10 tips for saving fuel

FUEL SAVING TIPS

Last summer fuel prices surged to record highs. You can save easily simply changing your behavior to ease the burden at your wallet.

1. Stop driving like a crazy person: Drive smoothly with care and accelerate gradually. You will gain up to %33 on the highway and up to %5 around town.

2. Don't use brake pedal if its not necessary: By using brake pedal you are throwing out the energy. Control your speed and keep an eye on your long view.

3. Go slower than 60 mph: A car moving less than 60 mph. is %15 efficient than a car moving faster than 60 mph.

4. Use cruise control: By using a cruise control, you can take a long look to the road. You can plan where you will increase or decrease your speed.

5. Avoid idling: Turn off the engine if you will wait a little longer. To turn off the engine and restarting it again will be more efficient than idling.

6. Turn off the A/C: Turn off the A/C while you are moving slowly in city traffic. Lower the windows would be enough to keep occupants comfortable.

7. Plan your trips: Plan your trips. Decide where you will go, how you will go, where to stop. Take a road map with you or use navigation systems for not to get lost .

8. Get rid of extra weight: Clean your cargo area. Getting rid of useless stuff that you're carrying to everywhere would save fuel up to%2.

9. Find the least expensive gas at your area: You can find least expensive gas prices from internet. Sites like gasbuddy.com will be helpful to find the lowest gas price.

10. Check your tires: Be sure that your tires have the correct air pressure. Check your owner's manual.

Fighting for forest frogs

The Philautus poppiae frog is native to Sri Lanka and lives in closed canopy cloud forest. It is classified as Endangered on The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species™ due to the ongoing decline in the quality and extent of its forest habitat.

Nineteen species of frogs native to Sri Lanka have gone extinct due to continuing habitat loss essentially caused by smallholder farming activities and logging. Drought and the use of agrochemicals in cardamom cultivation are additional threats. No other country in the world has more documented amphibian extinctions. Therefore, it is an urgent priority to protect the remaining forests in Sri Lanka to prevent further losses of species.

The IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group identified a 1,000-hectare cloud forest called Morningside as a top priority because a total of 11 globally Threatened amphibians, three endemic lizards, and three species of endemic freshwater crabs are native to this threatened forest. The Morningside Cloud Forest, where Conservation International has now been working for the past five years, is located in southeast Sri Lanka just east of the Sinharaja World Heritage Site.

The IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group and local partners, including Conservation International, the Wildlife Heritage Trust of Sri Lanka, IUCN Sri Lanka, and the Forest Department of Sri Lanka convinced the government of Sri Lanka to designate all 1,000 hectares of the Morningside Cloud Forest as a Forest Reserve for Biodiversity Conservation, which ensures its protection in perpetuity.

The IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group and local partners are now developing and implementing a management plan to enable reserve staff to effectively protect threatened species within Morningside.

Concerned about the local economy for people in the region around Morningside, IUCN and Conservation International staff are developing and implementing a management plan that targets the sustainable harvest of cardamom within portions of the Morningside Cloud Forest. Cardamom plants, which do not tolerate direct sunlight, are currently grown in the understory of the forest, where the cloud forest trees provide necessary shade. However, the cardamom is being grown in a way that is not only incompatible with maintaining a tree canopy, but is also potentially harming threatened frog species in other ways.

Because both cardamom plants and threatened species benefit from a healthy cloud forest habitat, there is great potential for developing cardamom farming in a way that is compatible with biodiversity conservation. The management plan will focus on how to cultivate cardamom efficiently, providing revenue to the local community without negatively impacting cloud forest trees and the threatened species that inhabit the forest.

In addition, the IUCN SSC Amphibian Specialist Group are working with IUCN Sri Lanka to incorporate the Morningside Cloud Forest Reserve within the Sinharaja World Heritage Site, which will help ensure the long-term allocation of funds to protect and manage the species unique to Morningside.

Iucnredlist

Global warming may be twice as bad as previously expected

Global warming will be twice as severe as previous estimates indicate, according to a new study published this month in the Journal of Climate, a publication of the American Meteorological Society.

"there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated...There's no way the world can or should take these risks."

The research, conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), predicts a 90% probability that worldwide surface temperatures will rise more than 9 degrees (F) by 2100, compared to a previous 2003 MIT study that forecast a rise of just over 4 degrees.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 forecast a temperature rise of anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees by 2100 based on a variety of different greenhouse-gas-emissions scenarios.


The projections in the MIT study were done using 400 applications of a computer model, which MIT says is the most comprehensive and sophisticated climate model to date. The model looks at the effects of economic activity as well as the effects of atmospheric, oceanic and biological systems.

The improved economic modeling and newer economic data (which gives a lower chance of reduced emissions) are among the major changes from the 2003 model application.

Unless greenhouse gas emissions are reduced, "there is significantly more risk than we previously estimated," says study co-author Ronald Prinn of MIT. "There's no way the world can or should take these risks."

"The results appear to be credible and quantify a certain unease many scientists have on the real magnitude of the climate problem ahead of us, one that is not adequately appreciated by most politicians," writes Kevin Trenberth, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and an IPCC lead author, in an e-mail.

"The difficulty of dealing with inertia in human systems and infrastructure, and the lack of current incentives and a global approach to the problem means that reducing emissions will be a major challenge for humanity," he added.

Funding for the study came in part in grants from the U.S. Department of Energy and by sponsors of MIT's Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change.

"To my knowledge, this is indeed the most exhaustive end-to-end analysis of climate change impacts yet performed," notes Michael Mann, a climatologist at Penn State University and also an IPCC author. "The results of the analysis are sobering, namely that we face a monumental challenge if we are to avoid dangerous interference with the climate system."

By Doyle Rice - USA TODAY , May 21, 2009

Welcome

Welcome to Clean Breath environmental support. From now on we will have also our blog with our website.

Publishing a blog is much more easier than to publish a website, for that reason from now on we will publish our articles first at our blog.

We will do as much as we can to protect environment.