Archive for June 6th, 2012

Credit: NASA

“The Arctic is screaming,” declared Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), when the extent of Arctic sea ice suddenly shrank in 2007. In that same year, Jay Zwally, a NASA climate scientist, warned that “the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer 2012, much faster than previous predictions.”

In its 2007 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said satellite data showed that since 1978, “annual average Arctic sea ice extent has shrunk by 2.7 [2.1 to 3.3] percent per decade, with larger decreases in summer of 7.4 [5.0 to 9.8] percent per decade…” The agency predicted that both Arctic and Antarctic ice would continue to shrink and said that “in some projections, Arctic late-summer sea ice disappears almost entirely by the latter part of the 21st century.”

That was five years ago. Not all observers are convinced that Arctic sea ice is in trouble. Read the rest of this entry »

Based in London and one of the largest multinational companies on the planet, Unilever produces a vast array of consumer goods and is behind some of the world’s most recognizable brands: Lipton, Vaseline, Dove and Hellmann’s. It has operations in more than 100 countries and sales in 190 nations, where consumers buy 170 billion units of its products every year. The company has more than 171,000 employees.

But in addition to its size, Unilever has proven to be a responsible corporate leader. In 2011, research firm GlobeScan and think tank SustainAbility jointly rated Unilever number one on their list of Global Corporate Sustainability Leaders, and the FTSE4 Good Index Series gave Unilever a top environmental rating of 5. Read the rest of this entry »