Environmentally Friendly Hosting is Super Green

More and more website builders and bloggers are looking for ways to embrace both technology and the environment. Here’s a way to not just go green, but super-green with Super Green hosting. Let’s take a look at what’s super about Super Green.

It starts with their "green ethics". Super Green Hosting started out with the goal to provide the greenest service available in the green web hosting market. It all comes down to the carbon. Do you realize that everything we do on the Internet has a carbon footprint? That’s because everything draws electricity and most of that electricity is being generated from sources that are decidedly un-green. Coal fired power stations - very, very un-green.

The way to counteract this is to cut back on the power you use, generate the rest using renewable resources such as solar and wind, and plant trees to absorb remaining carbon in the form of CO2 and store it away.

Super Green hosting does all three. They’re using dell servers that produce 20% less CO2 than average servers, using wind power to run them and planting trees to reverse the effects of global warming. They can boast of being 100% carbon-neutral. That’s hosting you can be proud of.

Unlike may hosting providers, Super Green Hosting keeps their plans simple but feature rich. For less than five bucks a month, you get unlimited hosting space, unlimited bandwidth and unlimited email accounts. With all those resources at your disposal, you can host as many domains as you want. But don’t pay for the first one. Super Green Hosting will give you a free domain and take care of renewing if for as long as you have your account. Already have a domain elsewhere? No problem, they’ll transfer it for you so you can use it in your account.

Some other included features that you might have to pay extra for elsewhere are 1 click installation for WordPress and Joomla, as many MySQL databases as you can use, Ruby/Ruby On Rails, SSL Secure Serve, shopping cards, a free generated certificate, Paypal support, merchant account support, and free ad credits for Google, Yahoo and MSN.

Also take note of their 99.9% uptime guarantee and their money back guarantee, along with 24/7 phone and email support, live support inside cPanel, video tutorials and extensive knowledgebase.

Most bloggers and website builders will be happy with the standard Green Hosting plan. For resellers and owners of extensive domain collections that want complete and independent control of each website, there are Green Reseller Hosting plans available starting at under twenty bucks a month. These offer both cPanel and WHM admin control panels, automated billing systems, site builder software, website templates and private name servers. One unusual benefit is a domain reseller account. This is a free eNom account for cheaper rates on domains with no setup fees.

Are you in the market for green hosting solutions with the power and flexibility to handle anything from a WordPress blog right on up to online business and even being a web hosting provider yourself? If so, check out the Green Hosting and Green Reseller Hosting plans available from Super Green Hosting.

Population and Climate Change

This map shows areas at the intersection of high population growth rates, declines in agricultural production, high water stress or scarcity, low resilience to climate change, and lack of available reproductive planning.  Source: Population Action International (Healthy Families Healthy Planet)

Continuing with the global perspective, the Population Action International (Healthy Families Healthy Planet) website has some nice interactive maps that show how the relationships amongst climate change impacts, demographic trends, and reproductive health needs are likely to affect countries’ abilities to adapt to climate change.  (Thanks, Elia Machado, for sending the link.) http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Interactive_Databases/climate_map.shtml

So much is unknown about climate change - there are numerous predictive models used to estimate the magnitude of sea level rise and other likely climate change-related phenomena, but the predictions vary considerably in extent and severity.  However, we know that adverse health impacts resulting from climate change have the potential to be dire in many parts of the world, and will likely affect almost every place to some degree.  Climate change will be coupled with rapid population growth rates in some places, reduced agricultural yields due to drought, water shortages and water stress, and the inability of less developed countries to mitigate these effects through increased resources.  In some places, all these negative factors will converge at once, and these places tend to be areas already at risk.  People in poorer areas are generally more vulnerable to natural disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding, landslides, and other extreme weather-related events, which are likely to increase in both number of events and severity, with global climate change.  These populations have fewer personal resources; less support from their governments for disaster preparedness, planning and management, evacuation, mitigation, and recovery; less community support infrastructure; and are therefore less resilient to recover from the impacts of climate change.  Climate change is therefore an environmental justice issue - actually, it will probably become the grand-daddy of all environmental justice issues in terms of impacts and numbers of people affected.

Possible health impacts from climate change include:

a.) cardiovascular and respiratory disease from increase in air pollution;

b.) vulnerability to kidney failure and heat stroke from extreme heat events;

c.) proliferation of vector-borne diseases (e.g., malaria, West Nile virus, Dengue fever, Lyme disease, encephalitis) from increases in the extent of vector habitat due to warming trends;

d.) water-borne diseases (e.g., cholera, cryptosporidium, giardia, E. coli infection, dysentery, typhoid) from increased flooding and resultant contamination of water, as well as from water stress and scarcity;

e.) health impacts due to salt intrusion into groundwater from sea level rise;

f.) increased vulnerability amongst the disabled, elderly, immune-compromised, and those with other serious health conditions from floods and other climate change-related hazards.

g.) reduction in agricultural productivity, food security, and subsequent increase in famine, malnutrition, and food- and diet-related illnesses. 

All of these impacts are exacerbated by rapid population growth rates and failing environmental infrastructure. 

Age Structure/Population Pyramids

Shape of things to come – another nice interactive feature, click on country and get time-line of population pyramids. http://www.populationaction.org/Publications/Reports/The_Shape_of_Things_to_Come_Interactive_Database/Index.shtml

Reproductive Risk

Source:  International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)

Narrowing the gender gap

“Improving the status of women is critical to achieving sustainable development. The ICPD Programme of Action advocates programmes and policies that increase women’s participation in government, promote education for girls, and increase employment opportunities for women, among other actions.”

Meeting health needs

“Promoting women’s health and safe motherhood is a key objective of the ICPD Programme of Action—and increasing women’s access to safe, affordable and effective reproductive health care and services is critical. These include family planning information and contraceptives, skilled care at childbirth, safe abortion services in countries where abortion is legal, and HIV/STI prevention, treatment and management.”  Source:  International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD)  http://www.populationaction.org/cd2015/reportCard/index.php

Human Planet: The most remarkable species of all, living in the wildest places on earth

Now, if you would like to see something totally uplifting, check out this short video from the BBC – it contains amazing photography of our planet (much of it taken from above) and the wildly varying habitats in which our species lives.  Soaring and achingly beautiful - even though most of us don’t live in any of these wild places anymore.  It makes you want to root for the humans!  (Thanks, Bobbie Menendez, for sending this.)  http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=2HiUMlOz4UQ&vq=large

Population Growth Infographic
And here is another short video, taken from Mr. Rozzy Roo's Science Blog: a Population Growth Infographic. "Overpopulation and overconsumption underlie every environmental problem we have today."  http://www.mrrozzyroo.com/2011/03/population-growth-infographic.html (Original source: MIND - Media Independent Network)

Climate chief admits error over report of Himalayan glaciers

The head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been forced to apologise for including in its 2007 report the claim that there was a "very high" chance of glaciers disappearing from the Himalayas by 2035.
Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC, conceded yesterday that "the clear and well-established standards of evidence required by the IPCC procedures were not applied properly" when the claim was included in the 900-page assessment of the impacts of climate change.
The paragraph at issue reads: "Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high."
Single source
The report's only cited source was a 2005 report by the environment group WWF, which in turn cited a 1999 article in New Scientist.
The New Scientist article quoted senior Indian glaciologist Syed Hasnain, the then vice-chancellor of Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, who was writing a report on the Himalayas for the International Commission for Snow and Ice. It said, on the basis of an interview with Hasnain, that his report "indicates that all the glaciers in the central and eastern Himalayas could disappear by 2035". The claim did not, however, appear in the commission's report, which was only made available late last year.
This week a group of geographers, headed by Graham Cogley of Trent University at Peterborough in Ontario, Canada, have written to the journal Science pointing out that the claim "requires a 25-fold greater loss rate from 1999 to 2035 than that estimated for 1960 to 1999. It conflicts with knowledge of glacier-climate relationships, and is wrong."
The geographers add that the claim has "captured the global imagination and has been repeated in good faith often, including recently by the IPCC's chairman". The IPCC's errors "could have been avoided had the norms of scientific publication, including peer review and concentration upon peer-reviewed work, been respected", they say.
Several of those involved in the IPCC review process did try to question the 2035 date before it was published by the IPCC. Among them was Georg Kaser, a glaciologist from the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and a lead author of another section of the IPCC report. "I scanned the almost final draft at the end of 2006 and came across the 2035 reference." Kaser queried the reference but believes it was too late in the day for it to be reassessed.
Publicly available IPCC archives of the review process show that during the formal review, the Japanese government also questioned the 2035 claim. It commented: "This seems to be a very important statement. What is the confidence level/certainty?" Soon afterwards, a reference to the WWF report was added to the final draft. But the statement otherwise went unchanged.
Grey literature
One of the IPCC authors, Stephen Schneider of Stanford University, California, this week defended the use of so-called "grey" literature in IPCC reports. He told New Scientist that it was not possible to include only peer-reviewed research because, particularly in the chapters discussing the regional impacts of climate change, "most of the literature is not up to that gold standard".
The Himalaya claim appeared in the regional chapter on Asia. "There are only a few authors in each region, so it narrows the base of science," Schneider says.
This week Hasnain has claimed, for the first time, that he was misquoted by New Scientist in 1999.
New Scientist stands by its story and was not the only news outlet to publish Hasnain's claim.