Biology
Breach
November 13, 2009, from National Geographic News
How's this for a sweet surprise? A team of researchers in Washington State has found traces of cooking spices and flavorings in the waters of Puget Sound.... The Puget Sound study is one of several ongoing efforts to investigate the unexpected ingredients that find their way into the global water supply.
Around the world, scientists are finding trace amounts of substances -- from sugar and spice to heroine, rocket fuel, and birth control -- that might be having unintended consequences for humans and wildlife alike.
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Climate
Chaos
November 13, 2014, from Guardian
Just this week, a new study has appeared which describes a clever method for measuring the flows of ocean currents and their impacts on ice shelves. This study has identified a major mechanism for melting ice in the Southern Hemisphere.
The paper, co-authored by Andrew Thompson, Karen Heywood, and colleagues is very novel. The scientists used sea gliders to identify water flows that bring warm waters to the base of ice shelves in Antarctica. As I've written before, ocean currents are complex; you cannot neglect their impact on the Earth's climate....
The data showed that eddy-transport and surface-wind-caused motion are comparable in their contribution to water circulation. They showed however, that the eddy motion is largely confined to the warm intermediate water layers. The penetration of the warm waters to the ice shelves is believed to be responsible for the dramatic ice loss that has been observed in the Antarctic.
November 13, 2013, from The Independent
A giant Antarctic iceberg has broken free of the continent and could be about to drift into busy international shipping lanes, a team of British scientists has warned ... 700 square kilometres (270 square miles) of ice - around eight times the size of Manhattan or the equivalent of Singapore....
Prof Bigg said the crack hadn't been enough in itself to allow the berg to break away over winter because it had stayed "iced-in".
"But in the last couple of days, it has begun to break away and now a kilometre or two of clear water has developed between it and the glacier," he told BBC News....
"... they can either go eastwards along the coast or they can... circle out into the main part of the Southern Ocean."...
This would take it into the path of one of the world's busiest international shipping lanes, and trigger hazard warnings via a number of observation agencies.
November 13, 2012, from Indiana Living Green
I've missed updating you on a number of presentations, and as I look back at my initial reports, I'm struck by my lack of confidence. Really, those first couple of times were scary! Working with something as static as a slideshow/power point is really odd, and learning when to talk and when to "show" is going to be a process.
But it is getting better. I had a great experience at UIndy a couple weeks ago, though I did make a mistake I hope I won't repeat.... By the time I got to Fountain Square, I realized I had some time to burn. About an hour. What better way to do than to go to Fountain Square Brewery, home of some of the best brews in town.
What could go wrong?
Well, what went wrong was that halfway into a delicious IPA, I was flat out drunk.
November 13, 2009, from Economist
AMERICA will not pass a cap-and-trade law in time for the global climate-change summit in Copenhagen next month. To understand why, it helps to ask a farmer. Take Bruce Wright, for example, who grows wheat and other crops on a couple of thousand acres near Bozeman, Montana. His family has tilled these fields for four generations. His great-grandfather built the local church. He loves his job and the rural way of life. But he fears that higher energy prices will endanger both.
To grow his crops, Mr Wright needs fertiliser, fuel and pesticides -- all of which are derived from oil. When the price of oil hit the sky last year, Mr Wright's operating costs nearly trebled. He survived because the oil-price surge also forced up the price of grain. But such wild swings make him nervous. If he has to invest three times as much in his crop and the crop fails, he says, he will be buried in debt.
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Resource
Depletion
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Recovery
November 13, 2013, from New York Times, via DesdemonaDespair
... Geological time scales, civilizational collapse and species extinction give rise to profound problems that humanities scholars and academic philosophers, with their taste for fine-grained analysis, esoteric debates and archival marginalia, might seem remarkably ill suited to address. After all, how will thinking about Kant help us trap carbon dioxide? Can arguments between object-oriented ontology and historical materialism protect honeybees from colony collapse disorder? Are ancient Greek philosophers, medieval theologians, and contemporary metaphysicians going to keep Bangladesh from being inundated by rising oceans?
Of course not. But the biggest problems the Anthropocene poses are precisely those that have always been at the root of humanistic and philosophical questioning: "What does it mean to be human?" and "What does it mean to live?" In the epoch of the Anthropocene, the question of individual mortality -- "What does my life mean in the face of death?" -- is universalized and framed in scales that boggle the imagination. What does human existence mean against 100,000 years of climate change? What does one life mean in the face of species death or the collapse of global civilization? How do we make meaningful choices in the shadow of our inevitable end?...
November 13, 2012, from The Telegraph
Under proposals presented to the city council on Monday, Socialist mayor Bertrand Delanoa intends to outlaw by September 2014 the use of cars and utility vehicles more than 17 years old and lorries or buses more than 18 years old... Philippe Goujon, head of the Right-wing opposition UMP federation in the Paris council criticised the move as "anti-social, anti-surbuban and anti-motorist."
November 13, 2009, from London Guardian
A police offensive and the global economic crisis have combined to produce the largest fall in more than 20 years... The Brazilian government yesterday announced a "historic" drop in the deforestation of the Amazon, weeks before world leaders meet in Copenhagen for climate change talks.
Brazilian authorities said that between August 2008 and July this year, deforestation in the world's largest tropical rainforest fell by the largest amount in more than 20 years, dropping by 45 percent from nearly 13,000 square kilometres to around 7,000 square kilometres (5,000 square miles to 2,700 square miles)... Since February 2008 the government has been waging an "unprecedented" campaign against the loggers, dispatching hundreds of heavily armed agents to remote rainforest towns where destruction was out of control.
November 13, 2009, from Telegraph.co.uk
The Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE) said it would be almost impossible for the UK to meet ambitious climate change targets to cut greenhouse gases by 80 per cent by 2050 without drastic action.
The only way to reach the target would be to "go to war" against carbon emissions, its report said. This would mean setting up a Department of Climate Security to act like the War Cabinet and co-ordinate action across every other Government department.
Unemployed people would be trained in making homes more energy efficient, factories would make solar panels and schools would encourage pupils to adopt more sustainable lifestyles. Money would be pumped into wind turbines, nuclear power stations and solar panels as a matter of urgency.
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