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I would suspect that China is also suffering.

Quite a bit actually. Invasive species from the US is probably a bigger problem in China than invasive species from China is in the US. Pine wood nematodes devastate pine forests and smooth cord grass smothers mangroves, for example - both originating in North America.

This was trialled in the Cayman Islands back in 2009 or so, except their skeeters needed tetracycline.

This was trialled in the Cayman Islands back in 2009 or so, except their skeeters needed tetracycline.

Not so much the medical community, as the educators. Science and math literacy is shockingly low and dropping. . .

Multiple examples:

Australia

India

And the US

Fear that science might upset some religious applecart or pop-culture shibboleth is the mind-killer. . . literally. . .

http://www.scidev.net/en/new-technologies/icts/news/solar-powered-3d-printer-uses-sand-to-make-glass-1.html

sort of.

Here's a link on Bangladesh: http://www.scidev.net/en/news/river-sediment-may-counter-bangladesh-sea-level-rise.html There are more recent studies and analyses. Go look for them yourself.

And these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and these people, and all the other farmers who willingly buy them. But yeah, other than them, who needs crop improvement techniques?

Ignoring your obvious racist message, developing countries have better things to spend their resources other than an army of robot worms. But scientific research does take place in more relevant fields http://m.scidev.net/en/science-and-innovation-policy/r-d-in-africa/news/south-african-scientists-win-first-obasanjo-science-prize.html

Baloney. The US is still the world's largest manufacturing nation.

China assembles iPhones, athletic shoes and similar consumer knick-knacks. The US makes airliners, CPUs, pharmaceuticals, heavy mining and earth-movers and food.

http://business.time.com/2011/03/10/can-china-compete-with-american-manufacturing/

Yes engineering has advantages when located close to manufacturing sites. That is not the same as R&D.

The US R&D spend rate is still very high. Even though it isn't as high as it should be it is still only barely exceeded by all of Asia combined as a percentage of the world, i.e. 31% vs 32%.

From: http://www.scidev.net/en/science-and-innovation-policy/finance/news/asian-countries-collectively-top-us-r-d-spend.html

The total science spend of China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam rose steadily between 1999 and 2009 to reach 32 per cent of the global share of spending on science, compared with 31 per cent in the US. Per capital the US spends 10x Asia.

The US needs to up it's game, certainly. But dig into the stats and the picture is not at all what it is painted to be in sensationalized news articles.

Yes, they will die from hunger, poor sanitation, wars (civil or otherwise) all of which are going to be made worse by climate change. The World Health Organization already attributes 150,000 deaths annually to the effects of climate change.

Climate change is widely expected to hit the poorest people hardest.

I think you need to consider the effect of making all those factors worse.

Woa, woa, woa...where do you get your prices? I LIVE 20 miles from the university. We are on a level here that you would not understand, so I won't try. We are wanting to SAVE LIVES . GEDDIT? Mainly rural South African lives. Mainly black South African lives. If you want to read about costs goto http://www.scidev.net/en/news/nano-tea-bag-purifies-water.html. We are talking CENTS. So please talk SENSE. Yeesh....money, money, money. The South African tax payer is footing the bill OK??

More specifics on the movement of emissions from developed to developing countries: http://www.scidev.net/en/news/developing-nations-blamed-for-co2-increase.html [scidev.net] "The study finds that in 2004, emissions from developing economies made up 73 per cent of the global growth in emissions largely due to moving energy-intensive activities from developed to developing countries."

So Least Developed Countries and Developing countries The latter category includes the so called "Newly Industrialised Nations" which exhibit the phenomena you are describing (e.g China, South Africa, India). The former (the Least Developed Countries) -

do not.

HTH

More specifics on the movement of emissions from developed to developing countries:

http://www.scidev.net/en/news/developing-nations-blamed-for-co2-increase.html

"The study finds that in 2004, emissions from developing economies made up 73 per cent of the global growth in emissions largely due to moving energy-intensive activities from developed to developing countries."

If you introduce an emissions control scheme that only focuses on third world countries, it simply provides incentives for moving those emissions to countries where they are allowed. The literature here is pretty robust, and I'm sure you could find more examples on scholar.google.com.

China steals 5 pieces of tech for every 1 they build

This kind of thinking is why the US and other western countries are going to fail in the long term.
Just like Japan in the 50's, China right now is largely perceived as being a country that makes cheap knock offs of products that are invented in the US or Europe, with no real innovation of their own.
The reality of course, is that we mostly only see the cheap crappy products that importers are willing to import - China actually has some pretty good tech of their own that does not get exported.
They are already the main producers of our favorite tech toys - iPads, iPhones, etc etc.

When I lived in Japan I was always surprised to see how far behind the "latest and greatest" consumer goods were back in my own country (eg. video cameras) compared to what was available in Japan. I would be very surprised if this is not already the case with stuff coming out of China too - we only see the goods here that importers are willing to import, which seems to be mostly the cheap knockoff stuff.

China is now greatly out-pacing the rest of the world in terms of growth in scientific research, and it already massively exceeds Japan - 125,000 in 2009 vs 72,000 from Japan) it will only be 6 or 7 years before it passes the US too.

The we keep believing the myth that the only the US or Europe is capable of producing innovative products, the further behind we will slide in science and technology, until we wake up one day and wonder why it is that the only thing that we are producing is the very goods that we used to ascribe to third world countries - ie. agricultural and primary products like ore ore and coal, with perhaps a few Britney CDs thrown in too.

The amount of money that was spent to reach the moon during the space race was astronomical - and justifiable at the time due the the cold war. To really get back in the space business properly, there has to be a good commercial reason to get there, and it has to be private companies that do it. What we should really be doing is encouraging more private enterprises to get into the field by having more schemes like the X prizes, which has so far been very successful at helping drive private industry into the field. The problem with large publicly funded NASA driven projects is it just generates way too much pork barrel inefficiencies, with relatively little return for all that public spending compared to what can be achieved by private companies for the same money.

I would like to see someone actually start trying to do something like actually capture an asteroid (or use some of the existing hunks of rock) at one of the Lagrange points as the basis for industrial mining, processing and fabrication of stuff in space - as ultimately this is probably going to be the most affordable way to build substantial structures up there, as opposed to pushing up every single component on rockets at thousands of dollars per Kg. Perhaps it is time for an X prize type competition for the first company who can actually make something from stuff that is already out there in space, so we can finally start building real space based industries.

"price of oil is high enough alternatives start to look very attractive."

And then you'll need to convert the whole planet with the only resource that can do it, oil, and you just said it'll be expensive...

Can you think for more than three seconds why that might be, um, difficult?

You can't build windmills in a wind-powered economy.

"I own no SUV nor home in the burbs, oh trollish one."

Good for you. How may do, though? Think you can convert all those people to a non-fossil lifestyle? Methinks you just don't get it.

Our life and civilization will be OVER when the oil is gone. Simple as that.

No doubt we will transform, but the society we will become will be nothing at all like what sci-fi has been pumping into our minds for a century.

Think horses.

So anyways, please tell me how you will magically make hydrocarbons with electricty?

Go ahead, tell me, because otherwise you're just like a child wishing to Santa Claus, or at best a very naive person who thinks problems just solve themselves because other, smarter people will solve them.

This problem isn't political or intellectual; it's geological. When is that going to sink in?

Solar power from space? Utterly and completely unfeasible, impractical, and a complete energy sink. It's been that way since it was first dreamt up in the feverish imagination of Space Age lunatics.

If it were possible, it would have been tried in the four decades we've had since then.

Guess what? It's far simpler, efficient and actually buildable to just focus a bunch of mirrors at a tower and get all the power you need on Earth.

Morocco is getting it.

Rice Patent (the story behind the second led me to this interesting brief.

Hanging on to our lead, on the other hand, is doubtful: "Cited papers first-authored by Chinese scientists -- an important indicator of scientific creativity -- increased by 25.3 per cent in 2006, and the number of times they were cited increased 28.3 per cent. However, China remains thirteenth in terms of total citation numbers." At that rate, China won't be in 13th for long.

From the global perspective it doesn't matter; all this means mankind as a whole is simply progressing much faster now. But from the US nationalist perspective, this definitely decreases our ability to compete for increasingly scarce natural resources. We've already seen this occur drastically in the price of oil.

For example, she emphasizes U.S. financial support for infrastructure and education in unstable countries as a means for minimizing extremism.

Obviously part of this is to support the military. Iran has been trying to build a domestic arms industry, including helicopters and fighter jets - mostly copies of Western designs, but with more variation from the original as they get more skilled at it. But that still requires scientists, and having a scientifically literate population can only have a positive influence on the country.

we know for sure we could reduce the effect by reducing human output of greenhouse gases (exactly how much we can reduce it by, is another question...).

Your Right... I say you lead the way... Start by commiting suicide to consume less, thus producing less GH gases... If it makes a measureable impact on the planet, I promise I'll follow shortly after.

BTW, IF we could get it soooo hot that everything dies (On purpose!) Eventually MAN will then die too... So eventually the planet will recreate life (from all the bacteri & stuff way down below the surface) that may lead to a new dominient species... so we are REALLY just contributing to the normal course of (if you believe in it) evolution. Right? so WHO GIVES a WHOOP if the Human race wipes itself out?

So, I don't get what the whole problem is about anyways.. It's just another normal cycle... We are only a blink in the time line. You or I will not and can not make a difference in the overall cycles of the planet. I think there is a MUCH GREATER chance that the 1,313,973,713 people in china (1.3 BILLION) will make MORE of an impact than the 298,444,215 People in the US (300 MILLION with "undocumented" immigrants) BUT everyone seems to jump on our backs first...

"Unlike developed countries, China and other developing nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol on climate change are not required to reduce their emissions of six greenhouse gases to below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. " - http://www.scidev.net/news/index.cfm?fuseaction=re adnews&itemid=1761&language=1

*China -- Population: 1,313,973,713 (July 2006 est.) According to https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/prin t/ch.html

*United States -- Population: 298,444,215 (July 2006 est.) According to https://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/prin t/us.html

i hate to be cynical, but this is nothing but an orchestrated effort to lay the groundwork for a monetary claim against "The Rich Industrialized West" a.k.a., the U.S.

First off, the article doesn't even have the date correct for when the island disappeared..22 years ago (that would be 1988). So let's dispense with accuracy right there..

Second, the river delta in question is FAMOUS for flooding and killing/displacing hundreds of thousands...geez it's the drainage basin for the freakin Himalayan mountain range...

Bangladesh is in bottom quintile in per capita GDP.

and finally, lets not forget this article..
'Bangladesh floods: rich nations 'must share the blame'
http://www.scidev.net/Editorials/index.cfm?fuseact ion=readEditorials&itemid=125&language=1

pretty much lays it out...they're after money..

'In future, therefore, when affected countries demand assistance from the rich countries of the world in helping address climate-related disasters such as floods, it will not be for a request for charity but for compensation, appealing to their moral responsibility, if not their legal liability, to make good the damage and destruction for which their activities have, directly or indirectly, been partially responsible.'

this is all sponsored and written under the auspices of that famously neutral organization the U.N.

this is a giant effort at laying the groundwork for demanding monetary compensation, not aid, for flooding that has been going on FOREVER in that country. These islands didn't "sink", they where washed away 22 years ago from flooding, that has been going on for millenia....

in the enviromental arena...it's never about the enviroment, it's always about money, and getting someone who has it, to fork it over to someone else, who wants it.

it's not like you'll be able to [...] add some nanorust, and have fresh sparkling drinking water. [...] the key is ensuring factories and agriculture do not dump their waste into the drinking supply (one of the big problems in India), that the sewage and drinking systems are separated, and that modern filtration units are used.

Unfortunately the deep sediments contained naturally occurring deposits of arsenic. Nobody realised this until local doctors noticed a large increase in arsenic-related health problems such as cancers, hair loss and skin lesions among young Bangladeshis. The drinking water from the tube wells was then tested and found to have dangerously high levels of arsenic. This arsenic contamination is caused by natural microbial degradation of peat, not by industrial pollution. Some people have unsuccessfully argued that the foreign experts involved in providing tube well advice in the 1990s were negligent in not having done any arsenic tests.

Because arsenic is cumulative and the local people have no alternative but to continue drinking the tube well water, the health problems from the arsenic are continuing to worsen and now affect over 13000 people. New more affordable arsenic filtration technologies are badly needed. Current technlogies are not practicable due to their very high maintenance costs.

Damn. Combine this with Brazil's uranium export programme, and you've got yourself the ultimate political hot potato.

This issue is actually getting some high level attention. The British Royal Society told the House of Commons that open publishing was " ... a threat to the vitality of the country's scientific community."

Open access publishers quickly rebutted the claim.

This issue is actually getting some high level attention. The British Royal Society told the House of Commons that open publishing was " ... a threat to the vitality of the country's scientific community."

Open access publishers quickly rebutted the claim.

We have been too rich in the USA for too long, so has western Europe. What happens when trade barriers are knocked down (with agreements like NAFTA) is that everyone else in the world is allowed to share a little in the richest peice of the pie. Overpaid technology workers find their jobs going overseas or across the border, where folks are making 20-30k per year doing the same job you get paid 60-80k for. This raises the standard of living a little in countries like Mexico, Brasil, India, etc.. while the standard of living for America's middle class decreases. This really can't be stopped, and it's not really good or bad. There are some bad things about it (environmental impact caused by artificially high crop prices), and there are some good things (um, now Mexico can claim it's fair share of yuppies?). Your best bet is to look for another job like every other out of work geek, and lower you standard of living, then get used to it. It would take about 10 planets the size of earth to provide the resources for the world population if everyone on the planet consumed the amount of resources an average American does. Aw shit, we've consumed up all the brazil nuts!