might say, "It's time to get the finger out!"

You can watch the segment below. I recommend you view the NOW page also, as the comments are enlightening. For instance, commenter Forrest M. Mims III says,"... land subsidence alone may account for an elevation change of -30 cm over the past several decades," which for me is in the category of "things you never thought of".

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• Thinning cloud cover over oceans speeds global warming, study finds (guardian.co.uk)
• World temperatures set for record highs (telegraph.co.uk)
• Climate-Change Dissent (cenblog.org)
• Google Earth offering up climate change tool and video channel (inquisitr.com)
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• Climate Change Forecast Worse Than Previous Predictions (takepart.com)
• Glaciers in Antarctica, Greenland Show Sea Level Rises (time.com)
• It's the climate, stupid (guardian.co.uk)
• Rather Than Melt, Some Glaciers Race to the Sea (time.com)
• Google Earth launches climate simulator (guardian.co.uk)
• Police stop green activist leaving UK (guardian.co.uk)
• Government climate change ad investigated (guardian.co.uk)