ApocaDocs Today is February 20, 2025.
On this day (02/20), we posted 21 stories, over the years 2009-2016.
Converging Emergencies:From 2009 to 2016, 'Doc Jim and 'Doc Michael spent 30 to 90 minutes nearly every day, researching, reading, and
joking about more than 8,000 news stories
about Climate Chaos, Biology Breach, Resource Depletion, and Recovery. (We also captured stories about Species Collapse and Infectious Disease,
but in this "greatest hits of the day" instantiation, we're skipping the last two.)
We shared those stories and japes daily, at apocadocs.com
(see our final homepage, upon the election of Trump).
The site was our way to learn about what humans were doing to our ecosystem, as well our way to try to help wake up the world.
You could call this new format the "we knew it all back then, but nobody wanted to know we knew it" version.
Enjoy these stories and quips from a more hopeful time, when the two ApocaDocs
imagined that humanity would come to its senses in time -- so it was just fine to make fun of the upcoming collapse.
Suicide may be linked to air pollution, according to new research that finds spikes in completed suicides in the days following peak pollution levels.
The research took place in Utah, part of the United States' western "suicide belt." Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the United States; in Utah, it is the eighth. Though the notion that suicide and air quality could be linked may not seem intuitive, similar studies in South Korea, Taiwan and Canada have also linked the two.... They found that suicide risk went up two to three days after levels of fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide rose.
An Oakland watchdog group said Tuesday it is suing major manufacturers and retailers, including Target and Amazon.com, for selling nap mats made with a toxic flame retardant that is also a known carcinogen.... Many foam nap mats, which are widely used at places like day care centers, are doused with flame retardants linked to obesity, hormone disruption and infertility, according to the lawsuit. One of those flame retardants is chlorinated Tris, a carcinogen that was banned more than 30 years ago from children's pajamas, the group says.
These chemicals are released into the air that infants and toddlers inhale as they doze on the mats, said Caroline Cox, the center's research director.
I thought things were either good, or they were bad. Where does "it's complicated" fit?
Unpublished Government research suggests the plastic carrier may not be an eco villain after all - but, whisper it, an unsung hero. Hated by environmentalists and shunned by shoppers, the disposable plastic bag is piling up in a shame-filled corner of retail history. But a draft report by the Environment Agency, obtained by the Independent on Sunday, has found that ordinary high density polythene (HDPE) bags used by shops are actually greener than supposedly low impact choices.
HDPE bags are, for each use, almost 200 times less damaging to the climate than cotton hold-alls favoured by environmentalists, and have less than one third of the Co2 emissions than paper bags which are given out by retailers such as Primark.
The findings suggest that, in order to balance out the tiny impact of each lightweight plastic bag, consumers would have to use the same cotton bag every working day for a year, or use paper bags at least thrice rather than sticking them in the bin or recycling.
Even as public opinion in the US turns against coal, judges have overturned a ban on blasting away mountaintops to get at seams.
In the central Appalachians, including West Virginia, mining companies have lopped up to 300 metres off hundreds of mountains, destroying biologically diverse hardwood forest. The debris is often dumped into valleys, sometimes burying streams in the process.
A lawsuit filed by the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) based in Huntington, West Virginia, argued that such valley fills violate the Clean Water Act and the National Environmental Policy Act, and a US district court ruled in their favour in March 2007. But on 13 February, a Court of Appeals panel voted 2:1 to reverse the decision.
The nation's top nutritional panel is recommending for the first time that Americans consider the impact on the environment when they are choosing what to eat, a move that defied a warning from Congress and, if enacted, could discourage people from eating red meat... the panel's findings, issued Thursday in the form of a 571-page report, recommended that Americans be kinder to the environment by eating more foods derived from plants and fewer foods that come from animals. Red meat is deemed particularly harmful because of, among other things, the amount of land and feed required in its production.
A National Science Foundation study involving 2,200 participants find that about 25 percent of Americans got this question wrong: 'Does the Earth go around the sun, or does the sun go around the Earth?'... And the fact that only 74 percent of participants knew that the Earth revolved around the sun is perhaps less alarming than the fact that only 48 percent knew that humans evolved from earlier species of animals.
In a shift in strategy, the company that wants to build an oil pipeline from western Canada to Texas said Tuesday that the project will have no measurable effect on global warming.
Alex Pourbaix, TransCanada's president for energy and oil pipelines, said opponents of the proposed Keystone XL pipeline have grossly inflated its likely impact on emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
On the same weekend that 40,000 people gathered on the Mall in Washington to protest construction of the Keystone Pipeline -- to its critics, a monument to carbon-based folly -- President Obama was golfing in Florida with a pair of Texans who are key oil, gas and pipeline players.
Obama has not shied away from supporting domestic drilling, especially for relatively clean natural gas, but in his most recent State of the Union speech he stressed the urgency of addressing climate change by weaning the country and the world from dependence on carbon-based fuels.... on his first "guys weekend" away since he was reelected, the president chose to spend his free time with Jim Crane and Milton Carroll, leading figures in the Texas oil and gas industry, along with other men who run companies that deal in the same kinds of carbon-based services that Keystone would enlarge.
If carbon dioxide emissions don't begin to decline soon, the complex fabric of marine ecosystems will begin fraying -- and eventually unravel completely, two new studies conclude.
The diversity of ocean species thins and any survivors' health declines as the pH of ocean water falls in response to rising carbon dioxide levels, scientists from England and Florida reported February 18 at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. What's more, affected species aren't restricted to those with shells and calcified support structures...
...if we're about to enter a battle over classroom instruction on climate change, it won't go on for decades, because the impacts of global warming are already patently obvious. Seven of the 10 warmest years since global record-keeping began in 1880 have occurred in the 21st century. Despite an intense campaign to discredit his work, Pennsylvania State University professor Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph, which shows that temperatures in the latter half of the 20th century soared to their highest level in 1,000 years, has been validated repeatedly. Last year set a record for the most climate-related disasters in the United States costing more than $1 billion in damage each...
February 20, 2012, from London Guardian/The Observer
Most scientists, on achieving high office, keep their public remarks to the bland and reassuring. Last week Nina Fedoroff, the president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), broke ranks in a spectacular manner.
She confessed that she was now "scared to death" by the anti-science movement that was spreading, uncontrolled, across the US and the rest of the western world.
"We are sliding back into a dark era," she said. "And there seems little we can do about it. I am profoundly depressed at just how difficult it has become merely to get a realistic conversation started on issues such as climate change or genetically modified organisms."
Oil from the BP spill remains stuck on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico, according to a top scientist's video and slides that she says demonstrate the oil isn't degrading as hoped and has decimated life on parts of the sea floor.
That report is at odds with a recent report by the BP spill compensation czar that said nearly all will be well by 2012.
At a science conference in Washington Saturday, marine scientist Samantha Joye of the University of Georgia aired early results of her December submarine dives around the BP spill site. She went to places she had visited in the summer and expected the oil and residue from oil-munching microbes would be gone by then. It wasn't.
"There's some sort of a bottleneck we have yet to identify for why this stuff doesn't seem to be degrading," Joye told the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual conference in Washington. Her research and those of her colleagues contrasts with other studies that show a more optimistic outlook about the health of the gulf, saying microbes did great work munching the oil.
"Magic microbes consumed maybe 10 percent of the total discharge, the rest of it we don't know," Joye said, later adding: "there's a lot of it out there."
And if the financial markets say it makes sense, then it must be so!
If you flick a switch today, the light goes on because of coal. Almost half the power generated in Britain on Tuesday came from coal and a bit more than a third from natural gas. Nuclear power stations were contributing 17 per cent and windmills provided 0.6 per cent.... After all the politics, we are breathless as our bright new whirligigs stand motionless on a beach horizon.
The wind has failed, as it does during periods of intense heat and cold, and although we have built, with enormous subsidy, enough wind turbines to generate 5 per cent of our electricity, no more than 1 per cent is operational when we need it.... The reason why we are still stuffing black lumps of carbon into furnaces is simple: it makes economic sense and the financial markets are shouting this message louder than ever before.
Surely Nature operates on the same supply/demand laws that the economy does: it'll just produce more fisheries. Because poor people demand it.
Researchers examined the fisheries of 132 nations to determine which were the most vulnerable, based on the potential environmental impact of climate change, how dependent their economy and diet were on fisheries, and the capacity of the country to adapt.
Climate change can affect the temperature of inland lakes, the health of reefs and how nutrients circulate in the oceans, the researchers say.
They identified 33 countries as "highly vulnerable" to the effects of global warming on fisheries.
These countries produce 20 per cent of the world's fish exports and 22 are already classified by the UN as "least developed". Inhabitants of vulnerable countries are also more dependent on fish for protein -- 27 per cent of dietary protein is gained from fish, compared with 13 per cent in other countries. Two-thirds of the most vulnerable nations identified are in tropical Africa.
Oh. Only ten feet deep? Guess we didn't measure in that spot. Oh well.
Indonesia's Minister for the Environment has approved a decree that will allow the conversion of carbon-rich peatlands for oil palm plantations, reports The Jakarta Post.
Rachmat Witoelar said that oil palm plantations will only be established in areas where peat is less than 3 meters (10 feet) deep. Conversion will require an environmental impact analysis (Amdal).
"The conversion of peatlands is possible for certain criteria, but should be done very selectively," Rachmat told The Jakarta Post on Wednesday. "The conversion is strictly forbidden in [peatland] more than 3 meters deep." ... "Allowing the destruction of more peatlands is a disaster for the fight against climate change, and will only confirm Indonesia's status as the world's third biggest polluter," Greenpeace Southeast Asia forest campaigner Bustar Maitar told The Jakarta Post.
Sometimes, you suddenly realize you're wearing the ruby slippers.
If you live in Portland, your lights may now be partly powered by your drinking water. An ingenious new system captures energy as water flows through the city's pipes, creating hydropower without the negative environmental effects of something like a dam.
Small turbines in the pipes spin in the flowing water, and send that energy into a generator.
Most people in four Midwestern states would pay slightly higher utility bills to boost clean energy and energy efficiency, a poll has found.
The survey of 1,600 voters Jan. 9-15 found that 51 percent of people in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio were willing to pay up to $6 more per month on electric bills for energy conservation efforts and clean power sources like wind and solar.
February 20, 2009, from Michigan Technical University, via EurekAlert
I hope we can abandon hope. At least, I hope I think so. Or think I hope so.
Do you "hope" that everyone will see the light and start living more sustainably to save the environment? If so, you may be doing more harm than good.... For decades, say Vucetich and Nelson, we have been hammered by the ceaseless thunder of messages predicting imminent environmental cataclysm: global climate change, air and water pollution, destruction of wildlife habitat, holes in the ozone. The response of environmentalists—from Al Gore to Jane Goodall—to this persistent message of hopelessness has focused on the need to remain hopeful.
But hope may actually be counter-productive, Vucetich and Nelson suggest. "I have little reason to live sustainably if the only reason to do so is to hope for a sustainable future, because every other message I receive suggests that disaster is guaranteed," they explain.
People are hearing radically contradictory messages:
Scientists present evidence that profound environmental disaster is imminent.
It is urgent to live up to an extremely high standard of sustainable living.
The reason to live sustainably is that doing so gives hope for averting disaster.
Yet disaster is inevitable....
"Instead of hope, we need to provide young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective," they say. "We need to lift up examples of sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster."
Stephen Salter, professor of engineering design at the University Edinburgh, and Professor John Latham, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, have been using Salt Flares to test if it is possible to seed or even create Marine Stratocumulus Clouds.
These clouds, which are common, low-flying clouds, could help reflect the suns rays and therefore combat global warming.
Prof Salter said: "We need to make them reflect about 10 per cent more than they are reflecting now."
Prof Latham added: "We’ve got the most massive global problem that we’ve ever had, so we’ve got to think big."
The flares will spray up salt water into the clouds. When the particles rise into a cloud they redistribute the moisture, increasing its reflectivity.
As a result the cloud bounces more sunlight back into space.
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