Biology
Breach
October 15, 2013, from Los Angeles Times
National parks from the Sierra Nevada to the Great Smoky Mountains are increasingly being fertilized by unwanted nutrients drifting through the air from agricultural operations, putting some of the country's most treasured natural landscapes at risk of ecological damage, a new study has found.
Thirty-eight of 45 national parks examined by scientists are receiving doses of nitrogen at or above a critical threshold that can harm sensitive ecosystems, such as lichens, hardwood forests or tallgrass prairie, scientists found...
Scientists looked at nitrogen oxides and ammonia that are released by vehicles, power plants and farms and carried on air currents into national parks, including those in some of the most remote areas of the West.
October 15, 2009, from Agence France-Presse
Swiss researchers have found that Alpine glaciers melting under the impact of climate change are releasing highly toxic pollutants that had been absorbed by the ice for decades.
They warned in a study abstract published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology that it could have a "dire environmental impact" on "pristine mountain areas" as global warming accelerates.
Much of the pollution was dumped on Europe's biggest mountain range by atmospheric currents from further afield, according to the researchers at three Swiss scientific institutes.
|
Climate
Chaos
October 15, 2013, from Sydney Daily Telegraph
THE ocean current off the coast of Australia made famous in Finding Nemo has moved 350km south and is accelerating toward the pole, a draft international climate change report has found.
And with it so too are moving some species of shark and large fish such as Tuna, it has warned.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's second and yet to be released report into the impact of climate change has claimed average climate zones in Australia have already shifted 200km southward along the north east coast.
October 15, 2013, from Associated Press
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to decide whether to block key aspects of the Obama administration's plan aimed at cutting power plant and factory emissions of gases blamed for global warming.
The justices said they will review a unanimous federal appeals court ruling that upheld the government's unprecedented regulation of carbon dioxide and five other heat-trapping gases.
The question in the case is whether the Environmental Protection Agency's authority to regulate automobile emissions of greenhouses gases as air pollutants, which stemmed from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling, also applies to power plants and factories.
October 15, 2013, from Yes! Magazine
The Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity has removed coal-related educational sections from its website, less than two weeks after the launch of a grassroots campaign demanding that the pages be taken down.
The website sections were supposed to educate children about energy, but had been widely denounced because they focused on misleading pro-coal messages.
It wasn't just environmentalists who objected to the way Illinois was talking about coal to kids. Last month, a state-commissioned evaluation of the Illinois coal education program determined that the curriculum, including the website, was "biased towards a positive image of coal."
October 15, 2013, from The Hill
An environmental group is pressing four large newspapers to follow The Los Angeles Times by refusing to print letters denying that humans are causing climate change.
The Times revealed its policy in a recent editor's note that declares: "Letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed."
October 15, 2012, from Climate Central
According to data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the globe recorded its warmest September on record, tying with 2005 for the title. Global surface temperature records stretch all the way back to 1880. September marked the 331st straight month with above-average temperatures, and the 36th straight September with a global temperature above the 20th-century average.
October 15, 2012, from EcoWatch
A new report1 on shale resources and hydraulic fracturing from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) -- an independent, nonpartisan agency that works for Congress -- concludes that fracking poses serious risks to health and the environment. The report, which reviewed studies from state agencies overseeing fracking as well as scientific reports, found that the extent of the risks has not yet been fully quantified and that there are many unanswered questions and a lack of scientific data.
Major reports and studies were also released in Europe the past two months, all of which came to the conclusion that fracking poses serious risks to water, public health, and the environment, and that additional scientific study is necessary. Meanwhile, in NY hundreds of doctors, scientists, and medical organizations have renewed calls for an independent, comprehensive health impact assessment and additional scientific research.
October 15, 2009, from Toronto Globe and Mail
Tim Flannery, the well-known Australian environmentalist, was on CBC Radio the other day to issue more alarms about global warming. He was more pessimistic than ever. "It's now or never," he said. "We have about 20 years to address climate change or else our entire future is in jeopardy." He painted an apocalyptic picture of drought, flooding, famine and war. But global warming -- or rather, the massive action demanded to address it -- has become a tougher sell... Why are people cooling on warming? One reason is surely the apocalyptic language of Mr. Flannery and others. When they say we are doomed unless we radically change our way of life by the end of next week, people figure the problem is exaggerated -- or else far too big to fix. They're being "stunned into inaction," said Nigel Winser of Earthwatch.
October 15, 2009, from Environmental Science and Technology
With a handful of weeks remaining before the climate convention meeting in Copenhagen, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) has released an updated summary of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The report, Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, warns that many predictions that were at the upper ranges of 2007 IPCC forecasts are increasingly likely, and some events that were seen previously as probable over the long term are on the verge of occurring or are occurring already. "The pace and the scale of climate change is accelerating, along with the confidence among researchers in their forecasts," UNEP Director Achim Steiner states in the document.
The analysis incorporates results from more than 400 major studies published since 2007 and addresses impacts on Earth systems, glaciers and ice sheets, oceans, and ecosystems. Increasingly, scientists are framing some of these transformations as "commitments"--inevitabilities that will play out even after the climate stabilizes.
October 15, 2009, from NOAA, via DesdemonaDespair
Sea surface temperatures (SST) during August 2009 were warmer than average across much of the world's oceans, with cooler-than-average conditions across the higher-latitude southern oceans and the northern parts of the Pacific and Atlantic oceans. The August 2009 worldwide ocean SST ranked as the warmest on record for a third consecutive month -- 0.57°C (1.03°F) above the 20th century average of 15.6°C (60.1°F). This broke the previous August record set in 1998, 2003, and 2005.
Meanwhile, the worldwide land surface temperature represented the fourth warmest August on record. During the month of August, warmer-than-average temperatures were present across large portions of the world's land areas with the exception of cooler-than-average conditions across Japan, the central contiguous United States, parts of Canada, western Alaska, and western Russia.
October 15, 2009, from Telegraph.co.uk
The explorer trekked more than 269 miles towards the North Pole this winter in temperatures below -40 degrees C to measure the depth of the ice.
The average thickness of ice floes was 1.8 metres, suggesting the ice sheet is now largely made up of first year ice rather than "multiyear" ice that will have built up over time....
An analysis by Cambridge University has concluded that the Arctic is now melting at such a rate that it will be largely ice free within ten years, allowing ships to cross the Arctic Ocean.
Further analysis by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) warned that the "irreversible trend" will cause dangerous feedback because water absorbs more heat from the sun than ice, therefore further speeding up the global warming process. The melting of the ice could also trigger extreme weather patterns as the ocean currents change and release even more greenhouse gases stored under the ice.
|
Resource
Depletion
|
Recovery
October 15, 2013, from New York Times
"Feeding the world" might as well be a marketing slogan for Big Ag, a euphemism for "Let's ramp up sales," as if producing more cars would guarantee that everyone had one. But if it worked that way, surely the rate of hunger in the United States would not be the highest percentage of any developed nation, a rate closer to that of Indonesia than of Britain....
While a billion people are hungry, about three billion people are not eating well, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, if you count obese and overweight people alongside those with micronutrient deficiencies. Paradoxically, as increasing numbers of people can afford to eat well, food for the poor will become scarcer, because demand for animal products will surge, and they require more resources like grain to produce....
Let's at last recognize that there are two food systems, one industrial and one of small landholders, or peasants if you prefer. The peasant system is not only here for good, it's arguably more efficient than the industrial model. According to the ETC Group, a research and advocacy organization based in Ottawa, the industrial food chain uses 70 percent of agricultural resources to provide 30 percent of the world's food, whereas what ETC calls "the peasant food web" produces the remaining 70 percent using only 30 percent of the resources.
October 15, 2012, from National Wildlife Federation
Let's just be clear, as we head into the next round of Presidential and Vice Presidential debates, the Department of Energy's investments in clean energy have been extremely successful. A recent fact-checking analysis found that DOE's projects had a 98 percent success rate. That means about 14,700+ successes out of 15,000+ projects.
October 15, 2012, from Wall Street Journal
Want to see where your food might come from in the future? Look up.
The seeds of an agricultural revolution are taking root in cities around the world -- a movement that boosters say will change the way that urbanites get their produce and solve some of the world's biggest environmental problems along the way.
It's called vertical farming, and it's based on one simple principle: Instead of trucking food from farms into cities, grow it as close to home as possible -- in urban greenhouses that stretch upward instead of sprawling outward.
October 15, 2012, from Midwest Energy News
For the first time in 17 years, Indiana's public utility commission is rewriting the state's rule governing how utilities develop long-term plans to meet electricity demand.
The new rule could force the state's five investor-owned utilities to face more public scrutiny in developing their plans, and perhaps move more quickly than they might otherwise toward reducing carbon emissions.
But the utilities are pushing back, saying that since they have the most skin in the game, they should have the most say over their plans.
October 15, 2012, from TakePart
It appears that this summer's record-breaking heatwave has lit a fire under our collective climate change views.
"Nearly three-quarters of Americans say global warming influences U.S. weather and made this year's record-hot summer worse,” Reuters reported this morning. In a new survey conducted by Yale and George Mason universities, results showed 74 percent of Americans believe that global warming is affecting weather, which is five percentage points higher than it was as recently as March 2012... Other surveys have in fact observed a bit of a see-sawing in American's opinion on the subject of climate change. In a July report, Business Week said, "Following a winter of record snowfall in 2010, the public's acceptance of climate change fell to a low of 52 percent, according to the National Survey of American Public Opinion on Climate Change, which was published by the Brookings Institution in Washington. After this year's mild winter, support jumped to 65 percent, the same as that found by the UT Energy Poll in March.”
October 15, 2012, from WorldWatch Institute
Emerging from the global economic recession, investments in renewable energy technologies continued their steady rise in 2011. Total new investments in renewable power and fuels (excluding large hydropower and solar hot water) jumped 17 percent"reaching $257 billion, up from $220 billion in 2010. In a year marked by falling costs for renewable energy technologies, net investment in renewable power capacity was $40 billion greater than investment in fossil fuel capacity. (Through the first half of 2012, however, total investment fell behind the impressive pace set the previous year, attracting slightly under $108 billion compared with nearly $125 billion in the first half of 2011.)
October 15, 2011, from CNN
Paving slabs that convert energy from people's footsteps into electricity are set to help power Europe's largest urban mall, at the 2012 London Olympics site.
The recycled rubber "PaveGen" paving slabs harvest kinetic energy from the impact of people stepping on them and instantly deliver tiny bursts of electricity to nearby appliances. The slabs can also store energy for up to three days in an on-board battery, according to its creator.
In their first commercial application, 20 tiles will be scattered along the central crossing between London's Olympic stadium and the recently opened Westfield Stratford City mall -- which expects an estimated 30 million customers in its first year.
|
ApocaDocs