Biology
Breach
August 8, 2011, from TreeHugger
We've covered before the horrible consequences of constantly given factory farm animals antibiotics so they don't get sick in the sickening conditions we make them live. And recently the USDA commissioned a report reviewing the current research on antibiotics, antibiotic resistant infections and farm animals. The report was pretty damning of current industry practices, as Tom Philpott summarizes over at Mother Jones.
Perhaps even more disturbing, though, is that the document has since disappeared from the USDA website, apparently after the findings upset industry, and the report's author seems to have been prevented from talking to media.
Have no fear, there's a cached version: A Focus on Antimicrobial Resistance....
August 8, 2009, from University of Hawaii, via ScienceDaily
Since the beginning of the industrial age, CO2-driven acidification of the surface oceans has already caused a 0.1 unit lowering of pH, and models suggest that another 0.3 pH unit drop by the year 2050 is likely. Continued acidification of the sea may have a host of negative impacts on marine biota, and has the potential to alter the rates of ocean biogeochemical processes.
Despite the global environmental importance of ocean acidification, there are few studies of sufficient duration, accuracy and sampling intensity to document the rate of change of ocean pH and shed light on the factors controlling its variability.... [However,] Dore, along with SOEST co-authors Karl, Lukas, Matt Church and Dan Sadler, found that over the two decades of observation, the surface ocean grew more acidic at exactly the rate expected from chemical equilibration with the atmosphere. However, that rate of change varied considerably on seasonal and inter-annual timescales, and even reversed for one period of nearly five years. The year-to-year changes appear to be driven by climate-induced changes in ocean mixing and attendant biological responses to mixing events.
August 8, 2009, from Mother Jones
In 2004, Renee Dufault, an environmental health researcher at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), stumbled upon an obscure Environmental Protection Agency report on chemical plants' mercury emissions. Some chemical companies, she learned, make lye by pumping salt through large vats of mercury. Since lye is a key ingredient in making HFCS (it's used to separate corn starch from the kernel), Dufault wondered if mercury might be getting into the ubiquitous sweetener that makes up 1 out of every 10 calories Americans eat.... The corn-syrup industry claims that no HFCS manufacturers currently use mercury-grade lye, though it concedes some used to. (According to the EPA, four plants still use the technology.) It says that its own tests found no traces of mercury in HFCS samples from US manufacturers, including a number of samples from some of the same sources Dufault tested. But hundreds of foreign plants still use mercury to make lye -- which may then be used to make foods for export. Already, 11 percent of the sweeteners and candy on the US market are imported.... [A] report issued by the Minnesota-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy ... found low levels of mercury in 16 common food products, including certain brands of kid-favored foods, like grape jelly and chocolate milk.
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Climate
Chaos
August 8, 2012, from CNN
The July heat wave that wilted crops, shriveled rivers and fueled wildfires officially went into the books Wednesday as the hottest single month on record for the continental United States.
The average temperature across the Lower 48 was 77.6 degrees Fahrenheit, 3.3 degrees above the 20th-century average, the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration reported. That edged out the previous high mark, set in 1936, by two-tenths of a degree, NOAA said.
U.S. forecasters started keeping records in 1895. The seven months of 2012 to date are the warmest of any year on record and were drier than average as well, NOAA said.
August 8, 2012, from Washington Post
... The deluge, the worst since 2009 when hundreds died in rampaging flash floods, was set off by the seasonal monsoon that overflowed major dams and rivers in Manila and surrounding provinces.
The capital and other parts of the country already were saturated from last week's Typhoon Saola, which battered Manila and the north for several days before blowing away Friday. That storm was responsible for at least 53 deaths.
"It's like a water world," said Benito Ramos, head of the government's disaster response agency. He said the rains flooded 50 percent of metropolitan Manila on Monday evening, and about 30 percent remained under waist- or neck-deep waters Tuesday.
August 8, 2011, from DesdemonaDespair
Yes, in a mere two weeks, another 30 percent of [Oklahoma] went into extreme or exceptional drought! Now the entire state is under severe drought or worse.
For some reason, science-denying southern Republican governors keep returning to one particular ineffectual 'adaptation' strategy: "Texas Drought Now Far, Far Worse Than When Gov. Rick Perry Issued Proclamation Calling on All Texans to Pray for Rain" (7/15/11)....
Of course, we don't really have any short-term strategies to address extreme weather. In the longer term, prayer would appear to be a non-optimal approach, given Texas's and Oklahoma's experience.
"The percent of contiguous U.S. land area experiencing exceptional drought in July reached the highest levels in the history of the U.S. Drought Monitor, an official at the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln said."
Sharply reducing greenhouse gas emissions, however, would seem our best hope of sharply reducing the prospects that the Southwest becomes a permanent dust bowl. It also has the benefit of science underpinning it....
[Take a look at this amazing animation of the last 12 weeks, by the US Drought Monitor: http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/12_week.gif -- 'Doc M]
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Resource
Depletion
August 8, 2011, from Earth Institute
Just what is a safe operating space for human civilization?
Twenty-eight scientists from around the world defined a "safe planetary operating space" circumscribed by 9 planetary boundaries within which humanity can continue to thrive and develop. The 2009 report by the group led by Johan Rockström, Director of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, examined the non-negotiable planetary conditions that humanity needs to respect and maintain in order to avoid catastrophic environmental changes....
While scientists have warned of specific environmental tipping points in the past, the 9 planetary boundaries concept looks at the global system as a whole and how separate biophysical processes interact. One of the report authors, Jonathan Foley, Director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, likened man's ignorance of the planetary gestalt to driving full speed at night over a mesa without lights or a map. We know the cliffs are out there, but we don't know where. The 9 planetary boundaries are an attempt to create that much needed map....
Human beings have already crossed the boundaries for climate change, biodiversity loss, and interference with the nitrogen cycle; and we are fast approaching the boundaries for freshwater use, land use changes, ocean acidification, and interference with the global phosphorus cycle.
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Recovery
August 8, 2014, from Guardian
... The trade in shark fins, a symbol of wealth in China and other parts of Asia, has led to the decline in some shark populations by up to 98 percent in the last 15 years. An estimated 100 million sharks are killed each year with up to 73 million used for their fins.
China became the world's largest market for shark fin due to its rising wealth and desire for luxury goods. However, sales of shark fin have fallen from 50-70 percent, according to a report by WildAid, a US-based organisation focusing on reducing demand for wildlife products.
According to data collected by WildAid, sales of shark fin in Guangzhou, considered to be the centre of the shark fin trade in China, have dropped by 82 percent. The report complied data from a number of different sources including news reports, online surveys, undercover interviews with traders in China and trade statistics from Hong Kong, once considered to be the global hub for trade in shark fin....
“The more people learn about the consequences of eating shark fin soup, the less they want to participate in the trade,” said Knights.
Pressure from conservationists has also influenced big businesses. A number of large hotel chains have stopped serving shark fin soup and more than 20 airlines have agreed not to transport it.
Last year, it was reported that the owners of factories that process sharks in Puqi, a seaside town in Zhejiang province blamed such awareness campaigns for a drop in their business.
August 8, 2014, from The Register-Guard
The Eugene City Council voted Monday to put some teeth into previously approved goals to reduce the city's fossil fuel use and carbon emissions.
The so-called "climate recovery ordinance," which passed on a 6-2 vote, seeks to cut communitywide fossil fuel use by 50 percent by 2030, compared with 2010 usage.
It also calls for city government operations to be entirely "carbon neutral" by 2020, either by reducing its own greenhouse gas emissions or by funding local emission reduction projects.... Mayor Kitty Piercy responded that "science" was the motivation for the ordinance.
"What's the cost of not doing something?" she asked.
August 8, 2011, from AlterNet
A new book called Deep Green Resistance, by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen, says that we likely won't have enough people interested in saving the planet before we run out of time. So, they're calling for a change in strategy. You may know Jensen from his many books, including Endgame. McBay is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparing for Life After Gridcrash, and Keith is the author of The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability. The three longtime activists have teamed up to offer a more radical approach to our environmental crisis....
Each day 200 species go extinct, Jensen writes in the preface. And if you can't wrap your head around that number, how about "90 percent of the large fish in the ocean are gone, there is ten times as much plastic as phytoplankton in the oceans, 97 percent of native forests are destroyed, 98 percent of native grasslands are destroyed..." and Jensen continues with the bad news from there....
And so how do we save the world (and along with it ourselves)? Well, naturally we take down industrial civilization, they say....
"Every cell in my body wants there to be a voluntary transition to a sustainable way of living, but I'm not going to base the future of the planet on that anymore than I am going to base it on unicorns jumping over the moon and farting pixie dust. It is just not going to happen. Those in power are insatiable. They are insane. They care more for increasing power and making money than life on the planet. I can't bear to live in a world being murdered, and I can't understand how anyone who even remotely considers themselves a living being can not oppose this with every bit of energy that they have, through whatever means are necessary to save life on the planet. I don't understand why it is even controversial to talk about dismantling industrial civilization when it has shown itself for 6,000 years to be destroying the planet and to be systemically committing genocide. I mean this is not even a new idea."
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