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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(2)
Plague/Virus:(2)
Climate Chaos:(12)
Resource Depletion: (8)
Biology Breach:(6)
Recovery:(8)
This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
climate impacts  ~ global warming  ~ economic myopia  ~ carbon emissions  ~ technical cleverness  ~ smart policy  ~ overfishing  ~ alternative energy  ~ water issues  ~ capitalist greed  ~ endocrine disruptor  



ApocaDocuments (8) for the "Resource Depletion" scenario from this week
[see full week] ~ [see full Resource Depletion scenario and stories]
Sun, Mar 29, 2009
from San Francisco Chronicle:
Fish tales, sad ones, from S.F. fishermen
But the runs of salmon back to the rivers to spawn went into a sharp decline, and last year, for the first time in 150 years, the state banned fishing for salmon. Seven years ago, 800,000 salmon returned to the Sacramento River to spawn, part of a mysterious ancient cycle; in 2007, only 68,000 were counted. Dams and water diversions were blamed, overfishing, warming waters in the ocean, mismanagement of the fishery. Whatever the reasons, it is almost certain the salmon season will be closed again this year.... "What we have is two lost salmon seasons in a row, plus the worst crab season in 40 years," said Pete Kellogg, who is 47 and has been fishing out of San Francisco for 30 years. "The first day of crab season was a disaster," said Don Ashwin. "And then it got worse." ...


We need to retrain these fishermen for something practical, like credit default swaps and derivative hedging.

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Sat, Mar 28, 2009
from Daily Kos:
The Golden Days: Bedtime, 2020
Are you sure you want stories from way back then? It's so long ago. You're sure? Ok, then, my sweet one, here it is. Let me think back a bit: In those golden days, we had something called the "pilot light." It was a small flame burning in our stoves, all day and night long. It was natural gas, burned for our convenience -- to let us light other fires on our stoves, piped from hundreds, even thousands of miles away, for our convenience. Because of that pilot light, we didn't have to strike flint, or use a match. ...


The future is just a figment of our imagination. I'm so sure of this.

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Fri, Mar 27, 2009
from MIT, via EurekAlert:
'Alarming' use of energy in modern manufacturing methods
Modern manufacturing methods are spectacularly inefficient in their use of energy and materials, according to a detailed MIT analysis of the energy use of 20 major manufacturing processes. Overall, new manufacturing systems are anywhere from 1,000 to one million times bigger consumers of energy, per pound of output, than more traditional industries. In short, pound for pound, making microchips uses up orders of magnitude more energy than making manhole covers.... Solar panels are a good example. Their production, which uses the same manufacturing processes as microchips but on a large scale, is escalating dramatically. The inherent inefficiency of current solar panel manufacturing methods could drastically reduce the technology's lifecycle energy balance -- that is, the ratio of the energy the panel would produce over its useful lifetime to the energy required to manufacture it.... One message from the study is that "claims that these technologies are going to save us in some way need closer scrutiny. There's a significant energy cost involved here," he says. ...


Let's make stuff now, while energy's cheap! I'm sure that "climate stuff" will work itself out.

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Tue, Mar 24, 2009
from London Times:
Billion people face famine by mid-century, says top US scientist
Famines affecting a billion people will threaten global food security during the 21st century, according to a leading US scientist. Nina Fedoroff, the US State Department chief scientist, is convinced that food shortages will be the biggest challenge facing the world as temperatures and population levels rise. Food security in the coming years, she said, is "a huge problem" that has been met with little more than complacency. "We are asleep at the switch," she said.... Dr Fedoroff, who advises Hillary Clinton, said famines that strike a billion people are quite possible in a world where climate change has damaged food production and the human population has risen to nine billion. ...


They won't have any water either -- so at least it's even!

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Tue, Mar 24, 2009
from Wall Street Journal:
Drought Turns Water Into a Cash Crop
... After three years of drought in California, water is now a potential cash crop. Last fall, the state activated its Drought Water Bank program for the first time since 1994. Under the program, farmers can choose to sell some of the water they would usually use to grow their crops to parched cities, counties and agriculture districts. Water -- or the lack of it -- has been costing the state dearly. According to Richard Howitt, a professor at the University of California, Davis, the drought and resulting water restrictions could cost as much as $1.4 billion in lost income and about 53,000 lost jobs, mostly in the agriculture sector. ...


But think of all the new job opportunities for rain dancers!

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Mon, Mar 23, 2009
from Denver Post:
Nestle plan sets off water war
A plan to suck, truck and bottle Arkansas Valley spring water has residents here crusading against the world's largest food and beverage company. "Nestle is seeking to drain the blood of Chaffee County," said Salida local Daniel Zettler during a fiery public hearing last week. Nestle -- with 12 U.S. brands of bottled water and almost $4.3 billion in North American sales in 2007 -- came calling for Arkansas Valley spring water about two years ago. The company wants to draw 65 million gallons a year from an aquifer feeding two freshwater springs near Nathrop, pipe it 5 miles to a truck stop and ship it 100 miles to a Denver bottling facility. It would be sold under the company's Arrowhead brand. ...


Sing with me now... Nestle makes the very best ... bottled water...

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Mon, Mar 23, 2009
from Scientific American:
The Ogallala Aquifer: Saving a Vital U.S. Water Source
On America's high plains, crops in early summer stretch to the horizon: field after verdant field of corn, sorghum, soybeans, wheat and cotton. Framed by immense skies now blue, now scarlet-streaked, this 800-mile expanse of agriculture looks like it could go on forever. It can't. The Ogallala Aquifer, the vast underground reservoir that gives life to these fields, is disappearing. In some places, the groundwater is already gone. This is the breadbasket of America -- the region that supplies at least one fifth of the total annual U.S. agricultural harvest. If the aquifer goes dry, more than $20 billion worth of food and fiber will vanish from the world's markets. And scientists say it will take natural processes 6,000 years to refill the reservoir. ...


The breadbasket is going to hell in a handbasket!

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Mon, Mar 23, 2009
from National Academy of Sciences, 2008:
Brave New Ocean
Finally, Jennings and Blanchard (2004) used the theoretical abundance-body mass relationship derived from macroecological theory to estimate the pristine biomass of fishes in the North Sea in comparison with the size and trophic structure of heavily exploited populations in 2001. The estimated total biomass of all fishes 64 g to 64 kg declined 38 percent while the mean turnover time of the population was estimated to have dropped from 3.5 to 1.9 years. Large fishes 4-16 kg were estimated to have declined by 97.4 percent, and species 16-66 kg were estimated to have declined by 99.2 percent. The great importance of these calculations is that they are entirely independent of all of the assumptions and controversies surrounding fisheries catch data and models, and yet lead to predictions entirely consistent with the most extreme estimates of fishery declines. ...


You mean theory is matching reality?
Again?

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