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What A Week It Was: Apocadocuments from

View By Scenario:
Species Collapse:	(4)
Plague/Virus:	(2)
Climate Chaos:	(7)
Resource Depletion:	(3)
Biology Breach:	(6)
Recovery:	(5)

This Week's Top Ten Very Scary Tags:
oil issues ~ ecosystem interrelationships ~ global warming ~ toxic leak ~ habitat loss ~ contamination ~ carbon emissions ~ marine mammals ~ economic myopia ~ corporate malfeasance ~ hunting to extinction

ApocaDocuments (27) gathered this week:
Sun, Jun 20, 2010 from Scientific American: Oceans choking on CO2, face deadly changes: study The world's oceans are virtually choking on rising greenhouse gases, destroying marine ecosystems and breaking down the food chain -- irreversible changes that have not occurred for several million years, a new study says. The changes could have dire consequences for hundreds of millions of people around the globe who rely on oceans for their livelihoods. "It's as if the Earth has been smoking two packs of cigarettes a day", said the report's lead-author Australian marine scientist Professor Ove Hoegh-Guldberg. The Australia-U.S. report published in Science magazine on Friday, studied 10 years of marine research and found that climate change was causing major declines in marine ecosystems. Oceans were rapidly warming and acidifying, water circulation was being altered and dead zones within the ocean depths were expanding, said the report. There has also been a decline in major ocean ecosystems like kelp forests and coral reefs and the marine food chain was breaking down, with fewer and smaller fish and more frequent diseases and pests among marine organisms. ...	I've been told that the four out of five doctors smoke Chesterfields. ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, Jun 20, 2010 from AP: Tons of bushmeat smuggled into Paris, study finds The traders sell an array of bushmeat: monkey carcasses, smoked anteater, even preserved porcupine. But this isn't a roadside market in Africa -- it's the heart of Paris, where a new study has found more than five tons of bushmeat slips through the city's main airport each week. Experts suspect similar amounts are arriving in other European hubs as well -- an illegal trade that is raising concerns about diseases ranging from monkeypox to Ebola, and is another twist in the continent's struggle to integrate a growing African immigrant population.... For the study, European experts checked 29 Air France flights from Central and West Africa that landed at Paris' Roissy-Charles de Gaulle airport over a 17-day period in June 2008. Of 134 people searched, nine had bushmeat and 83 had livestock or fish. The people with bushmeat had the largest amounts: One passenger had 112 pounds (51 kilos) of bushmeat -- and no other luggage.... Experts found 11 types of bushmeat including monkeys, large rats, crocodiles, small antelopes and pangolins, or anteaters. Almost 40 percent were listed on the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. ...	MMmmmm... tastes like poulet! ApocaDoc permalink
Sun, Jun 20, 2010 from New York Times: BP Chief Draws Outrage for Watching Yacht Race BP officials on Saturday scrambled yet again to respond to another public relations challenge when their embattled chief executive, Tony Hayward, spent the day off the coast of England watching his yacht compete in one of the world's largest races.... On Friday, the chairman of the board of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg, told the British TV network Sky News that Mr. Hayward would be "now handing over" the daily operations in the gulf to Robert Dudley, an American who joined BP as part of its acquisition of Amoco a decade ago. On Saturday, BP tried to clarify what Mr. Svanberg had said about the transition of leadership in the gulf. "What he meant by 'now,'" Ms. Williams said, was that "there would be a transition over to Bob over a period of time." ...	Kinda like how the Gulf will be put back to rights "over a period of" maybe a couple centuries. ApocaDoc permalink
Sat, Jun 19, 2010 from University of Tennessee, via EurekAlert: Scientist links increase in greenhouse gases to changes in ocean currents By examining 800,000-year-old polar ice, scientists increasingly are learning how the climate has changed since the last ice melt and that carbon dioxide has become more abundant in the Earth's atmosphere. For two decades, French scientist Jérôme Chappellaz has been examining ice cores collected from deep inside the polar ice caps of Greenland and Antarctica. His studies on the interconnecting air spaces of old snow -- or firn air -- in the ice cores show that the roughly 40 percent increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere since the Earth's last deglaciation can be attributed in large part to changes in the circulation and biological activity of the oceanic waters surrounding Antarctica.... ...	Sweet! That means it's in large part not our fault, right? ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, Jun 18, 2010 from Associated Press: Gulf oil full of methane, adding new concerns It is an overlooked danger in the oil spill crisis: The crude gushing from the well contains vast amounts of natural gas that could pose a serious threat to the Gulf of Mexico's fragile ecosystem. The oil emanating from the seafloor contains about 40 percent methane, compared with about 5 percent found in typical oil deposits, said John Kessler, a Texas A&M University oceanographer who is studying the impact of methane from the spill. That means huge quantities of methane have entered the Gulf, scientists say, potentially suffocating marine life and creating "dead zones" where oxygen is so depleted that nothing lives. "This is the most vigorous methane eruption in modern human history," Kessler said. ...	In other words this is the most massive fart ever! ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, Jun 18, 2010 from Utrecht University via ScienceDaily: Climate Change Threatens Food Supply of 60 Million People in Asia According to an article by three Utrecht University researchers published in the journal Science on 11 June, climate change will drastically reduce the discharge of snow and ice meltwater in a region of the Himalayas, threatening the food security of more than 60 million people in Asia in the coming decades. The Indus and Brahmaputra basins are expected to be the most adversely affected, while in the Yellow River basin the availability of irrigation water will actually increase. ...	Doesn't McDonald's sooo feed that many folks in, like, ten minutes? ApocaDoc permalink
Fri, Jun 18, 2010 from CanWest News Service: Carbon emissions having harmful, lasting impact on oceans: Reports The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a disaster, but it may pale compared to what scientists say is brewing in the world's oceans due to everyday consumption of fossil fuels. The billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide sent wafting into the atmosphere each year through the burning of oil, gas and coal are profoundly affecting the oceans, says a series of reports published Friday in the journal Science... Marine scientists Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, at the University of Queensland in Australia, and John Bruno, at University of North Carolina, describe how the oceans act as a "heat sink" and are slowly heating up along with the atmosphere as greenhouse gas emissions climb. The warming, they say, is "likely to have profound influences on the strength, direction and behaviour" of major ocean currents and far-reaching impacts on sea life. ...	The surf is up a creek with a dissolving paddle. ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, Jun 17, 2010 from London Guardian: Cutting greenhouse gases will be no quick fix for our weather, scientists say Global warming will continue to bring havoc to the world's weather systems for decades after reductions are made in greenhouse gas emissions, a new study shows. Scientists at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter say climate change could bring greater disruption to the planet's water cycle than previously thought. The research suggests that increased floods and droughts could continue long after future efforts to stabilise temperature may succeed. ...	Creedence asks: "Who'll stop the rain?" ...looks like nobody! ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, Jun 17, 2010 from Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Loss of rain forest leads to malaria spike, UW researchers find Chopping down the rain forest can harm animals such as toucans, golden lion tamarind monkeys and poison dart frogs. Now, add another species to the list - humans. Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon can lead to malaria epidemics years later, according to a new study from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The findings are some of the most detailed yet to link environmental changes with the spread of disease. The work, published Wednesday in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases, combined malaria case reports with high-resolution satellite imagery from a remote, sparsely populated region of tropical Brazil about half the size of Rhode Island. For every square kilometer of forest cut down, the number of reported malaria cases spiked by 50 percent, the study found.....In a previous study, the team showed that the population of Anopheles darlingi, the species of mosquito that carries the disease, explodes after deforestation. ...	Oh my little darlingi! ApocaDoc permalink
Thu, Jun 17, 2010 from Los Angeles Times: Death by fire in the gulf ...When the weather is calm and the sea is placid, ships trailing fireproof booms corral the black oil, the coated seaweed and whatever may be caught in it, and torch it into hundred-foot flames, sending plumes of smoke skyward in ebony mushrooms. This patch of unmarked ocean gets designated over the radio as "the burn box." Wildlife researchers operating here, in the regions closest to the spill, are witnesses to a disquieting choice: Protecting shorebirds, delicate marshes and prime tourist beaches along the coast by stopping the oil before it moves ashore has meant the largely unseen sacrifice of some wildlife out at sea, poisoned with chemical dispersants and sometimes boiled by the burning of spilled oil on the water's surface. "It reflects the conventional wisdom of oil spills: If they just keep the oil out at sea, the harm will be minimal. And I disagree with that completely," said Blair Witherington, a research scientist with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission who has been part of the sea turtle rescue mission. ...	But the fires are so dramatic and pretty! ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, Jun 16, 2010 from CanWest News Service: Arctic bird poop loaded with environmental poisons, biologists say High Arctic seabirds carry a "cocktail" of contaminants, confirms new research, which analyzed the excrement of Arctic terns and eiders nesting on a small island north of Resolute Bay. The seabirds' cocktail is not a particularly healthy mix for the birds or the land they nest on, a team of biologists from the Canadian Wildlife Service and Queen's University in Kingston, Ont., determined. That's because, in addition to pesticides, the seabirds are loaded with heavy metals such as cadmium and lead, which they pick up from the foods they eat. ...	The sky (crap) is falling! ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, Jun 16, 2010 from Christian Science Monitor: Oil spill could be Gulf's biggest ever, new flow estimate suggests BP's Deepwater Horizon blowout is spewing between 35,000 and 60,000 barrels a day, with up to 18,000 barrels currently being captured, according to a fresh estimate released this afternoon by the National Incident Command's flow-rate technical group. The new number is a revision -- and a significant increase -- of the estimate released last week, which pegged the flow rate at 20,000 to 40,000 barrels (840,000 to 1.68 million gallons) a day...By these new figures, the Deepwater Horizon blowout might have pumped as much as 2.7 million barrels into the Gulf. ...	There's probably some algorithm for taking these under-estimates and turning them into truth. ApocaDoc permalink
Wed, Jun 16, 2010 from Associated Press: Alaska state official objects to polar bear plan The federal plan for designating more than 187,000 square miles as polar bear critical habitat is too large and will lead to huge, unnecessary costs for Alaska's petroleum industry, opponents of the proposal told the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Tuesday night. Critical habitat by definition is the area that contains features essential to the conservation of the species, said Doug Vincent-Lang, endangered species coordinator for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game... The Endangered Species Act requires protections to be balanced against their costs, Vincent-Lang said. The additional protection for bears was minimal but the costs for people were huge, he said. ...	Easy for YOU to say, human. ApocaDoc permalink
Want more context? Try reading our book FREE online: Humoring the Horror of the Converging Emergencies! More fun than a barrel of jellyfish!
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Scientific American: Terror in a Vial When it comes to countering the threat of biological weapons, most governments, including that of the U.S., are still mired in a decades-old nuclear-arms model geared toward preventing hostile nations from acquiring closely guarded weapons-making materials. It is an approach unsuited to the modern reality wherein nonstate actors are more likely than states to use biological warfare agents and the growth of biotechnology is only making those weapons easier to come by. Security experts have long warned that would-be terrorists no longer need to steal deadly pathogens when commonplace genetic engineering techniques could turn a benign microbe into a killer or synthetic biology tools might be used to build a virus from scratch.... Ken Coleman and Raymond A. Zilinskas point to a proliferation of international counterfeiters cashing in on the craze for the wrinkle-smoothing drug Botox, whose active ingredient botulinum neurotoxin is one of the deadliest poisons on earth. Many of the sales take place through Web sites, and most of the counterfeits contain real toxin, meaning that basement brewers may already be cultivating lethal toxin-making bacteria to satisfy avid consumer demand. The authors ask, What is to stop those criminals from simply selling pure toxin to terrorists instead? In fact, what is to stop terrorists themselves from getting into the bootleg Botox business, for profit and easy access to toxin? ...	Hey, I've been ingesting BPA, pthalates, and heavy metals all my life. Think I'm afraid of a little Botox? ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Politico: Henry Waxman puts Big Oil on trial Henry Waxman's war on Big Oil has begun. The California Democrat, along with Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), will force top oil executives to defend or condemn industry practices and profits, according to series of pre-hearing questions obtained by POLITICO, foreshadowing an intense, made-for-TV hearing Tuesday that could create an iconic Washington moment for the petroleum industry... BP may be first in the line of fire, but experts said the whole industry will be on trial Tuesday. Executives from BP, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, Shell and Chevron are scheduled to testify. ...	The Waxman Cometh! ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from AP, via PhysOrg: Japan may quit whaling commission if ban stays put Japan is considering withdrawing from the International Whaling Commission if no progress is made toward easing an international ban on commercial whaling, its fisheries minister said Tuesday.... The proposal to allow commercial whaling has drawn criticism from all sides and drawn fresh attention to the whaling issue. The foreign minister of New Zealand and Australia's environment minister are due to attend next week's meeting.... Japan's whaling program includes large-scale scientific expeditions to the Antarctic, while other whaling countries mostly stay along their coasts. Opponents call Japan's scientific research hunts a cover for commercial whaling. ...	If you won't play by my rules, I'll take my scientific cetaceacide and go home. ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from New York Times: Efforts to Repel Gulf Oil Spill Are Described as Chaotic ...For much of the last two months, the focus of the response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been a mile underwater, 50 miles from shore, where successive efforts involving containment domes, "top kills" and "junk shots" have failed, and a "spillcam" shows tens of thousands of barrels of oil hemorrhaging into the gulf each day. Closer to shore, the efforts to keep the oil away from land have not fared much better, despite a response effort involving thousands of boats, tens of thousands of workers and millions of feet of containment boom. From the beginning, the effort has been bedeviled by a lack of preparation, organization, urgency and clear lines of authority among federal, state and local officials, as well as BP. As a result, officials and experts say, the damage to the coastline and wildlife has been worse than it might have been if the response had been faster and orchestrated more effectively. ...	Somehow I think our response to the Apocalypse will be similarly disorganized. ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Seattle PI, via DesdemonaDespair: 'Surprisingly large amount of microplastics in the environment' While scientists have documented the effects of large plastic flotsam in the oceans for decades - turtles trapped in fishing nets, albatrosses swallowing plastic cigarette lighters - very little research has focused on what happens when those bigger pieces break down into tiny specks, called microplastics.... Baker said microscopic fragments are floating in the ocean and washing up on shores, but the exact consequences for marine organisms are still unknown. His project is developing methods to measure how much microplastics are in seawater and sediments, as a first step to answering those questions. They're sampling the waters of Puget Sound and using citizen scientists to help collect plastics that wash up on beaches.... "What's the impact? Frankly, we have no idea," said Baker, science director of the new Center for Urban Waters in Tacoma. "The one thing we know for sure is that it doesn't break down." ...	If they don't break down, Mr. SmartyPants, then how did they become microplastics? ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Mongabay: Indonesian government's promise up in smoke: fires rise by 59 percent The Indonesian government failed to live up to its promises to reduce fires across the tropical nation last year. Instead a 2009 State Environment Report showed a 59 percent rise of fire hotspots from 19,192 in 2008 to 32,416 last year, as reported by The Jakarta Post. Officials say land clearing was the primary cause of the fire increase in the tropical nation. Unlike temperate forest, rainforests rarely burn naturally. "Illegal land clearing with fires by local people in Kalimantan and Sumatra is still rampant," Heddy Mukna, deputy assistant for forest and land management at the Environment Ministry told The Jakarta Post. The state of Kalimantan on the island of Borneo saw fires triple in some areas from 2008 to 2009. Haze blanketed much of the island last year during the 'burning season'. ...	At least this way the land'll be useful. ApocaDoc permalink
Tue, Jun 15, 2010 from Cape Cod Times, from DesdemonaDespair: Cape lobster industry faces crisis In what could be the first major economic blow to local fisheries pinned on global warming, regulators are contemplating shutting down the lobster industry from Buzzards Bay to Long Island Sound for five years due to a drastic population drop brought on by temperature changes of just a few degrees in inshore waters. Lobstermen south of Cape Cod have seen their catches nosedive for the past decade, from more than 20 million pounds in 1997 to less than 5 million last year. In the past, overfishing, water pollution, pesticides and an outbreak of shell disease were blamed for the failure of the fishery. But tough fishing regulations have done nothing to reverse the trend, and some scientists now believe water temperature may be the primary obstacle to recovery.... It's called trophic shift -- when the environment changes so dramatically that the least tolerant resident species move out, and ones more adapted to live under those new conditions move in. ...	It's not just the lobsters that are in hot water! ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from Science: What the Gulf Disaster Could Tell Us About Sudden Global Warming Oceanographer John Kessler of Texas A&M University, College Station, and his colleagues have been awarded a grant by the National Science Foundation for a research cruise on the R/V Cape Hatteras, to measure concentrations of methane gas. Methane makes up about 40 percent by mass of what's spewing out of the well, according to measurements by BP.... But the burst well has also become an unlikely scientific windfall for Kessler, who studies natural methane seeps and their link to rapid climate change.... "Knowing if it's 1 percent or 90 percent that makes it out to the atmosphere will be a very big discovery for us," says Kessler. If the methane stays dissolved, it could trigger a feeding frenzy among microbes, he says. Their consumption of oxygen could create hypoxic zones and have "a serious influence on biodiversity at those times as well,"... Given the disaster unfolding in the gulf, says Kessler, "if we can make a little lemonade out of the lemons we've been given, then at least maybe some good will come of this." ...	I'm not sure I'd call methane plumes "lemonade." ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from Science News: Operation Icewatch 2010 gears up ...June is the time when polar scientists start to scrutinize in earnest how much ice will be left atop the Arctic Ocean after this year's summer melt season. The National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., reported this week that ice extent -- a measure of total ice-covered area, including some gaps in the ice -- was, at the end of May, close to the lowest ever recorded for that time of year...there's no denying the remarkable overall decline of Arctic ice cover since satellite observations began in 1979. ...	It may be melting because we're paying attention to it!. ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from National Geographic News: Ecuador Puts a Price Tag on Untapped Oil In the coming weeks, Ecuador aims to sign a unique agreement to forgo drilling for oil in a huge plot of this rain forest in exchange for money. The idea is that contributions from industrialized nations and, potentially, from corporations would make up for the badly needed petroleum revenue that the South American nation would lose by keeping the fossil fuel underground....If it comes together, some hope that the so-called YasunÃ-ITT Initiative -- named for the area's Ishpingo, Tiputini, and Tambococha oil fields --could be a model for combating global warming. ...	And they can pay me to cheer about it! ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from SciDev.net: Low-cost solar solution could empower off-grid poor A low-cost, plastic solar lamp could provide affordable lighting for millions living in rural off-grid areas across Africa. The lamp is made from polymer solar cells and although it is not as efficient as similar technologies, it could prove more affordable, according to its developers.... Several versions of the lamp are under development, following trials on a prototype in Zambia in 2009. One, a pocket-sized torch that could be used for night-time navigation, is ready to be rolled out commercially and Krebs is confident that it could be produced for as little as 3 Euros (around US$4). He suggested that 'microfinance' schemes, where people collaborate to buy a lamp which they can share, would be useful for people who cannot afford this initial outlay.... Solar lighting is an important alternative to the kerosene lamps currently used in off-grid developing areas, said David Battley from charity SolarAid, based in the United Kingdom, which promotes the use of solar energy to help reduce global poverty and climate change. ...	This is dangerous. Before you know it, Africans are going to think "solar is the answer." ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from New York Times: U.S. Identifies Vast Riches of Minerals in Afghanistan The United States has discovered nearly $1 trillion in untapped mineral deposits in Afghanistan, far beyond any previously known reserves and enough to fundamentally alter the Afghan economy and perhaps the Afghan war itself, according to senior American government officials. The previously unknown deposits -- including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium -- are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the "Saudi Arabia of lithium," a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries.... The vast scale of Afghanistan's mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.... The corruption that is already rampant in the Karzai government could also be amplified by the new wealth, particularly if a handful of well-connected oligarchs, some with personal ties to the president, gain control of the resources. Just last year, Afghanistan's minister of mines was accused by American officials of accepting a $30 million bribe to award China the rights to develop its copper mine. The minister has since been replaced. ...	See? Whenever we need something, Nature provides. ApocaDoc permalink
Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from New York Times: Twilight of the Coal Era? On Monday, Siemens is announcing [pdf] that it has won contracts to supply five new high-efficiency gas plants to Progress Energy at two sites in North Carolina that have old coal-fired generators. The H.F. Lee Energy Complex, near Goldsboro, has three coal-fired generators that began operating in 1951, 1952 and 1962. The three coal-fired generators at the Sutton plant, near Wilmington, went into service in 1954, 1955 and 1972. The six plants are among 11 that Progress owns in North Carolina that do not have sulfur scrubbers. The company has said it will eventually close all 11. "I think they came to the conclusion with all the uncertainty, and the likelihood that the rules for pollutants like mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides will be further tightened, it's not worth spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the back end" of an old power plant, Mr. Zwirn said. What is more, he said, in the decades that a new plant would run, there is a possibility that restrictions will be imposed on carbon dioxide emissions. Per kilowatt-hour generated, the new gas-fired generators will reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 60 percent and nitrogen oxides by 95 percent from levels produced by their coal-fired predecessors. Nearly 100 percent of sulfur dioxides will be eliminated, and all of the mercury, Siemens said. ...	Don't forget that Twilight is a story about undead vampires. ApocaDoc permalink
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Mon, Jun 14, 2010 from New Scientist: Extreme tactics in the battle to resume whaling Japan's tactics in attempting to overturn the ban on commercial whaling have come under fresh scrutiny following an undercover investigation by UK newspaper The Sunday Times. Opponents of whaling have long accused Japan of offering foreign aid to small, poor countries if they joined the International Whaling Commission (IWC) and vote to resume whaling. But hard evidence of Japan's tactics have not been documented until now. The Sunday Times used undercover reporters, posing as representatives of a billionaire conservationist, to approach officials from pro-whaling countries. They offered them aid packages in exchange for their votes.... According to the newspaper, senior fisheries officials for the Marshall Islands and Kiribati said their vote at the IWC was dependent on the funds that Japan gave them. In a commentary, The Sunday Times wrote that Japan "systemically" recruits these small countries - who have little or no direct interest in whaling - onto the IWC. Japanese officials deny all of the allegations, and according to The Sunday Times "insists it is a coincidence that the countries it targets with overseas aid happen to be voting members of the IWC". ...	Bribery is just part of the "scientific exploration" of whaling. ApocaDoc permalink