Biology
Breach
September 16, 2013, from Chemical and Engineering News
An array of skin care cleansers on the market promise to exfoliate and unclog pores. Some of these skin-scrubbing products contain tiny beads of plastic scattered through a gel or creamy paste. After washing with these cleansers, consumers rinse the soapy stuff -- along with its teeny spheres -- down the drain, giving nary a thought to what happens to the plastic bits, which are less than 1 mm in diameter.
Now, researchers are finding plastic microbeads in the Great Lakes. They say the miniscule spheres could harm aquatic animals that mistake them for food. Perhaps more ominously, they worry that the plastic balls could help transfer toxic pollutants from the Great Lakes to the food chain, including fish that people eat.
September 16, 2013, from InsideClimate News
...Michigan, like almost every other state that is crisscrossed by oil pipelines, does not stipulate how much space should separate pipelines from houses. The state's Public Service Commission asks only that pipelines be "designed and routed in a reasonable manner."... A section of the new line already has been installed about 7 feet from Marty Burke's house in Howell, Mich. -- so close that Enbridge used a special process to make sure his foundation didn't collapse.
"At every level of government I contacted, they all said they had no regulations or no authority to do anything," Burke said.
September 16, 2009, from New York Times
Tests show that their tap water contains arsenic, barium, lead, manganese and other chemicals at concentrations federal regulators say could contribute to cancer and damage the kidneys and nervous system.
"How can we get digital cable and Internet in our homes, but not clean water?" said Mrs. Hall-Massey, a senior accountant at one of the state's largest banks.... When Mrs. Hall-Massey and 264 neighbors sued nine nearby coal companies, accusing them of putting dangerous waste into local water supplies, their lawyer did not have to look far for evidence. As required by state law, some of the companies had disclosed in reports to regulators that they were pumping into the ground illegal concentrations of chemicals -- the same pollutants that flowed from residents' taps.
But state regulators never fined or punished those companies for breaking those pollution laws.
September 16, 2009, from American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert
Scientists in Pennsylvania report that boosting production of crops used to make biofuels could make a difficult task to shrink a vast, oxygen-depleted "dead zone" in the Gulf of Mexico more difficult. The zone, which reached the size of Massachusetts in 2008, forms in summer and threatens marine life and jobs in the region.... the zone forms when fertilizers wash off farm fields throughout the Mississippi River basin and into the Gulf of Mexico. The fertilizers cause the growth of algae, which eventually depletes oxygen in the water and kills marine life. Government officials hope to reduce fertilizer runoff and shrink the zone to the size of Delaware by 2015. But that goal could be more difficult to reach due to federally-mandated efforts to increase annual biofuel production to 36 billion gallons by 2022, the study says.
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Climate
Chaos
September 16, 2013, from University of Bristol
New research has revealed that more ice leaves Antarctica by melting from the underside of submerged ice shelves than was previously thought, accounting for as much as 90 per cent of ice loss in some areas.
Iceberg production and melting causes 2,800 cubic kilometres of ice to leave the Antarctic ice sheet every year. Most of this is replaced by snowfall but any imbalance contributes to a change in global sea level.
For many decades, experts have believed that the most important process responsible for this huge loss was iceberg calving -- the breaking off of chunks of ice at the edge of a glacier.
New research [shows] sub-shelf melting has as large an impact as iceberg calving for Antarctica as a whole and for some areas is far more important.
September 16, 2013, from Scientific American
What's killing the bees? If you've been watching the news, you might answer: "Colony collapse disorder." Yet after the winter of 2011-2012, beekeepers only attributed 8 percent of their wintertime honeybee-hive losses to colony collapse disorder. Other reasons for hive deaths were much more common, including ailing queen bees, to which beekeepers attributed 32 percent of their dead hives. At one recent pollination research conference, nobody seemed to be looking for the disorder's cause anymore.... Queens just don't seem as long-lived and fecund as they used to be, says David Tarpy, who researches beekeeping at the University of North Carolina. Sometimes worker bees even kill their own queens. This behavior, called supersedure, is part of a healthy colony's life cycle, but beekeepers say they're seeing it occur at an accelerated rate, which stresses hives.
September 16, 2013, from Center for American Progress
The United States suffered from numerous extreme weather events in 2011 and 2012. In fact, there were 25 severe storms, floods, droughts, heat waves, and wildfires that each caused more than $1 billion in economic damages, with a total price tag of $188 billion. To help communities recover from these violent weather events, the federal government spent nearly $62 billion for disaster relief in fiscal years 2011 and 2012. These federal funds only cover a portion of recovery costs; private insurance and individuals harmed by the events also spent billions of dollars.
There is recent evidence that climate change played a role in the extreme weather events of 2012.... Interestingly, many of the states that received the most federal recovery aid to cope with climate-linked extreme weather have federal legislators who are climate-science deniers. The 10 states that received the most federal recovery aid in FY 2011 and 2012 elected 47 climate-science deniers to the Senate and the House. Nearly two-thirds of the senators from these top 10 recipient states voted against granting federal emergency aid to New Jersey and New York after Superstorm Sandy.
September 16, 2009, from AP, via PhysOrg.com
Ocean temperatures averaged 62.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the June-August period, 1.04 degree higher than normal for the period.
And for August the world sea-surface average was 62.4 degrees, 1.03 higher than usual, also the warmest for August on record, NOAA's National Climatic Data Center said.
The report is based on data back to 1880.
The combined land and water temperature worldwide was 61.2 degrees, third warmest on record for the three-month period. For August it was 58.2 degrees, fourth warmest. Climate change has been raising the planet's average temperature steadily in recent decades. All of the 10 hottest years on record have occurred since 1997.
September 16, 2009, from New Scientist
As climate change causes sea ice to shrink, the number of "problem" polar bears appears to be increasing.
"Hungry bears don't just lie down -- they go looking for an alternate food source," says zoologist Ian Stirling at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. "In many cases this brings them into human settlements and hunting camps."
Stirling's team found that around the town of Churchill on the shores of Hudson Bay –- the "polar bear capital of the world" –- the number of bears reported as attacking humans, homes and hunting camps more than tripled between 1970 and 2005, from 20 to 90 per year. The shorter the sea ice season, the greater the reports of problem bear activity.
This increase in problem bears comes despite a 22 per cent decline in the west Hudson Bay polar bear population since the late 1980s. Sea ice in Hudson Bay now melts three weeks earlier than it did in the 1970s.
September 16, 2009, from National Geographic News
The immediate cause of the unexpected rise has now been solved, U.S. officials say in a new report (hint: it wasn't global warming). But the underlying reason remains a mystery.... NOAA's phones began ringing this summer when East Coast residents reported higher than predicted water levels, much like those associated with short-term weather events like tropical storms. But these high seas persisted for weeks, throughout June and July.
The startling rise caused only minor coastal flooding -- but major head scratching among scientists.... But this summer, for reasons unknown, "the Gulf Stream slowed down," Edwing said, sending water toward the coasts -- and sea levels shooting upward.
Adding to the sustained surge, autumn winds from the northeastern Atlantic arrived a few months early, pushing even more water coastward.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
September 16, 2009, from Paul Gilding, in ClimateProgress
Some days my head hurts, as I shift between what feels like two parallel universes in the climate change debate.... They tell me the science says it is almost certain the impacts will be serious and destabilising for our society and our economy. The science also describes a lower level of risk -- which they find hard to quantify but generally say between 10 percent and 50 percent -- that the impacts of climate change will be catastrophic, perhaps even civilisation threatening. This could include widespread famine, war and economic collapse. Not certain, but a reasonable possibility.... Then I shift into the parallel universe.
I spend time in corporate boardrooms and listen to the analysis of business executives who explain how we mustn't damage the economy by "over-reacting."... But they still fall for the easy way out, the path of denial and avoidance. Not because they’re bad people, but because they're not thinking clearly and courageously.
My message on this topic is clear and direct. We are at a crucial moment in human history. 2009 is to climate change what 1939 was to WWII. Poland has been invaded -- the Arctic is melting, the bushfires are burning, the droughts are strengthening and the floods are sweeping away communities. There is only one question you have to ask yourself: "what will I tell my children?"
September 16, 2009, from COP15
Rockets that release dust particles into the stratosphere, plans to fertilize oceans, or huge mirrors that reflect the sun's radiation may sound like handy shortcuts to cool the earth.
"It's a temporary cure and doesn't solve anything, and the second thing is that we don't know the earth system enough to start playing with it," says Frank Raes, head of the climate change unit at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre in an interview with EurActiv.... "We have to stay very careful about how to use afforestation and deforestation so that we really have a benefit for the climate," Raes says.
Instead, he is advocating for geo-renovating.
"It is about discussing very sophisticated ways of solving the problems of climate change and air pollution rather than resorting to hard geo-engineering," Frank Raes says in the interview.
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