Biology
Breach
August 26, 2014, from Reuters
Chinese police have seized over 30,000 tonnes of tainted chicken feet, common on restaurant menus in China, in the latest food scandal to hit the country.
Authorities have detained 38 people involved in the sale of the chicken feet in provinces including the eastern province of Zhejiang, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Tuesday.
The arrests followed raids on nine supplier factories in nearby Jiangsu, Anhui, Henan and Guangdong provinces, Xinhua said, adding police found that excess hydrogen peroxide was being added to the meat.
August 26, 2014, from Washington Post
They don't get the same attention as shark attacks (or even great white sightings), but jellyfish ruin far more weekends, descending on beaches like water-bound locusts.
The latest example came in the waters along Daytona Beach and New Smyrna Beach. This past weekend, more than 400 swimmers were stung by jellyfish at the Florida beaches, according to Reuters. The swarm of serial stingers prompted lifeguards to raise purple flags warning of hazardous marine life.
August 26, 2014, from National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research
Unregulated trash burning around the globe is pumping far more pollution into the atmosphere than shown by official records. A new study estimates that more than 40 percent of the world's garbage is burned in such fires, with emissions that can substantially affect human health and climate.
August 26, 2013, from Nature
The slow and inexorable increase in the oceans' acidity as they soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere could itself have an effect on climate and amplify global warming, according to a new study. Acidification would lead certain marine organisms to emit less of the sulphur compounds that help to seed the formation of clouds and so keep the planet cool....
Adding in the effects of acidification on DMS, which the team calculated using three different estimates of the strength of the link between pH and DMS production, led to additional increases ranging between 0.23 and 0.48 degrees C. Their paper is published in Nature Climate Change today.
(Thanks, DesdemonaDespair)
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Climate
Chaos
August 26, 2014, from USA Today
If you're interested in seeing the namesake glaciers of Glacier National Park, Ken Burns has a piece of advice: hurry.
"The great sadness of Glacier National Park is that it's probably going to be true that fairly soon, we're going to call it 'The National Park Formerly Known as Glacier'," Burns says.
With current global warming trends, the United States Geological Survey warns that Glacier National Park's glaciers could disappear within the next several decades.
August 26, 2011, from The Independent
A team of British adventurers was poised last night to become the first to row to the magnetic North Pole.
They were less than a mile from the end of their journey after a 28-day struggle through Arctic waters to complete a historic trip only made possible by climate change.
The retreat of the Arctic's summer ice sheet has left navigable water where only a few years ago explorers would have to walk if they wanted to reach the pole. It was still a close-run thing, with wind-driven ice floes threatening to smash into the reinforced rowing boat and destroy it. Ironically, the last two miles of the journey had to be completed by hauling the boat onto an ice floe which had floated over the pole as the team approached....
Mr Wishart, who has rowed across theAtlantic, added: "We are all exhilarated and relieved that weather conditions were in our favour. It is an enormous achievement, and a privilege for our team to have been part of what is one of the world's last great firsts."
August 26, 2009, from COP15
New research from two professors at the University of Bergen, Norway, reveals that nature absorbs much less greenhouse gas from the atmosphere than estimated by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).... The models show that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere could likely be 20 to 25 percent higher than previously estimated. Consequently climate change will happen faster, writes the Norwegian newspaper Dagsavisen.... "The most realistic is no longer 2, but 3.5 or 4 degrees Celsius," Helge Drange says to Norwegian weekly Teknisk Ukeblad. "Then we will cross more thresholds with irreversible damage to water supply and food production", says Drange.
August 26, 2009, from UCSD, via EurekAlert
From mid July to early August 2006, a heat wave swept through the southwestern United States. Temperature records were broken at many locations and unusually high humidity levels for this typically arid region led to the deaths of more than 600 people, 25,000 cattle and 70,000 poultry in California alone.
An analysis of this extreme episode carried out by researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego, put this heat wave in the context of six decades of observed heat waves. Their results suggest that such regional extremes are becoming more and more likely as climate change trends continue.... While mechanisms driving this regional anomaly are still under investigation, the researchers concluded that the trend towards more frequent and larger-scale muggy heat waves should be expected to continue in the region as climate change evolves over the next decades.
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Resource
Depletion
August 26, 2014, from Sydney Morning Herald
"The challenges from waste to warming, spurred on by a growing population with a rising middle-class hunger for meat, are leading us down a dangerous path," Professor Kyte told the Crawford Fund 2014 annual conference in Canberra on Wednesday.
"Unless we chart a new course, we will find ourselves staring volatility and disruption in the food system in the face, not in 2050, not in 2040, but potentially within the next decade," she said, according to her prepared speech.
August 26, 2009, from Reuters, via DesdemonaDespair
Illegal fishing is depleting the seas and robbing poor nations in Africa and Asia of resources, but a lack of global cooperation is undermining efforts to track rogue vessels, an environmental group said on Tuesday.
The Pew Environment Group, a Washington-based think-tank, has found that a United Nations scheme to oblige ports to crack down on illegal fishing boats is handicapped by a lack of accurate information, implementation and participation.... Pew estimates that a fifth of all fish landed come from illegal, unregulated or unreported vessels -- and this figure rises to around half for valuable species like blue fin tuna.
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Recovery
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