PLANET IN PERIL

Dr. David Suzuki Debating the best way to do something we shouldn't be doing in the first place is a sure way to end up in the wrong place. Details here. Related: "Have our Servants Become our Masters?" "More Oil Spilled From American Trains ini 2013 Than in the Four Previous Decades."

United Nations Implications on Food Security and Natural Systems. Details here.

DESMOGBLOG.com    James Lawrence Powell . I have brought my previous study (see  here  and  here)  up-to-date by reviewing peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals over the period from Nov. 12, 2012 through December 31, 2013. I found 2,258 articles, written by a total of 9,136 authors. Only one article, by a single author in the  Herald of the Russian Academy of Sciences , rejected man-made global warming. I discuss that article  here . Full story here.

PhysOrg Sunset. PLT photo. The average world temperature was 58.12 degrees (14.52 Celsius) tying with 2003 for the fourth warmest since 1880, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Tuesday. Full story here.

McClatchy Washington Bureau A Canadian National freight, as seen from a Via Rail passenger train, parked on a siding. These "close encounters" are a common occurrence in Canada, where passenger trains need to yield the right-of-way to the freights. (PLT movie.) More crude oil was spilled in U.S. rail incidents last year than was spilled in the nearly four decades since the federal government began collecting data on such spills, an analysis of the data shows. Details here.

(Reuters) - The first warning of the problems that eventually swept away Irina Vorochkova's house near Russia's Olympic city of Sochi came when the garden began shifting, then the ground slid away downhill towards a river. Details here.

Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog Earth set a new record for billion-dollar weather disasters in 2013. Full story here. Southern Alberta, summer, 2013.

iPolitics While this may not come as a shock to Neil Young, who’s  compared the oil sands to Hiroshima , a national study suggests that  Alberta has disturbed more natural landscape than any other province . The analysis by Global Forest Watch adds that Wild Rose Country also has two of the three areas in Canada where the rate of disturbance is the highest. Those disruptions included everything from roads to seismic lines to clearcuts to croplands. “This is a simple monitoring analysis that should be done and could very easily be done by the feds,” the report’s author Peter Lee said Monday. “(But) they’re not doing it.”

Winnipeg Free Press Opponents outraged as St. Clement's lagoon OK'd. Details here. Related:  The Rural Municipality of Shell River, Manitoba, Scraps Plans for a New Sewage Lagoon at a Controversial Location "Born of the Stump"

Preamble by  by Larry Powell This article sprouts from the fertile mind of John Fefchak, a writer from Virden, Manitoba and a regular contributor to this blog. (It's a refinement of a piece he did, which appeared here some time ago.) I believe you'll find it both funny and provocative. In it, he speaks of modern-day policy-makers forsaking their God-given duty to care for planet Earth. Instead, they have turned their backs on ancient biblical teachings and  abandoned their sacred duty as stewards of our water resources, from which all life springs. "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jessie,  and a branch shall grow out of his roots." Isaiah 11:1-10  by John Fefchak  INTRODUCTION….THE AGREEMENT. Before there was anything, there was GOD, a few angels and huge swirling globs of rocks and water with no place to go.  The angels asked GOD: "Why don't you clean up this mess"? So GOD collected rocks from the huge swirling