Biology
Breach
April 28, 2013, from CNN
There used to be two or three people working with him; now he's alone. The catch that's coming in is light, particularly for crabs.
"Guys running five or six hundred traps are coming in with two to three boxes, if that," said Stander, 26....
"My fellow fishermen who fish crab and who fish fish, they're feeling the same thing," Barisich said. "You get a spike in production every now and then, but overall, it's off. Everybody's down. Everywhere there was dispersed oil and heavily oiled, the production is down."...
"Things's changing, and we don't know what's happening yet," said oysterman Byron Encalade.
April 28, 2009, from Environmental Health News
New research studying household air in homes in Arizona found more than 400 chemicals ranging from pesticides to phthalates, confirming that indoor air can be heavily contaminated with pollutants.
Pesticides, including diazinon, chlorpyrifos and DDT were found at surprisingly high levels, as were phthalates... A total of 586 individual chemicals were identified. The pesticides diazinon and chlorpyrifos were found in the greatest amounts and both were found in all of the 52 homes tested.... Researchers were not able to identify at least 120 of the chemicals. Many of these unidentified chemicals had structures similar to fragrance compounds. Fragrances made up the major chemical component of the collected chemicals.
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Climate
Chaos
April 28, 2013, from Bangor Daily News
Data collected from the Gulf of Maine indicates that the average sea surface temperature in the gulf has risen 1.5 degrees from 2011 to 2012 and that in the past four years, it has risen between 2 and 3.5 degrees, depending on how one looks at the data collected from scientific studies.
With the rising temperatures come concerns, and some indication, about how marine life along the coast will be affected.
Officials and scientists in Maine have suggested that higher temperatures in the Gulf of Maine have been a factor in bacterial outbreaks in bivalves and in sea lice infestations in Cobscook and Passamaquoddy bays. Some have put partial blame on the gulf's warmer waters for a northeasterly shift of cod in the gulf into colder waters, for declining shrimp catches and for the glut of soft-shell lobsters last summer that caused a plummet in prices lobstermen were receiving for their catch....
Over the past 40 years, roughly half of 36 fish stocks in the northwest Atlantic Ocean studied by NEFSC have shifted northward, the statement added.
April 28, 2011, from Duke University via ScienceDaily
Scientists have observed a "super-aggregation" of more than 300 humpback whales gorging on the largest swarm of Antarctic krill seen in more than 20 years in bays along the Western Antarctic Peninsula. The sightings, made in waters still largely ice-free deep into austral autumn, suggest the previously little-studied bays are important late-season foraging grounds for the endangered whales. But they also highlight how rapid climate change is affecting the region..."The lack of sea ice is good news for the whales in the short term, providing them with all-you-can-eat feasts as the krill migrate vertically toward the bay's surface each night. But it is bad news in the long term for both species, and for everything else in the Southern Ocean that depends on krill," says Ari S. Friedlaender, co-principal investigator on the project and a research scientist at Duke.
April 28, 2009, from Scientific American
TROMSOE, Norway (Reuters) - An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said Tuesday.
"The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.
Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km (270.3 sq mile) of ice -- bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York City -- has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.
April 28, 2009, from London Guardian
Figures from a measuring station in northern Norway show that CO2 levels are increasing by 2-3 parts per million every year... The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures released by an internationally regarded measuring station in the Arctic.
The measurements suggest that the main greenhouse gas is continuing to increase in the atmosphere at an alarming rate despite the downturn in dip in the rate of increase of the global economy. Levels of the gas at the Zeppelin research station on Svalbard, northern Norway, last week peaked at over 397 parts per million (ppm), an increase of more than 2.5ppm on 2008.
April 28, 2009, from American Society of Agronomy, via EurekAlert
Landfills are classified as the second-largest human-made source of CH4 in the U.S. Additionally, landfill gas contains numerous non-methane hydrocarbons that are either volatilized directly from waste materials or produced through biochemical reactions during waste degradation.... A value of 0 to 10 percent oxidation has been recommended.... The overall mean fraction oxidized across all studies was 36 percent with a standard error of 6 percent. For a subset of fifteen studies conducted over an annual cycle the fraction of methane oxidized ranged from 11 to 89 percent with a mean value of 35 [plus or minus] 6 percent, a value that was nearly identical to the overall mean.
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Resource
Depletion
April 28, 2014, from The Canadian Press, via HuffingtonPost
A group of First Nations with territory covering a quarter of the route for the proposed Northern Gateway oil pipeline met with federal representatives Friday to officially reject the project....
"We do not, we will not, allow this pipeline," Peter Erickson, a hereditary chief of the Nak'azdli First Nation, told the six federal bureaucrats.
"We're going to send the message today to the federal government and to the company itself: their pipeline is dead. Under no circumstances will that proposal be allowed.
"Their pipeline is now a pipe dream."...
The bands said the project is now banned from Yinka Dene territories, under their traditional laws.
Members young and old of the Nadleh Whut'en, Nak'azdli, Saik'uz, Takla Lake, Tl'azt'en and Wet'suwet'en communities were unanimous. They said the decision by the four clans marks the end of negotiations.
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Recovery
April 28, 2012, from Discover Magazine
[Environmentalism is] still anti-nuclear, anti-technology, anti-industrial civilization. It still talks in mushy metaphors from the Aquarius age, cooing over Mother Earth and the Balance of Nature. And most of all, environmentalists are still acting like Old Testament prophets, warning of a plague of environmental ills about to rain down on humanity.
... No, I'm not talking about the UK's just-published Royal Society report, which, among other things, recommends that developed countries put a brake on economic growth. I'm talking about that other landmark report from 1972, the one that became a totem of the environmental movement.
I mention the 40-year old Limits to Growth book in connection with the new Royal Society report not just to point up their Malthusian similarities (which Mark Lynas flags here), but also to demonstrate what a time warp the collective environmental mindset is stuck in. Even some British greens have recoiled in disgust at the outdated assumptions underlying the Royal Society's report. Chris Goodall, author of Ten Technologies to Save the Planet, told the Guardian: "What an astonishingly weak, cliche ridden report this is... 'Consumption' to blame for all our problems? Growth is evil? A rich economy with technological advances is needed for radical decarbonisation. I do wish scientists would stop using their hatred of capitalism as an argument for cutting consumption."...
"Pro-technology, pro-city, pro-growth, the green modernist has emerged in recent years to advance an alternative vision for the future. His mission is to remake environmentalism: Strip it of outdated mythologies and dogmas, make it less apocalyptic and more optimistic, broaden its constituency. In this vision, the Anthropocene is not something to rail against, but to embrace. It is about welcoming that world, not dreading it. It is about creating a future that environmentalists will help shape for the better."
April 28, 2009, from New Scientist
Converting a greenhouse gas into a clean-burning fuel offers two benefits for the price of one. That's the thinking behind a novel process for converting carbon dioxide into methanol at room temperature.... "Our catalyst isn't toxic, and the reaction happens rapidly at room temperature," says team leader Jackie Ying.
The catalyst used by Ying's team is a type of chemical called an N-heterocyclic carbene (NHC). The mechanism by which the NHC speeds up the conversion is uncertain, but it appears to change the shape of the CO2 molecule, "activating" it in a way that makes it easier for hydrogen to bond with its carbon atom, says team member Yugen Zhang.
April 28, 2009, from Yale Environment 360
n the high desert of southern Spain, not far from Granada, the Mediterranean sun bounces off large arrays of precisely curved mirrors that cover an area as large as 70 soccer fields. These parabolic troughs follow the arc of the sun as it moves across the sky, concentrating the sun's rays onto pipes filled with a synthetic oil that can be heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. That super-heated oil is used to boil water to power steam turbines, or to pump excess heat into vats of salts, turning them a molten, lava-like consistency.
The salts are just fertilizers -- a mix of sodium and potassium nitrate -- but they represent a significant advance in the decades-old technology of solar thermal power production, which has traditionally used mirrors to heat water or oil to generate electricity-producing steam. Now, engineers can use the molten salts to store the heat from solar radiation many hours after the sun goes down and then release it at will to drive turbines. That means solar thermal power can be used to generate electricity nearly round-the-clock.
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