Situation Report

The UN today elected Cuban Health Minister Roberto Tomas Morales Ojeda to chair its 2014 World Health Assembly.

Cuban media hails decision; UN Watch condemns "UN handing propaganda victory to a dictatorship"

unwatch.org

GENEVA, May 19 – The Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch criticized the UN's election today of Cuba to chair the 67th World Health Assembly, with executive director Hillel Neuer saying the decision "wrongly hands a coveted propaganda victory to a dictatorship that imprisons journalists and brutalizes human rights defenders," and that it "enables Cuba to further perpetuate myths about a health system that is in fact crumbling, with desperate citizens reduced to asking tourists to bring them Aspirin and other basic medicines."

The consensus election today by 194 WHO member states chose the sole candidate, Cuban Health Minister Roberto Tomas Morales Ojeda.

nature.com

Growing population and increasing demand for higher living standards have led to the overuse of water resources.

More recently, the management of watersheds has been threatened by the impacts of climate change on the water cycle.

In the face of these challenges, water companies and agribusinesses need to seek solutions.

In this focus, Nature Climate Change presents four opinion pieces that discuss the risks and opportunities posed to private companies by water scarcity, highlight the steps some companies have already taken and, overall, the actions still required.

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ossfoundation.us

The idea that Global Warming is a natural cycle is well understood from paleo data covering the past 1 million years. Is there a difference between current climate, and the natural cycle? For the past million years the natural climate has oscillated between warm periods and ice ages. This shifting in and out of warm periods and ice ages is correlated strongly with Milankovitch cycles. In order to understand the difference between natural cycle and human-caused global warming, one needs to consider changes in radiative forcing and how this affects systems on earth such as the atmosphere, vegetation, ice and snow, ocean cycles and related effects. The current radiative forcing levels are clearly outside of the natural cycle range.

Is global warming a natural cycle? Or is global warming affected by human influence? What does the science say? Both are true. In the natural cycle, the world can warm, and cool, without any human interference. For the past million years this has occurred over and over again at approximately 100,000 year intervals. About 80-90,000 years of ice age with about 10-20,000 years of warm period, give or take some thousands of years.

Although the Amundsen Sea region is only a fraction of the whole West Antarctic Ice Sheet, the region contains enough ice to raise global sea levels by 4 feet (1.2 meters).  Image Credit: NASA/GSFC/SVS

(CNN) -- New research shows a major section of west Antarctica's ice sheet will completely melt in coming centuries and probably raise sea levels higher than previously predicted, revealing another impact from the world's changing climate.

According to a study released Monday, warm ocean currents and geographic peculiarities have helped kick off a chain reaction at the Amundsen Sea-area glaciers, melting them faster than previously realized and pushing them "past the point of no return," NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot told reporters.

The glacial retreat there "appears unstoppable," said Rignot, lead author of a joint NASA-University of California Irvine paper that used 40 years of satellite data and aircraft studies.

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