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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from
View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:(5)
Plague/Virus:(1)
Climate Chaos:(9)
Resource Depletion: (1)
Biology Breach:(12)
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This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
contamination  ~ ecosystem interrelationships  ~ invasive species  ~ anthropogenic change  ~ carbon emissions  ~ climate impacts  ~ global warming  ~ massive die-off  ~ governmental idiocy  ~ corporate farming  ~ toxic buildup  



ApocaDocuments (9) for the "Climate Chaos" scenario from this week
[see full week] ~ [see full Climate Chaos scenario and stories]
Sat, Jan 16, 2010
from NUVO Newsweekly:
CAFOs in court
Randolph County family farmers Judy and Allen Hutchison are finally getting their day in court. The couple's home is surrounded by more than 75,000 hogs and cows housed on what are called Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), a.k.a. "factory farms." They can see the largest CAFO manure lagoon in the county from their driveway, a manmade, uncovered, 7.2-acre pond that holds roughly 20 million gallons of liquid animal waste. Their clothes frequently smell like manure when they come out of the dryer. The Hutchisons are among more than a dozen East-Central Indiana citizens who have sued several in- and out-of-state CAFO operators for more than just the daily indignities of life near factory farms, like the odors and the irrepressible flies. The lawsuits also allege the families have suffered from a number of physical maladies as a result, including skin irritations, nausea, headaches, breathing difficulties, tightness of the chest, sinus infection, stress and burning eyes, noses and throats. ...


That, my friends, is one whale of a pile of shit.

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Sat, Jan 16, 2010
from Mother Jones:
The New Storm Brewing On the Climate Front
The cap-and-trade bill may have stalled in Congress, but its opponents aren't taking it easy. They've launched a new assault on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) -- hoping to neutralize the only legal weapon the Obama administration has to curb carbon emissions if the climate legislation fails... In Congress, Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski has emerged as the leading -- and most canny -- threat to the EPA. Unlike many of her GOP colleagues, Murkowski acknowledges that emissions from human activity are warming the planet and must be reduced. (That her state is warming faster than most provides a good reason for her to be concerned.) And she's couching her attacks on the EPA in an argument that resonates with some Democrats and environmentalists: Legislation is a more effective way to address emissions, so the agency should back off to give Congress time to pass a law. ...


As we know, Congress is sooooo effective at all this.

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Fri, Jan 15, 2010
from Wall Street Journal:
The Vexing Bugs in the Global Trading System
... As global trade has mounted, more goods are coming in from overseas, sometimes bringing with them the accidental cargo of destructive bugs and plants. An estimated 500 million plants are imported to the U.S. each year, and shipments through one plant inspection station doubled to 52,540 between 2004 and 2006, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Today, about 30 new invasive insects are discovered annually in the U.S., up sharply over the last decade, the USDA says. The yearly economic impact of invasive species in the U.S. is estimated at $133.6 billion, according to a study in Agricultural and Resource Economics Review in 2006. That includes the cost of control and prevention such as pesticides, inspection programs at ports and damage to crops. ...


We sure like to mix it up here in America!

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Thu, Jan 14, 2010
from SolveClimate:
Return to Small Farms Could Help Alleviate Social and Environmental Crises
Indeed, Altieri shows that on a per-hectare basis, small farms are able to strongly out-produce large ones. It's not the first time this claim has been made. The quick counter is that agricultural labor is onerous and backbreaking, that no one wishes to do it, that freeing up farm labor by using mechanical devices and chemical inputs allows former farmers to move into the cities, raising productivity, contributing more effectively to national GDP, and so on. That's a reasonable claim, except for the fact that there's now more available labor in the world than the world knows what to do with, so much so that much of the global South, its former peasantry, lives in dilapidated shanties on the peripheries of urban cores. ...


Farm? I'd rather profit from credit default swaps.

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Wed, Jan 13, 2010
from New Scientist:
Major Antarctic glacier is 'past its tipping point'
A major Antarctic glacier has passed its tipping point, according to a new modelling study. After losing increasing amounts of ice over the past decades, it is poised to collapse in a catastrophe that could raise global sea levels by 24 centimetres. Pine Island glacier (PIG) is one of many at the fringes of the West Antarctic ice sheet. In 2004, satellite observations showed that it had started to thin, and that ice was flowing into the Amundsen Sea 25 per cent faster than it had 30 years before. Now, the first study to model changes in the ice sheet in three dimensions shows that PIG has probably passed a critical "tipping point" and is irreversibly on track to lose 50 per cent of its ice in as little as 100 years, significantly raising global sea levels. ...


Sheesh, I'll be long dead by then.

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Wed, Jan 13, 2010
from NASA:
Antarctica Losing 24 cubic miles per year, and growing
Gravity data collected from space using NASA's Grace satellite show that Antarctica has been losing more than a hundred cubic kilometers (24 cubic miles) of ice each year since 2002. The latest data reveal that Antarctica is losing ice at an accelerating rate, too. How is it possible for surface melting to decrease, but for the continent to lose mass anyway? The answer boils down to the fact that ice can flow without melting.... Isabella Velicogna of JPL and the University of California, Irvine, uses Grace data to weigh the Antarctic ice sheet from space. Her work shows that the ice sheet is not only losing mass, but it is losing mass at an accelerating rate. "The important message is that it is not a linear trend. A linear trend means you have the same mass loss every year. The fact that it's above linear, this is the important idea, that ice loss is increasing with time," she says. And she points out that it isn't just the Grace data that show accelerating loss; the radar data do, too. "It isn't just one type of measurement. It's a series of independent measurements that are giving the same results, which makes it more robust." ...


I thought Antarctica was the opposite of Arctica.

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Wed, Jan 13, 2010
from Guardian:
Last-minute agreement at Copenhagen marks turning point for the world
Depending on whether you live in Beijing, Berlin or Boston the assessment ranges from catastrophe to success to somewhere in between. But what lies ahead? First let us take stock. In important ways the Copenhagen accord signals significant and promising changes in the world's approach to global warming under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, not just in what it says, but also in how it was negotiated. The dramatic story of a last-minute agreement fashioned in a meeting among the leaders of the "Copenhagen 5", Brazil, China, India, South Africa, and the United States reveals a profound change in global politics. One in which, for the first time, the rapidly developing giants of Asia, Africa, and Latin America emerged as key to the solution. The ad hoc leadership by the so-called Copenhagen 5 (C-5), representing 45 percent of the world's population and 44 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, constitutes a new and potentially historic alliance, a symbol, perhaps, of a new world order. ...


Mild applause for a slight movement trending in the right direction.

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Wed, Jan 13, 2010
from Guardian (UK):
Climate scientists to convene global geo-engineering summit
Scientists are to hold a high-level summit to discuss how the world could take emergency measures such as blocking out the sun to slow dangerous global warming. Experts from around the world have been invited to attend the meeting in March in California, which will examine possible field trials of so-called geo-engineering schemes, such as pumping chemicals into the air and oceans to combat climate change. The move follows the failure of the recent Copenhagen climate talks to set meaningful carbon reduction targets, and comes amid mounting concern that such controversial techniques may be the only way to curb rising temperatures. ...


EXPERTS?! There are no experts in geoengineering, only amateurs, pretending they understand.

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Mon, Jan 11, 2010
from CNN:
World warming to greener train travel
Take more trains and fewer planes. That's what Sarah Kendrew pledged to herself a few years ago. An astronomer at the Netherlands' Leiden Observatory, she travels frequently to nearby countries on business -- and prefers to not leave vapor trails in the sky when doing so. "I've been making a conscious effort to take trains rather than fly," she told CNN, "for environmental reasons initially, but I've also found them to be much more comfortable and convenient -- so it's not really an effort anymore." Faced with global climate change, many around the globe -- from governments to companies to individuals -- have also warmed to train travel. Traveling by rail is on average three to 10 times less CO2-intensive compared to road or air transport, according to the UIC, a Paris-based international organization of the railway sector. ...


Especially since we never got those jetpacks we were promised!

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