Biology
Breach
November 19, 2012, from Environmental Health News
Slowing cargo vessels near coastlines by 10 to 15 miles per hour could dramatically cut ships' air pollution, according to a new study. But only a few U.S. ports have initiated such efforts. A speed limit of 14 mph, down from the current cruising speeds of 25 to 29 mph, would cut nitrogen oxides -- a main ingredient of smog -- by 55 percent and soot by almost 70 percent. It also would reduce carbon dioxide -- a potent greenhouse gas and key contributor to climate change -- by 60 percent. With 100,000 ships carrying 90 percent of the world's cargo, air pollution is a heavy burden for people living near ports, so slowing ships could improve their health, researchers say.
November 19, 2009, from The Charleston Gazette
Coal pollution is assaulting human health through impacts on workers, residents near mining operations and power plants, and the environment in coalfield communities, according to a new report by a group of physicians....coal combustion releases mercury, particulate matter, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and dozens of other substances known to be hazardous to human health. ...Even people who do not develop illnesses from coal pollutants could find their health and wellbeing impacted because of coal's contribution to global warming. The discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from coal-burning power plants is a major contributor to global warming and its adverse effects on health worldwide, such as heat stroke, malaria, declining food production, scarce water supplies, social conflict and starvation.
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Climate
Chaos
November 19, 2014, from Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
A vast majority of scientists believe that the Earth is warming at an unprecedented rate and that human activity is almost certainly the dominant cause. But on the topics of response and mitigation, there is far less consensus.
November 19, 2013, from AP, via WHTI
The microscopic creatures that make up a critical link in the ocean food chain declined dramatically the first half of this year in the North Atlantic as ocean temperatures remained among the warmest on record, federal scientists say.
Springtime plankton blooms off the coast of northern New England were well below average this year, leading to the lowest levels ever seen for the tiny organisms that are essential to maintaining balance in the ocean food chain, said Kevin Friedland, a marine scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The absence of the normal surge of plankton in the spring is a concern because that's when cod and haddock and many other species produce offspring, Friedland said....
"The first six months of 2013 can be characterized by new extremes in the physical and biological environment," Friedland said from his office in Rhode Island.
The findings come after temperatures off the Northeast U.S. hit an all-time high in 2012.
November 19, 2013, from Planet Ark
A Russian medic and a freelance journalist who were among 30 people arrested for a Greenpeace protest against offshore Arctic drilling were granted bail on Monday in a case that has drawn fierce criticism abroad.
Colin Russell, an Australian, was denied bail by a separate court earlier on Monday. He was a radio operator on the Arctic Sunrise, the Greenpeace ship used for the September 28 protest.
Western leaders including German Chancellor Angela Merkel have expressed concern to Russian President Vladimir Putin over the case and Western celebrities have voiced support for the Greenpeace campaigners. Ex-Beatle Paul McCartney has asked Putin to help secure their release.
The 30 arrested over the protest, in which activists tried to scale the offshore Prirazlomnaya oil rig that is crucial to Russia's drive to tap Arctic energy resources, face up to seven years in jail if convicted of hooliganism.
November 19, 2013, from Climate Desk
Earlier this month, Super Typhoon Haiyan stunned the meteorological community. The Navy's Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which tracked the storm, estimated its maximum 1-minute sustained wind speeds at more than 195 miles per hour based on satellite imagery. If confirmed, that would exceed the official wind speed estimates for all other hurricanes and typhoons in the modern period. (Prior to 1969 some Pacific storms were recorded as stronger, but these measurements are now considered too high).
But here's the thing: Haiyan isn't the globe's only record-breaking hurricane in recent years. Even as scientists continue to study and debate whether global warming is making hurricanes worse, hurricanes have continued to set new intensity records. Indeed, a Climate Desk analysis of official hurricane records finds that many of the globe's hurricane basins -- including the Atlantic, the Northwest Pacific, the North Indian, the South Indian, and the South Pacific -- have witnessed (or, in the case of Haiyan and the Northwest Pacific, arguably witnessed) some type of new hurricane intensity record since the year 2000. What's more, a few regions that aren't usually considered major hurricane basis have also seen mammoth storms of late.
November 19, 2012, from National Research Council, via National Academies Press
From page 4 of the Summary: Available knowledge of climate-security connections that feature societal vulnerabilities indicates that security analysis needs to develop more nuanced understanding of the conditions -- largely, social, political, and economic conditions -- under which particular climate events are and are not likely to lead to particular kinds of social and political stresses and under which such events and responses to them are and are not likely to lead to significant security threats. The empirical knowledge base on the connections between extreme events and political instability or violence also suggests some hypotheses that are worthy of further examination....
From page 5 of the summary: Building Fundamental Understanding: Recommendations 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, and 6.1 The intelligence community should participate in a whole-of-government effort to inform choices about adapting to and reducing vulnerability to climate change. Recommendation 3.1 It should, along with appropriate federal science agencies, support research to improve the ability to quantify the likelihoods of potentially disruptive climate events, that is, single extreme climate events, event clusters, and event sequences.
November 19, 2012, from University of East Anglia
The structure and processes of United Nations climate negotiations are "antiquated," unfair and obstruct attempts to reach agreements, according to research published November 18. The findings come ahead of the 18th UN Climate Change Summit, which starts in Doha on November 26.
The study, led by Dr Heike Schroeder from the University of East Anglia (UEA) and the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, argues that the consensus-based decision making used by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stifles progress and contributes to negotiating deadlocks, which ultimately hurts poor countries more than rich countries.
November 19, 2012, from The Hill
A major World Bank report warns that Earth is heading for a 4 degrees Celsius (7.2 degrees Fahrenheit) temperature rise by 2100 that would bring unprecedented heatwaves, droughts and floods -- effects that put some of the poorest nations at highest risk.
"No nation will be immune to the impacts of climate change," states the new report titled "Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4 [degrees] C Warmer World Must be Avoided."
November 19, 2012, from Youngstown Vindicator
The city doesn't have plans to lease park land to companies for oil and gas drilling, but its parks and recreation commission will take comments from the public about the issue.... City council gave the board of control approval Oct. 17 to move ahead with a plan to solicit offers from companies to lease city-owned land for fracking. The proceeds are to be used for neighborhood improvement work, primarily demolitions....
"Right now, I wouldn't be in favor of any fracking in parks," said Mayor Charles Sammarone. "But if the city has the chance to make a zillion dollars, we'd have to re-evaluate."
November 19, 2009, from Inter Press Service
Poor women will bear the greatest "climate burden", says the United Nations Population Fund in its 2009 State of the World Population report, released today.
The report emphasises that climate change is more than an issue of energy efficiency or industrial carbon emissions; it is also an issue of population dynamics, poverty and gender equity.
Poor and vulnerable populations the world over are the ones who will be hardest hit by climate change, despite their comparatively minute contribution to our global carbon footprint - the poorest billion people on Earth contribute a mere three percent of the world's total carbon footprint.
November 19, 2009, from Washington Post
...one of the biggest, and most overlooked, causes of global climate change: a vast and often smoldering layer of coal-black peat that has made Indonesia the world's third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States.
Unlike the noxious gases pumped into the atmosphere by gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles in the United States and smoke-belching factories in China, danger here in the heart of Borneo rises from the ground itself.
Peat, formed over thousands of years from decomposed trees, grass and scrub, contains gigantic quantities of carbon dioxide, which used to stay locked in the ground. It is now drying and disintegrating, as once-soggy swamps are shorn of trees and drained by canals, and when it burns, carbon dioxide gushes into the atmosphere.
November 19, 2009, from New York Times
The Earth's oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests.
Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels began soaring in the 1950s, and oceans largely kept up, scientists say. But the growth in the intake rate has slowed since the 1980s, and markedly so since 2000, the authors of a study write in a report in Thursday's issue of Nature.
The research suggests that the seas cannot indefinitely be considered a reliable "carbon sink" as humans generate heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
The slowdown in the rise of the absorption rate resulted from a gradual change in the oceans' chemistry, the study found. "The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes and the less carbon dioxide it can absorb," said the study's lead author, Samar Khatiwala...
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Resource
Depletion
November 19, 2011, from New York Times
Down but not quite out, these Americans form a diverse group sometimes called "near poor" and sometimes simply overlooked -- and a new count suggests they are far more numerous than previously understood.
When the Census Bureau this month released a new measure of poverty, meant to better count disposable income, it began altering the portrait of national need. Perhaps the most startling differences between the old measure and the new involves data the government has not yet published, showing 51 million people with incomes less than 50 percent above the poverty line. That number of Americans is 76 percent higher than the official account, published in September. All told, that places 100 million people -- one in three Americans -- either in poverty or in the fretful zone just above it.
November 19, 2011, from UPI
Great Plains river basins are threatened by pumping of groundwater from aquifers, risking a bleak future for native fish in many streams, U.S. researchers say.
Unlike alluvial aquifers, which can be replenished with rain and snow, these regional aquifers were created by melting glaciers during the last Ice Age, the researchers say, and when that water is gone, it's gone for good....
In a three-year study of the Arikaree River in eastern Colorado, researchers concluded that during the next 35 years only slightly more than half of the current fish refuge pools would remain.
Falke and his colleagues say it would require a 75 percent reduction in the rate of groundwater pumping to maintain current water table levels and refuge pools, which is "not economically or politically feasible," the study said.
Pumping of regional aquifers is done almost entirely for agriculture, Falke said, with about 90 percent of the irrigation aimed at corn production, along with some alfalfa and wheat.
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Recovery
November 19, 2012, from PhysOrg
The researchers have applied a mathematical model to a real world situation, the environmental collapse of a lake in China, to help prove a theory which suggests an ecosystem 'flickers', or fluctuates dramatically between healthy and unhealthy states, shortly before its eventual collapse. Head of Geography at Southampton, Professor John Dearing explains: "We wanted to prove that this 'flickering' occurs just ahead of a dramatic change in a system - be it a social, ecological or climatic one - and that this method could potentially be used to predict future critical changes in other impacted systems in the world around us."
November 19, 2012, from Sydney Morning Herald
EVEN as a kid taking a dip in a friend's swimming pool, Derek Spielman would think about how it would be much better if it was full of turtles. Now his own backyard swimming pool is one of 50 on Sydney's north shore that have been turned into ponds, saving thousands of dollars on power and water bills.
There are no turtles, but Dr Spielman's pool at his home in Gordon is swarming with native fish, such as empire and spotted gudgeons and Pacific blue eye. It's noisy with a chorus of frogs and full of water lilies and other aquatic plants, attracting native birds, dragonflies and bees....
November 19, 2011, from The Market Oracle
The simple answer is no - and the complicated answer is also no....
What we find is a reality wall for EVs so high that "The Switch" (to a fully motorised all electric car future) is such pure fantasy it is avoided - even by its most blustering shills.
These, like Renault's Carlos Ghosn talk loudly about attaining production rates of 1 million EVs per year "by about 2016". The quantum leap they would need to match the world's current output of OVs, about 75 million per year, and then replace the existing stock of around 950 - 975 million OVs, growing at about 55 million a year (after the scrapping of about 20 million a year), is so far beyond their admittedly world class ability to lie, boast and brag - that only fantasy will suffice.
As we know from the first table, for every ton of global oil production, we produce 5 kilograms of aluminium, less than 2 kgs of copper, a half kilo of lead, and so on down the scale - to lithium. Like we also know, lithium is the Holy Grail for EV boomers, who can present this light metal as relatively "eco friendly', or relatively non-toxic, but this does nothing to change its rarity. To be sure, it is fun to know the world's oceans contain an estimated 230 billion tons of lithium - dissolved in about 1450 billion cubic kilometres of water - which means there is about 140 kgs of lithium in every cubic kilometre of seawater ! More seriously, we need to know the world's mineable and extractible reserves of lithium.
These are mainly located in Bolivia, Argentina, Portugal and Russia and their exact extent is most certainly a controversial subject, but the US Geological Survey in 2007 estimated these may be as little as 13.75 million tons. The most optimistic estimates, assuming a large increase in lithium prices, extend this to about 29 Mt.
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