Biology
Breach
November 3, 2013, from Al Jazeera
"After sea kayaking after BP's spill happened, I was sitting at my desk and started coughing up loads of blood," Frizzell, an avid outdoorsman, told Al Jazeera. "My doctor ran a scope down to the top of my lungs and said my bronchi were full of blood."
Frizzell's medical records bear out that he was exposed to toxic chemicals, and he is far from alone.
Since the spill began in April 2010, Al Jazeera has interviewed hundreds of coastal residents, fishermen, and oil cleanup workers whose medical records, like Frizzell's, document toxic chemical exposure that they blame on BP's oil and the toxic chemical dispersants the oil giant used on the spill....
"BP told the public that Corexit was 'as harmless as Dawn dishwashing liquid'," Dr Susan Shaw, of the State University of New York, told Al Jazeera. "But BP and the EPA clearly knew about the toxicity of the Corexit dispersants long before this spill."...
"The combination of crude oil and Corexit is exponentially more toxic than either alone, since they contain many ingredients that target the same organs in the body."...
"People across four states expressed concern that these headache-dizziness-nausea-respiratory problems-blood disorders-skin lesions were different than anything they'd experienced before, and far more intense."
Ott said that people she is seeing along the roughly 900km impact zone are all consistently describing these same symptoms of exposure to chemicals in the oil and dispersants.
November 3, 2009, from The Hindu
The fire raging at the Indian Oil Corporation depot at the Sitapura Industrial Area near here since last Thursday has led to an environmental crisis in the capital city. The thick black plumes of smoke have spread to dozens of villages and residential colonies, hampering visibility and creating panic.
Hundreds of people are visiting hospitals with the complaints of breathing problem, sore throat, irritation in the eye, allergy and itching. In addition to the mobile medical teams that are making rounds in the villages, all primary health centres in the rural terrain have been asked to remain open round-the-clock.
Environmental experts here fear that the smoke, apart from affecting the health of the people in and around the city, would also hit agriculture in the surrounding villages which supply vegetables and food grain to Jaipur.
|
Climate
Chaos
November 3, 2011, from Media Matters for America
Citing what it calls "a scathing new expose on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change," Fox News is trumpeting claims that IPCC reports "have often been written by graduate students with little or no experience in their field of study." Fox's article, titled "U.N. Hires Grad Students to Author Key Climate Report," comes as the IPCC prepares to issue a new report on weather extremes.
Fox's "expose" is an e-book by Canadian writer Donna Laframboise, who recruited "a team of citizen auditors" to pore over IPCC reports from the past two decades. Drawing from the book, Fox identifies four IPCC authors since 1994 who were in, or had recently completed, grad school.
Here are the facts Fox characteristically avoided: There were over 450 lead authors for the 2007 assessment report, plus 800 contributing authors and more than 2,500 reviewers. Fox identified only one graduate student who worked on the 2007 report. 1 out of over 1250 authors.
November 3, 2011, from Washington Post
Earlier this year, Republicans found what they saw as an ideal talking point to illustrate a federal bureaucracy gone batty.
The Environmental Protection Agency, they warned, was trying
to regulate something only God could control: the dust in the wind. "Now, here comes my favorite of the crazy regulatory acts. The EPA is now proposing rules to regulate dust," Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.) said on the House floor. He said Texas is full of dusty roads: "The EPA is now saying you can be fined for driving home every night on your gravel road."
There was just one flaw in this argument: It was not true.
The EPA's new dust rule did not exist. It never did.
November 3, 2011, from Duke University via ScienceDaily
More than half of eastern U.S. tree species examined in a massive new Duke University-led study aren't adapting to climate change as quickly or consistently as predicted. "Many models have suggested that trees will migrate rapidly to higher latitudes and elevations in response to warming temperatures, but evidence for a consistent, climate-driven northward migration is essentially absent in this large analysis," says James S. Clark, H.L. Blomquist Professor of Environment at Duke's Nicholas School of the Environment.
November 3, 2009, from Purdue University via Eureka Alert
Researchers say regional surface temperatures can be affected by land use, suggesting that local and regional strategies, such as creating green spaces and buffer zones in and around urban areas, could be a tool in addressing climate change.
A study by researchers from Purdue University and the universities of Colorado and Maryland concluded that greener land cover contributes to cooler temperatures, and almost any other change leads to warmer temperatures. The study, published on line and set to appear in the Royal Meteorological Society’s International Journal of Climatology later this year, is further evidence that land use should be better incorporated into computer models projecting future climate conditions, said Purdue doctoral student Souleymane Fall, the article’s lead author.
November 3, 2009, from Climate Wire
Full-blown partisan warfare is expected tomorrow when Democrats try to begin a markup of global warming legislation in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee despite plans by the panel's seven Republicans to skip the meeting altogether. Chairwoman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) plans to proceed under a rarely used interpretation of the committee's rules that allows her to start and finish the markup so long as a majority of the panel's members are present, rather than longstanding precedent requiring two minority members to be in attendance, according to sources on and off Capitol Hill.
Boxer's justification for the move is that Republicans are trying to stall on a climate bill that they have no intention of voting for anyway. And with a 12-7 majority favoring Democrats, she does not need their support to report the bill favorably.
November 3, 2009, from London Guardian
Global warming will force up to 150 million "climate refugees" to move to other countries in the next 40 years, a new report from the Environmental Justice Foundation (EJF) warns.
In 2008 alone, more than 20 million people were displaced by climate-related natural disasters, including 800,000 people by cyclone Nargis in Asia, and almost 80,000 by heavy floods and rains in Brazil, the NGO said.
President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, who presented testimony to the EJF, said people in his country did not want to "trade a paradise for a climate refugee camp". He warned rich countries taking part in UN climate talks this week in Barcelona "not to be stupid" in negotiating a climate treaty in Copenhagen this December.... Last month, the president held a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to the plight of his country.
November 3, 2009, from New York Times
The ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania has continued to retreat rapidly, declining 26 percent since 2000, scientists say in a new report.
Yet the authors of the study, to be published Tuesday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reached no consensus on whether the melting could be attributed mainly to humanity’s role in warming the global climate.
Eighty-five percent of the ice cover that was present in 1912 has vanished, the scientists said....Dr. Thompson emphasized that the melting of ice atop Mount Kilimanjaro was paralleled by retreats in ice fields elsewhere in Africa as well as in South America, Indonesia and the Himalayas.
"It's when you put those together that the evidence becomes very compelling," he said.
November 3, 2009, from National Geographic News
"Like something out of a disaster movie, a six degree global average temperature rise in the next one hundred years could render the world something completely different." Their interactive map lets the reader explore one, two, three, up to six degrees, with map hotspots. At six degrees, among others, "emergency alert system disbanded," because -- it's all one giant emergency.
|
Resource
Depletion
November 3, 2014, from ThinkProgress
An alarming satellite-based analysis from NASA finds that the world is depleting groundwater -- the water stored unground in soil and aquifers -- at an unprecedented rate....
The groundwater at some of the world's largest aquifers -- in the U.S. High Plains, California's Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere -- is being pumped out "at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished."
The most worrisome fact: "nearly all of these underlie the word's great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity."
And this is doubly concerning in our age of unrestricted carbon pollution because it is precisely these semiarid regions that are projected to see drops in precipitation and/or soil moisture, which will sharply boost the chances of civilization-threatening megadroughts and Dust-Bowlification.
|
Recovery
|
ApocaDocs