Biology
Breach
May 1, 2012, from Planet Ark
Exxon Mobil Corp has shut the 160,000 barrel-per-day (bpd) North Line crude oil pipeline in Louisiana after a leak spilled 1,900 barrels of crude oil in a rural area over the weekend, affecting a conduit that supplies the nation's third-largest refinery.
The 22-inch line originates in St. James, Louisiana, and provides shippers with access to oil from the giant Louisiana Offshore Oil Port and crude from offshore platforms, according to Exxon's website.... A spate of recent leaks and incidents has heightened local concerns and prompted calls for tougher scrutiny from regulators. Last July, Exxon' Silvertip pipeline spilled about 1,000 barrels of oil into the Yellowstone River in Montana, an accident that the company said cost it about $135 million.
May 1, 2012, from BBC
The government of Peru is investigating the deaths of more than 500 pelicans along a 70km (40-mile) stretch of the country's northern coast.
Officials say most appeared to have died on shore over the past few days.
Scientists have also found the carcasses of 54 boobies, several sea lions and a turtle.
They were found in the same region where some 800 dolphins washed ashore earlier this year. The cause of their death is still being investigated.
The Peruvian government said it was "deeply worried".
A preliminary report said that there was no evidence to show the pelicans had died at sea, but rather on the beach where they were found.
May 1, 2012, from Edmonton Journal
A new federal environmental review panel "does not have any right to attribute significance to the spirituality of a place per se," Taseko Mines Ltd. president Russell Hallbauer wrote in a letter obtained under the Access to Information Act and provided to the Vancouver Sun by B.C. independent MLA Bob Simpson.
Vancouver-based Taseko, which failed in its 2010 bid to get federal approval after a "scathing" federal review, also asked Ottawa to not permit aboriginal prayer ceremonies at pending hearings on the revised proposal.
Children's plays should also be banned, Hallbauer said in his November letter.
May 1, 2012, from Bloomberg News
Babies exposed in the womb to a commonly used insecticide have brain abnormalities after birth, according to a study that looked at children born before the U.S. limited the chemical's use.
Magnetic resonance imaging of elementary school-aged children with the highest exposure to chlorpyrifos, used mostly in agricultural settings now, showed structural changes in the brain compared with those who had the lowest exposure, research online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found. Some parts of the brain were overgrown, while other regions were smaller, the scientists found.
The study is the first to use imaging scans to show that prenatal exposure to the chemical, included in Dow Chemical Co.'s pesticide Dursban, is linked to structural changes in the brain five to 10 years after exposure...
May 1, 2009, from The Charleston Gazette
A new scientific study has for the first time found a group of chemicals used in coatings on food wrappers in human blood.
Previous reports have documented low levels of certain perfluorochemicals -- those used to make commercial products like food wrapper coatings -- in the blood of the general human population. But the new study, led by University of Toronto researchers, focused on chemicals that are actually used in food wrapper coatings and other consumer products...
Scott Mabury, one of the study authors, said the results indicate that these food wrapper coatings are likely breaking down in the body into C8, which is also known as PFOA, and a related chemical called PFOS.
May 1, 2009, from Purdue University, via EurekAlert
Because both groups of fish wriggled at about the same temperature, the researchers thought the responses might be more like a reflex than a cognitive reaction to experiencing pain.... Upon later observation in their home tanks, however, the researchers noticed that the fish from each group were exhibiting different behaviors.
"The fish given the morphine acted like they always had: swimming and being fish," Garner said. "The fish that had gotten saline -- even though they responded the same in the test -- later acted different, though. They acted with defensive behaviors, indicating wariness, or fear and anxiety."
Nordgreen said those behavioral differences showed that fish can feel both reflexive and cognitive pain.
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Climate
Chaos
May 1, 2015, from New Zealand Herald
"Preliminary indications are that methane is reaching the ocean surface - this is the first time this has been measured in New Zealand," he said.
"However, to understand how much methane, and then what this means for atmospheric contributions, will require detailed analysis of the data."...
The discovery of this high concentration of gas flares in shallow water depths - 100m-300m - on an active tectonic subduction zone was unique, as gas seeps usually occurred much deeper, at 600m to 1000m below the surface.
The team identified methane gas in the sediment and in the ocean, and vast areas of methane hydrates - ice-like frozen methane - below the seafloor.
This year's research voyage continued the work of an international project focusing on the interactions between gas hydrates and slow-moving landslides called SCHLIP - Submarine Clathrate Hydrate Landslide Imaging Project.
May 1, 2013, from Los Angeles Times
Mark Zuckerberg is being unfriended by progressives angered by television ads from his political advocacy group Fwd.us that praise lawmakers for supporting the expansion of the Keystone XL oil pipeline and drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.... Though none of the ads suggest that Zuckerberg or Facebook support these policies, that distinction may be lost on the general public.
May 1, 2012, from New York Times
...polls say 97 percent of working climate scientists now see global warming as a serious risk.
Yet in recent years, the climate change skeptics have seized on one last argument that cannot be so readily dismissed. Their theory is that clouds will save us.
They acknowledge that the human release of greenhouse gases will cause the planet to warm. But they assert that clouds -- which can either warm or cool the earth, depending on the type and location -- will shift in such a way as to counter much of the expected temperature rise and preserve the equable climate on which civilization depends.
May 1, 2011, from Bloomberg
The U.S. probably won't take significant steps to curb climate change until an environmental disaster sways public view and prompts political action, Robert Stavins of Harvard University said.
"It's unlikely that the U.S. is going to take serious action on climate change until there are observable, dramatic events, almost catastrophic in nature, that drive public opinion and drive the political process in that direction," Stavins, director of Harvard's Environmental Economics Program in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said today in an interview in Bloomberg's Boston office....
Stavins, an economist, is a member of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said in 2007 that scientists are more than 90 percent certain that humans are causing global warming....
"There's a legit reason for the public to be skeptical about climate change because they don't see it," Stavins said.
Grabbing the public's attention would require a dramatic development, such as a "well-observed melting of parts of polar ice caps that result in some amount of sea-level rise," Stavins said.
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Resource
Depletion
May 1, 2013, from Smithsonian Institution
Douglas Owsley, the division head for physical anthropology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, presented today a forensic analysis of 17th-century human remains proving that survival cannibalism took place in historic Jamestown. The findings answer a long-standing question among historians about the occurrence of cannibalism at Jamestown during the deadly winter of 1609-1610 known as the "starving time" -- a period during which about 80 percent of the colonists died.
May 1, 2013, from Slate
Long story short, we're in nothing like the peak oil nightmare that a naive forward projection of the 2003-08 hockey stick would have led you to expect. But we've hardly conquered oil scarcity either. New discoveries are having trouble keeping pace with rising car ownership in Asia and declining production from many established oil sources. Meanwhile, unconventional oil is coming onto the market in part because oil is scarce and expensive, which makes it profitable to extract hard-to-extract oil. That's better for the economy than if we didn't find any, but it also means we haven't returned to the 1990s oil bounty and most likely never will.
May 1, 2011, from Yale360
Carbon emission reductions achieved since 1990 by the world's developed nations were canceled out many times over by the increase of imported goods from nations without binding emissions targets, including China, according to a new report. While climate policies, including the Kyoto Protocol, stabilized carbon emissions in many wealthy nations from 1990 to 2008, most of these nations increased their "consumption-based" emissions significantly during this period because of large imports, according to the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study, which the authors call the first global assessment of how international trade affected national carbon footprints since Kyoto, says that while developed nations reduced their CO2 emissions by 2 percent from 1990 to 2008, those emissions actually increased by 7 percent when imports were factored in. "This suggests that the current focus on territorial emissions in a subset of countries may be ineffective at reducing global emissions without some mechanisms to monitor and report emissions from the production of imported goods and services," said Glen Peters of the Centre for International Climate and Environmental Research and lead author of the study.
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Recovery
May 1, 2009, from Canadian Press
The Christian Bible doesn't say anything about global warming, greenhouse gases or overpackaging. And when it mentions pollution by name, it tends to mean things like "blood pollutes the land," as discussed in Numbers.
So those looking for biblical references to back up their eco-friendly outlooks have had to look far deeper into their readings.
The newly published Green Bible, complete with essays and an index of environment-related references throughout the Old and New Testaments, can help.
"It's a wonderful tool," says Katharine Vansittart of the Greening Sacred Spaces program, which helps worship spaces get green retrofits.
May 1, 2009, from BusinessGreen
Since launching a 5p charge for food bags last May as part of its Plan A scheme to reduce waste, Marks & Spencers says the number of bags taken to cart posh ready meals home has fallen by 80 per cent, from 460m bags a year to 80m. The National Trust, which introduced a charge on 1 May last year in its shops and garden centres, has managed to slash plastic bag usage by 85 per cent, or one million bags a year. It said just five per cent of its customers were now taking the disposable option.... Tesco, which offers one Green point to its clubcard customers for every bag they reuse, says it has cut bag use by 50 per cent since it launched the scheme in August 2006, saving three billion bags in the process. In the past year alone, 1.8bn bags have been saved.
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