Biology
Breach
December 18, 2013, from Terre Haute Tribune-Star
Drilling started on Monday in what many hope will be the first successful oil well downtown in more than 100 years.
Pioneer Oil of Lawrenceville, Ill., brought in more than 20 truckloads of drilling equipment over the weekend, despite heavy snow, and was set to begin boring into the ground Monday afternoon, said Steve Miller, chief financial officer for Pioneer... New drilling technology, including "horizontal drilling," has emerged in the last 10 years, making difficult-to-reach subterranean pools of oil economically viable. Technology now also allows drilling operations to capture gases and odors so that even wells in heavily populated areas are feasible...
December 18, 2012, from London Guardian
An explosion of car use has made fast-growing Asian cities the epicentre of global air pollution and become, along with obesity, the world's fastest growing cause of death according to a major study of global diseases.
In 2010, more than 2.1m people in Asia died prematurely from air pollution, mostly from the minute particles of diesel soot and gasses emitted from cars and lorries. Other causes of air pollution include construction and industry. Of these deaths, says the study published in The Lancet, 1.2 million were in east Asia and China, and 712,000 in south Asia, including India.
December 18, 2009, from Associated Press
INDIANAPOLIS — Three environmental groups asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on Thursday to review and correct what they call serious flaws in Indiana's water pollution control program, or to wrest control of it from the state... In a petition, the Chicago-based Environmental Law & Policy Center, the Hoosier Environmental Council and the Sierra Club Hoosier Chapter asked the EPA to “evaluate the systematic failure” of Indiana to properly administer and enforce a federal water pollution program that issues wastewater permits to industrial, municipal and other facilities.
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Climate
Chaos
December 18, 2013, from MLive.com
Several Republican leaders have formed a conservative group aimed at promoting renewable energy in Michigan.
The Michigan Conservative Energy Forum will push the state to reduce its dependence on coal and increase investment in renewable energy and energy efficiency programs. The announcement comes two days before Gov. Rick Snyder is scheduled to conduct a roundtable discussion on the future of Michigan's energy policy.
"For too long, we have allowed the energy discourse to be dominated by the left," said Larry Ward, former political director for the Michigan Republican Party and executive director of the forum.
December 18, 2012, from The Daily Climate
Women pregnant during heat waves face a higher risk of giving birth to babies with a rare defect causing blindness, according to new research.
The study, surveying 15 years of birth defect records in New York state, offers troubling implications for a warmer climate.
In the first study to explore a link between extreme heat and birth defects, researchers from the New York Department of Health and The State University of New York at Albany found that even a five-degree increase in temperature during crucial developmental stages in pregnancy increased the odds of an infant developing congenital cataracts.
December 18, 2011, from Washington Post
...A well-organized and vocal group of residents has taken a keen interest in municipal preparations for sea-level rise caused by climate change, often shouting their opposition, sometimes while planners and politicians are talking. The residents' opposition has focused on a central point: They don't think climate change is accelerated by human activity, as most climate scientists conclude..."Environmentalists have always had an agenda to put nature above man," said Donna Holt, leader of the Virginia Campaign for Liberty, a tea party affiliate with 7,000 members.
December 18, 2011, from Associated Press
MOSCOW (AP) Russia supports Canada's decision to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol, says its foreign ministry, reaffirming Friday that Moscow will not take on new commitments.
Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich told Friday's briefing that the treaty does not cover all major polluters, and thus cannot help solve the climate crisis.
Canada on Monday pulled out of the agreement -- initially adopted in 1997 in Kyoto, Japan, to cut carbon emissions contributing to global warming. Its move dealt a blow to the treaty, which has not been formally renounced by any other country.
December 18, 2011, from New York Times
A bubble rose through a hole in the surface of a frozen lake. It popped, followed by another, and another, as if a pot were somehow boiling in the icy depths. Every bursting bubble sent up a puff of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas generated beneath the lake from the decay of plant debris. These plants last saw the light of day 30,000 years ago and have been locked in a deep freeze -- until now....
If a substantial amount of the carbon should enter the atmosphere, it would intensify the planetary warming. An especially worrisome possibility is that a significant proportion will emerge not as carbon dioxide, the gas that usually forms when organic material breaks down, but as methane, produced when the breakdown occurs in lakes or wetlands. Methane is especially potent at trapping the sun's heat, and the potential for large new methane emissions in the Arctic is one of the biggest wild cards in climate science....
A recent survey drew on the expertise of 41 permafrost scientists to offer more informal projections. They estimated that if human fossil-fuel burning remained high and the planet warmed sharply, the gases from permafrost could eventually equal 35 percent of today's annual human emissions.
December 18, 2009, from Associated Press
Far from Copenhagen's turbulent climate talks, the sea lions, harbor seals and sea otters reposing along the shoreline and kelp forests of this protected marine area stand to gain from any global deal to cut greenhouse gases.
These foragers of the sanctuary's frigid waters, flipping in and out of sight of California's coastal kayakers, may not seem like obvious beneficiaries of a climate treaty crafted in the Danish capital. But reducing carbon emissions worldwide also would help mend a lesser-known environmental problem: ocean acidification.... Another way to think of ocean acidification is as osteoporosis of the seas...
December 18, 2009, from Scientific American
COPENHAGEN—Revolutionizing the energy industry to achieve a target concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of no more than 450 parts per million (ppm) would require building 17 nuclear power plants a year between now and 2030; 17,000 wind turbines a year; or two hydropower dams on the scale of Three Gorges Dam in Chin, according to the International Energy Agency. Such an effort would require an investment of $10.5 trillion during the next 20 years but would ultimately yield savings of $8.6 trillion, the IEA estimated.
December 18, 2009, from Associated Press
COPENHAGEN — Carbon emissions cuts pledged at U.N. climate talks would put the world on "an unsustainable pathway" toward average global warming 50 percent higher than industrial countries want, a confidential U.N. draft document showed Thursday... Scientists say such rises in average temperatures could lead to catastrophic sea level rises, which would threaten islands and coastal cities, kill off many species of animals and plants, and alter the agricultural economies of many countries.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
December 18, 2014, from Youth Power Indiana
December 18, 2011, from Brown University via ScienceDaily
Engineers at Brown University have developed a system that cleanly and efficiently removes trace heavy metals from water. In experiments, the researchers showed the system reduced cadmium, copper, and nickel concentrations, returning contaminated water to near or below federally acceptable standards. The technique is scalable and has viable commercial applications, especially in the environmental remediation and metal recovery fields.
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