Biology
Breach
October 9, 2012, from Associated Press
RIDGEVILLE, Ind. -- An eastern Indiana hog farm tied to a large fish kill would plant more than 500 trees as an air emissions buffer and pay a $5,000 fine under a settlement proposed by the state environmental agency.
State officials say Aaron Chalfant Farms sprayed 200,000 gallons of hog manure onto a field upstream of the June 2010 fish kill near the Randolph County town of Ridgeville. An estimated nearly 108,000 fish died in the Mississinewa (mis-ih-SIHN'-uh-wah) River and a tributary.
October 9, 2011, from Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Acting on a tip, state environmental inspectors in February paid a surprise visit to a dairy farm in Eatonton. They found the owner pumping gallon upon gallon of liquefied cow manure into a freshwater pond. From there the toxic brew leached into neighboring streams, the inspectors said.
Seven months later, the farmer signed a consent order agreeing to bring his farm up to regulations, update some equipment and take classes on managing the huge amounts of manure his cows generate. (A single dairy cow may produce an astonishing 140 pounds of manure a day.)
The Georgia Environmental Protection Division chose not to fine the Eatonton farmer.
October 9, 2009, from New Scientist
The flow of pollutants into the lake peaked in the 1970s, mainly due to the production of plastics, electronics, pesticides and fragrances. The levels declined during the 1980s and 1990s when people realised that these compounds were toxic and they were banned.
However, they found that banned chemicals, such as pesticides that have been linked with Parkinson's disease, have been pouring into the lake at an increasing rate since the 1990s.... Bogdal reckons that a glacier feeding the lake has been storing these chemicals for decades, and is releasing them as it melts. This process could be dramatically sped up by global warming, he warns.
The problem isn't limited to Alpine glaciers. Since these chemicals would have been transported great distances via the atmosphere before they were frozen into ice, many other glaciers around the world may be contaminated. Toxic chemicals have previously been found in polar regions -- putting arctic wildlife at risk.
|
Climate
Chaos
October 9, 2013, from Sydney Daily Telegraph
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its latest report, has signalled for the first time that clouds are most likely contributing to warming the planet.
However, experts say it is still unclear how significant that contribution is.
And predictions around global warming in the IPCC's fifth assessment report - that temperatures will rise between 2C and 4.8C this century - would be more accurate if the influence clouds and rain had on the atmosphere was better understood, says Professor Christian Jakob.
October 9, 2013, from E&E Publishing
If the countries of the world reduced their greenhouse gas emissions today enough to keep the world from warming more than 2 degrees Celsius, when would they be able to tell that these efforts had succeeded?
That's the basic question posed in a paper released yesterday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The answer: about 25 to 30 years, at least where global temperatures are concerned. On a regional level, it may take even longer to see the changes, the paper states.
October 9, 2013, from Reuters
...In golf clubs, gated communities and other housing developments across the United States, tens of thousands of families ... have in recent years moved into new homes where their developers or homebuilders, with little or no prior disclosure, kept all the underlying mineral rights for themselves, a Reuters review of county property records in 25 states shows. In dozens of cases, the buyers were in the dark.
The phenomenon is rooted in recent advances in extracting oil and gas from shale formations deep in the earth, fueling the biggest energy boom in modern U.S. history. Horizontal drilling and the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," have opened vast swaths of the continental United States to exploration.
October 9, 2013, from Shanghai Daily
More than 50 roads and 600 households were flooded yesterday as Shanghai experienced its biggest rainfall in 52 years between Monday night and noon yesterday....
The rain spawned by two typhoons, combined with a high tide in the Huangpu River, overwhelmed part of the city's drainage system.
Local authorities issued the highest level of rain and tide alerts as well as the second-highest alert for gales.
"It is very rare for the city to suffer such a heavy rainstorm in October," said Shanghai Meteorological Bureau's Zhang Ruiyi.
October 9, 2013, from University of Hawaii at Manoa
The seesaw variability of global temperatures often engenders debate over how seriously we should take climate change. But within 35 years, even the lowest monthly dips in temperatures will be hotter than we've experienced in the past 150 years, according to a new and massive analysis of all climate models. The tropics will be the first to exceed the limits of historical extremes and experience an unabated heat wave that threatens biodiversity and heavily populated countries with the fewest resources to adapt.
October 9, 2012, from Midwest Energy News
Michigan's governor is speaking out against a plan by operators of a major natural gas pipeline to use it to move bottlenecked crude oil to the Gulf.
Gov. Rick Snyder and others have filed a motion with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to "intervene and protest” the move by Trunkline Gas Co., arguing that abandoning a natural gas pipeline that supplies nearly a third of Michigan's natural gas would not serve citizens' energy needs as furnaces are firing up for the winter.
October 9, 2011, from BBC
The northern Italian city of Milan banned all traffic from its streets for 10 hours on Sunday in an attempt to reduce smog.
The measure, first imposed on a trial basis in 2007, is triggered whenever pollution exceeds the statutory limit for 12 consecutive days.
Satellite imagery shows Milan to be one of the most polluted cities in Europe.
An estimated 120,000 vehicles will be affected by the move, according to the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
The most polluting vehicles have been banned from driving through the city centre since Thursday.
But on Sunday, there was no traffic between 0800 and 1800 local time (06:00-16:00 GMT).
October 9, 2011, from Reuters
Nearly 200 factories, including one run by Japanese car maker Honda Motor Co Ltd, closed in the central Thai province of Ayutthaya because of flooding, which could threaten Bangkok this week, officials said on Sunday. About 261 people have died since late July in flood-related incidents, the Department of Disaster Prevention and Mitigation said..."All 198 factories at Rojana have to be closed because the water is about 5.1 meters high," Industry Minister Wannarat Channukul told Reuters.
October 9, 2009, from National Geographic News
As sea temperatures have risen in recent decades, enormous sheets of a mucus-like material have begun forming more often, oozing into new regions, and lasting longer, a new Mediterranean Sea study says... Up to 124 miles (200 kilometers) long, the mucilages appear naturally, usually near Mediterranean coasts in summer. The season's warm weather makes seawater more stable, which facilitates the bonding of the organic matter that makes up the blobs.... Now, due to warmer temperatures, the mucilages are forming in winter too -- and lasting for months.... But the new study found that Mediterranean mucilages harbor bacteria and viruses, including potentially deadly E. coli, Danovaro said.
October 9, 2009, from UCLA, via EurekAlert
"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today -- and were sustained at those levels -- global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level was approximately 75 to 120 feet higher than today, there was no permanent sea ice cap in the Arctic and very little ice on Antarctica and Greenland," said the paper's lead author, Aradhna Tripati, a UCLA assistant professor in the department of Earth and space sciences and the department of atmospheric and oceanic sciences.... Levels of carbon dioxide have varied only between 180 and 300 parts per million over the last 800,000 years -- until recent decades, said Tripati, who is also a member of UCLA's Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. It has been known that modern-day levels of carbon dioxide are unprecedented over the last 800,000 years, but the finding that modern levels have not been reached in the last 15 million years is new.
|
Resource
Depletion
October 9, 2009, from New York Times
Global warming will not necessarily change the amount of fish caught half a century from now, but it will shift catches away from the tropics toward the poles, researchers reported. The researchers, from the University of British Columbia and elsewhere, used a computer model including environmental factors and data on 1,066 fish species ranging from sharks to shrimplike creatures at the bottom of the food chain. Together those species accounted for most of the world's catch from 2000 to 2004. The findings were reported in the journal Global Change Biology. By 2055, the scientists predicted, countries like China, Chile, Indonesia and the United States (excepting Alaska and Hawaii) will see catches decline, while catches off Alaska, Greenland, Norway and Russia will rise.
|
Recovery
October 9, 2012, from The Daily Climate
DETROIT -- A renewable energy initiative on Michigan's ballot is finding support in an unlikely place -- churches. "As a pastor, I look at the call in the first book of Genesis, to care for the Earth, and to the gospels' call to love thy neighbor," said the Rev. Terry Gallagher, a pastor at Sacred Conversation in Trenton, Mich. "If we don't change energy paths, we're dooming the future of the Earth." The Renewable Energy Amendment would mandate that Michigan get 25 percent of its electricity from renewable resources by 2025. The proposal was filed by Michigan Energy, Michigan Jobs, a coalition of state businesses, labor organizations and health care advocates.
The amendment has drawn national attention because it would make Michigan the first state to have a renewable energy standard in its constitution. Now some churches in the state have lent their support.
October 9, 2012, from Reuters
More U.S. coal-fired power plants could retire due to environmental regulations and weaker-than-expected electric demand, costing the industry up to $144 billion, economists at consultancy Brattle Group said.
In a new study, Brattle's economists forecast 59,000 to 77,000 megawatts (MW) of coal plant capacity would likely retire over the next five years.
That was about 25,000 MW more than the firm had estimated in 2010, Brattle said in a release. There is about 317,000 MW of coal-fired capacity now in the United States.
October 9, 2009, from BusinessGreen
Norway yesterday became the first country to pledge to cut carbon emissions in line with climate scientists' most demanding recommendations, committing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 40 per cent on their 1990 level by 2020.
Prime minister Jens Stoltenberg, who was re-elected last month, said the government was prepared to meet demands from developing nations for the rich world to take the lead in tackling climate change and would upgrade its existing 30 per cent target to 40 per cent.... The row continued to bubble away for a second day after the US yesterday said it would not sign up to any deal based on the Kyoto Protocol and called for a complete reworking of the draft Copenhagen Treaty based on countries setting their own emissions targets.
|
ApocaDocs