If you’re in the South today and haven’t yet seen An Inconvenient Truth, the Watermelon series of six “Green and Red” lectures at Beer Sheva‘s Ashan Hazman cafe/bookshop kicks off with a movie screening and discussion (in Hebrew) at 7 p.m. For the last few months, Ashan Hazman (The smoke of time) has gradually become […]
Who said being an environmentalist is thankless? If you’re worried about how global warming may drastically change the Middle East, and you know how to work a reporter’s notebook, paintbrush or computer graphics program, there are two international competitions coming up to raise awareness of climate change. The first one, which we came across on the Dot […]
A week ago England’s Department of Health published practical recommendations to prepare for a potential heatwave which is also the central theme of their 2009 Heatwave Plan. The Heatwave Plan for 2009 has been updated with extra guidance that outlines the benefits of insulating houses to keep them cool during summer months, and warm during […]
Earlier this year, we saw members of the Lebanese group IndyACT trek out into the snowy wilderness to protect Lebanon’s snow from catastrophic climate change. This week IndyACT members, along with their friends in the Association for Forest Development and Conservation (AFDC) were back in action, putting the heat (so to speak) on decision-makers to […]
Why would a prominent Israeli-born professor at Indiana University decide to change his research emphasis from economics and political science to climate change and ecomigration? And to move from Israel to the United States? Ecomigration is not an entirely crazy idea, and some western people have already started planning and moving to the most suitable […]
For those of us who live in the Middle East, those hot dry heat waves known as khamsini (in Arabic) or sharav (the Hebrew term) appear to be becoming more frequent, as well as more intense. They also seem to be occurring during times of the year when they ordinarily are not supposed to – […]
(Palm Island in Dubai) A couple of weeks ago I was in New Orleans with my parents at the annual craziness known as Fat Tuesday during Mardi Gras. Besides the excess of everything I saw there including waste, and the nasty black eye I sustained from a large set of beads being thrown on my […]
Snow is a serious matter for Lebanon. So serious, in fact, that the white part of the Lebanese flag represents the country’s snowy mountains. Snow also plays an important economic role, since Lebanon’s six ski resorts draw tourists from nearby countries. Most significant of all, however, is the fact that the mountain soil absorbs the […]
(Kuwait Towers) Identifying opportunities for contributing to climate change policy and institutional innovations were a key priority at the Global Development Network’s 10th Annual Conference in Kuwait, which Green Prophet had posted on earlier. The rest of this report, was penned by conference organizers at the GDN Network: This 10th annual conference on ‘Natural Resources […]
Two things were clear from attending the International Renewable Energy Conference that took place in Eilat this week. The first is that Israel is now a world leader in clean energy. The second is that there is a small but growing group of players in the field who see this not just as a huge […]
“So Hiram, King of Tyre, gave King Solomon timber of cedar and timber of cypress according to all his desire.”-Book of Kings vs. 24 A recent article by Ahmed Khatib in the Lebanese Daily Star emphasized the dangers of climate change and global warming to Lebanon‘s remaining cedar groves, which have been a historic national […]
This week, executives of major oil companies met at the Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA) annual conference in Houston, Texas and (finally!) expressed a willingness to help combat global climate change. This is a major step, because these companies denied the existence of global warming and deliberately tried to obstruct political progress on the issue […]
(A map of Jordan and the surrounding region highlighting the Disi Aquifer and the proposed Red-Dead project.) With worrying frost alerts in Jordan getting farmers anxious, Jordanians are also seeing a rainless season this year, increasing their fears that crops will collapse. Last week, officials had been calling on its citizens to pray for rain, […]
(Rapidly depleting water resources has forced residents of Sana’a to buy water from private sources. Water levels are dropping by 6 metres a year in the Yemeni capital. © David Swanson/IRIN) If you think things seem pretty dicey in the Middle East right now with Israel and Hamas fighting, according to IRIN, expect tensions to […]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjWD8pbK5t8[/youtube] It was almost exactly a year ago that we enthusiastically wrote about Tel Aviv’s upcoming participation in Earth Hour 2008, as the only Middle Eastern city to join the worldwide campaign. We are now pleased to announce that although Tel Aviv (and other Israeli cities) will not be formally participating in Earth Hour 2009, […]