Biology
Breach
December 10, 2012, from NPR
A report that shed favorable light on fracking is at the center of a controversy at the University of Texas ... The author of the study, Dr. Charles Groat, retired in the wake of the scathing review ... The original fracking study concluded that hydraulic fracturing was safe, the danger of water contamination low and suggestions to the contrary mostly media bias. But then it was reported this summer that Professor Groat sat on the board of a natural gas drilling company and received more than a million and a half dollars in compensation. That information was not disclosed in Groat's report.
December 10, 2012, from INFORUM
Jacki Schilke likes to say her black angus cattle live in harmony with the cats and dogs on her rural Williston ranch.
But recently, Schilke's ranch has not been in harmony with oil development expanding around her 160 acres.
Five cows, one bull, two dogs and as many as two dozen farm cats have died in the past two years, and Schilke worries the dozens of oil wells within three miles of her ranch could be to blame....They had four cattle that lost the ends of their tails before they either died or were shot by her husband to end their suffering.
December 10, 2012, from Midwest Energy News
Each year, tanker trucks carrying fracking fluid or fracking wastewater log hundreds of miles on Ohio's rural roads. What if one crashes into a car and tips, injuring and spilling fracking fluid on the car's passenger? ... Would doctors treating the accident victims know what they'd been exposed to?
Under a 2012 Ohio fracking law, maybe not, says Melissa English, development director of Ohio Citizen Action, a Columbus-based ratepayer and environmental advocacy group (and a member of RE-AMP, which publishes Midwest Energy News).
English is among a group of environmentalists and health professionals who say the law makes it nearly impossible for doctors, nurses and emergency medical technicians to get the chemical information they need in time to protect patients.
December 10, 2012, from Food safety news
Enough beef to feed one million Americans for a year has been imported from Brazil without the bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) mitigations that are supposed to be applied to countries where BSE is known to exist.
That's because for the past two years, USDA was operating under the assumption that Brazil had not experienced any BSE, or Mad Cow disease as it's commonly known. But Brazil -- the world's biggest beef exporting country -- was keeping a secret for the past two years. A secret that if known might well have seen its beef banned from the U.S., or at the very least, subjected its beef to BSE controls.
That's because while the U.S. was importing 67 million pounds of beef from Brazil, South America's biggest country was keeping a Mad Cow secret.
December 10, 2009, from PNAS Special Feature
The Earth System (ES) is defined
as the conglomerate
formed by human civilization
and its planetary matrix (i.e.,
all parts of the Earth that interact with
the members and manifestations of our
species)...
Only singular transformations
(that remove, add, or replace constitutive
traits) are able to create entirely
new characters.... but what about
the monsoon systems, jet streams, coral
mega-reefs, tropical rainforests, and
iconic landscapes of the Holocene if the
[Global Mean Temperature] rises by two, three, four, or more
degrees? When answering these quintessential
questions, it is natural to search
for the most vulnerable ES components,
i.e., those characteristic features that
will be switched (out) first and (possibly)
irreversibly as the planet warms.
These features are the so-called tipping
elements (TE)...
|
Climate
Chaos
December 10, 2014, from Associated Press
Heat-trapping pollution released into the atmosphere from rising exports of U.S. gasoline and diesel dwarfs the cuts made from fuel efficiency standards and other efforts to reduce global warming in the United States, according to a new Associated Press investigation.
Under President Barack Obama, the U.S. has reduced more carbon pollution from energy than any other nation, about 475 million tons between 2008 and 2013, according to U.S. Energy Department data. Less than one-fifth of that amount came from burning less gasoline and diesel fuel.
Yet the U.S. is sending more fuel than ever to other parts of the world, where efforts to address resulting pollution are just getting underway, if advancing at all. U.S. exports of gasoline and diesel released roughly 1 billion tons of carbon pollution into the atmosphere elsewhere during the same period, according to AP's analysis.
This fossil fuel trade has helped President Barack Obama meet political goals to curb carbon dioxide at home, by taking it off America's pollution balance sheet. But that does not necessarily help the planet.
December 10, 2014, from Reuters, via HuffingtonPost
Some of the millions of abandoned oil and natural gas wells in the United States are still spewing methane, marking a potentially large source of unrecorded greenhouse gas emissions, according to a study released on Monday.
Researchers at Princeton University measured emissions from dozens of abandoned wells in Pennsylvania in 2013 and 2014 and found they were emitting an average of 0.27 kg (0.6 lbs) of methane per day, according to the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"These measurements show that methane emissions from abandoned oil and gas wells can be significant," according to the study. "The research required to quantify these emissions nationally should be undertaken so they can be accurately described and included in greenhouse gas emissions inventories."
December 10, 2012, from Los Angeles Times
... One of the hidden costs of solar and wind power -- and a problem the state is not yet prepared to meet -- is that wind and solar energy must be backed up by other sources, typically gas-fired generators. As more solar and wind energy generators come online, fulfilling a legal mandate to produce one-third of California's electricity by 2020, the demand will rise for more backup power from fossil fuel plants.
December 10, 2012, from New York Times
The death rate of many of the biggest and oldest trees around the world is increasing rapidly, scientists report in a new study in Friday's issue of the journal Science. They warned that research to understand and stem the loss of the trees is urgently needed... The research team found that big, old trees are dying at an alarmingly fast clip around the world at all latitudes -- Yosemite National Park in California, the African savanna, the Brazilian rain forest, Europe and the boreal forests around the world.
December 10, 2012, from International Herald Tribune
...the Doha summit was almost politics as usual. It did take 24 hours of overtime, but the Doha Climate Gateway was finally approved Saturday. The agreement extends the Kyoto Protocol until 2020, when a more global emissions reduction agreement is to take effect.... Though the new, tougher and more inclusive treaty will be under negotiation until 2015, environmentalists warn that any deal that goes into effect in 2020 comes too late.... The American news media reported little on the climate talks, compared with Europe. That may be in part, as my colleague John Broder reports: "It has long been evident that the United Nations talks were at best a partial solution to the planetary climate change problem, and at worst an expensive sideshow...["]
December 10, 2009, from UPenn, via EurekAlert
An international team of environmental scientists led by the University of Pennsylvania has shown that sea-level rise along the Atlantic Coast of the United States was 2 millimeters faster in the 20th century than at any time in the past 4,000 years.... Researchers corrected relative sea-level data from tide gauges using the coastal-subsidence values. Results clearly show that the 20th-century rate of sea-level rise is 2 millimeters higher than the background rate of the past 4,000 years. Furthermore, the magnitude of the sea-level rise increases in a southerly direction from Maine to South Carolina. This is the first demonstrated evidence of this phenomenon from observational data alone. Researchers believe this may be related to the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and ocean thermal expansion.
December 10, 2009, from CGIAR, via EurekAlert
Disagreement over what constitutes a forest could undermine an agreement to protect forests, which is expected to be one of the bright spots at the UN climate change meeting in Copenhagen, according to an analysis by the Alternatives to Slash and Burn (ASB) Partnership for Tropical Forest Margins.... "Countries can clear massive amounts of forest and still claim that deforestation had not occurred," said Peter A Minang, ASB Global Coordinator, who has extensive experience working with the REDD initiative. For example, replacement of tropical rainforests by oil palm plantations in Southeast Asia would not be considered 'deforestation' because the plantations meet the definition of a forest. Lands that have been clear cut or burned, but which remain under control of forest institutions, are also still considered forest.
|
Resource
Depletion
|
Recovery
December 10, 2014, from London Independent
Organic farming is much more productive than previously thought, according to a new analysis of agricultural studies that challenges the conventional "biased" view that pesticide-free agriculture cannot feed the world.
The study says that organic yields were only 19.2 per cent lower, on average, than those from conventional crops and that this gap could be reduced to just eight per cent if the pesticide-free crops were rotated more frequently.
Furthermore, in some crops - especially leguminous plants such as beans, peas and lentils - there were no significant differences in yields, the researchers from the University of California, Berkeley found.
December 10, 2012, from Sacramento Bee
A 55-meter wind turbine soon will be generating half of the power needed to operate Superior Farms' Dixon food processing plant, the company announced.
The 1-megawatt turbine is expected to go online around the first of the year.
Company officials said it speaks to their green credentials. "We are committed at every facet of our business to sustainability," said Ed Jenks, CEO for Superior Farms.
December 10, 2009, from UCLA, via EurekAlert
In a new approach, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have genetically modified a cyanobacterium to consume carbon dioxide and produce the liquid fuel isobutanol, which holds great potential as a gasoline alternative. The reaction is powered directly by energy from sunlight, through photosynthesis.... This new method has two advantages for the long-term, global-scale goal of achieving a cleaner and greener energy economy, the researchers say. First, it recycles carbon dioxide, reducing greenhouse gas emissions resulting from the burning of fossil fuels. Second, it uses solar energy to convert the carbon dioxide into a liquid fuel that can be used in the existing energy infrastructure, including in most automobiles.
|
ApocaDocs