Biology
Breach
May 9, 2011, from Agence France-Press
With just over 1,000 days left before the Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia is pulling out all the stops to get ready in a drive activists say is leaving a devastating toll on the environment...
"In general, environmental damage in Sochi is much worse than what we expected in the early stages of construction planning," said Suren Gazaryan of the Environmental Watch on North Caucasus....A mudslide from an illegal dump up the hill tore through the park and filled the river's banks with debris from tunnel construction and other waste in January.
"Clearly leaving thousands of tons of waste on a steep hillside is not a good idea, but its convenient, and it can't be stopped," Gazaryan said as he picked off a chunk of the black substance for testing.
May 9, 2009, from The New York Times
A U.N.-sponsored treaty to combat highly dangerous chemicals has been expanded to include nine more substances that are used in pesticides, electronics and other products, U.N. officials said Saturday.
The additions include one called PFOS worth billions of dollars in a wide range of uses from making semiconductor chips to fighting fires. Another is lindane, a pesticide widely used in combatting head lice.
"These chemicals transit boundaries. They are found everywhere in the world," Donald Cooper, [executive secretary to the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants, or POPs] said. "They don't go away. They persist in the atmosphere, they persist in the soil, in the water for extremely long periods of time."
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Climate
Chaos
May 9, 2016, from Slate.com
May 9, 2012, from London Guardian
A network of ultra-conservative groups is ramping up an offensive on multiple fronts to turn the American public against wind farms and Barack Obama's energy agenda.
A number of rightwing organisations, including Americans for Prosperity, which is funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, are attacking Obama for his support for solar and wind power. The American Legislative Exchange Council (Alec), which also has financial links to the Kochs, has drafted bills to overturn state laws promoting wind energy.
Now a confidential strategy memo seen by the Guardian advises using "subversion" to build a national movement of wind farm protesters.
May 9, 2012, from Washington Post
As far back as records go (1895), never has the U.S. strung together 12 straight months warmer than May 2011 to April 2012 according to new data released today by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC).
The record-setting 12-month period edged out November 1999-October 2000, the 2nd warmest 12-month period, by 0.1 degrees F. The average temperature was 2.8 degrees F above the 20th century average.
May 9, 2011, from Cardiff Western Mail
TODAY'S teenagers are consuming more energy than any previous generation - despite receiving unprecedented education on climate change and other green issues, an academic has warned.
Mobile phones, gaming devices, televisions, computers and hair straighteners are just some of the gadgets commonly found in the bedrooms of modern teenagers.
Professor Ian Williams, who has studied the Facebook generation's lifestyles and environmentalism, says a typical teenager may have amassed more electrical items than an entire household would have owned a generation earlier.
May 9, 2011, from Reno Gazette-Journal
The claim: There is no scientific consensus that global temperatures are rising and humans are significantly to blame.
The background: This week's claim started because of a study done by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes. The study's aim was to determine whether the Citizens United case before the Supreme Court, which allowed unlimited campaign contributions from corporations and unions, affected people's perception of the truthfulness of the information being fed in the midterm elections.
The study wasn't intended to be concerned with where people got their information, just how accurate it seemed. But the researchers noticed a peculiar thing: Although some Americans were misinformed, they generally became more informed if they consumed more news -- with one major exception.
The study found that the more people watched Fox News, the less informed they became.
May 9, 2011, from The Walrus
He's been training his mental telescope on the year 2031, and the nagging question of whether our world will be consumed by a new, climate-related geopolitics....
China and the Pacific Rim nations, meanwhile, are enduring ever-worsening repercussions of climate change: volatile storms, food riots, and rising sea levels that displace millions of people. "Suddenly," he says, drawing out the tale like the pitch for a thriller, "some countries say, 'Screw it. We have to cool this down.'"
How? A bloc of Asian nations underwrites an aggressive geoengineering effort that uses specially designed aircraft to disperse thousands of tonnes of sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere. The goal: to reduce global temperatures and calm regional weather patterns. Relative to the costs of environmental mayhem, this high-leverage project is alluringly affordable and promises quick results. Indeed, the halo of high-altitude particles succeeds in reflecting enough sunlight into space that ocean temperatures begin to drop -- so much so that the summer sea ice in the Arctic refreezes.
Blackstock continues the plot line: Arctic oil and gas exploration halts, triggering a recession as investors anticipate rising energy prices. Resource-rich northern nations, which have reaped a climate change dividend in the Arctic, now find their commercial interests directly threatened by the geoengineering efforts of southern countries hit by global warming symptoms.
May 9, 2011, from Scientific American blogs
In the 1980s, however, he became so worried about global warming that he started speaking out. At a 1988 Senate hearing on climate change, he made headlines when he asserted with 99 percent certainty that greenhouse gases from human activities were causing global warming. Since then the correlated surge in atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures has borne out his assertion....
Hansen advocates civil disobedience to block fossil-fuel operations; in 2009 he was arrested along with other protestors allegedly obstructing traffic into a coal-mining operation in West Virginia. Now he is trying another tactic: suing the government. Hansen serves as a scientific advisor for Our Children's Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit formed "to protect Earth's natural systems for current and future generations." The group has organized a lawsuit that a coalition of environmental groups filed last week against the U.S. and other nations in attempt to force them to take measures to cut fossil-fuel emissions.
May 9, 2009, from BBC
Rising temperatures in Tibet are threatening droughts and floods, which could endanger millions of people, China's top weather official warned.
Climate change "has accelerated glacial shrinkage" which has already led to swollen lakes, said Zheng Guoguang.
He said that if the warming continued, many of those living in western China would face "floods in the short-term and drought in the long-run".
Beijing says it wants to tackle climate change yet ensure economic development.
Experts say more than 400 million people in China are already living with the problem of desertification, partly brought on by climate change.
May 9, 2009, from TIME Magazine
Once touted as an environmental and economic cure-all, corn ethanol has had a rough year. The collapse in grain and oil prices, preceded by overinvestment in refineries over the past few years, badly hurt ethanol producers. Meanwhile, environmentalists have steadily chipped away at ethanol's green credentials. Far from being better for the planet than gasoline, many scientists now argue that ethanol actually has a sizable carbon footprint, because when farmers in the U.S. use their land to grow corn for fuel rather than food, farmers in the developing world end up cutting down more forests to pick up the slack. Now a new study makes the case that ethanol isn't even the greenest way to use biomass as a fuel. In an article published in the May 8 issue of Science, researchers from the Carnegie Institution, Stanford University and the University of California-Merced (UCM) used life-cycle analysis — which takes into account the entire impact of a biofuel from field to vehicle — to show that converting biomass to electricity (to power electric cars) produces 80 percent more transportation energy than turning it into ethanol (to power a flex-fuel car), with a carbon footprint that is half as small.
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Resource
Depletion
May 9, 2011, from New Scientist
If we humans are good at hunting, we excel at fishing. As we vacuum up stupendous numbers of fish from oceans, rivers and lakes, the nature of the ones that get away is changing at an astonishing rate.
In particular, the targeting of big animals drives the evolution of smaller fish or ones that become sexually mature at a younger age, or both. Many fish populations are changing dramatically, with average size shrinking by 20 per cent and average life histories 25 per cent shorter (PNAS, v 106, p 952). Harvested species show the most abrupt trait changes ever observed in wild populations, Michael Kinnison of the University of Maine and colleagues reported recently....
There is also no doubt about the plausibility of such rapid evolution. A decade-long study of Atlantic silversides kept in tanks has shown that intense targeting of large individuals can halve average size in just four generations.
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Recovery
May 9, 2012, from The Atlantic
Alec Loorz turns 18 at the end of this month. While finishing high school and playing Ultimate Frisbee on weekends, he's also suing the federal government in U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C.
The Ventura, California, teen and four other juvenile plaintiffs want government officials to do more to prevent the risks of climate change -- the dangerous storms, heat waves, rising sea levels, and food-supply disruptions that scientists warn will threaten their generation absent a major turnabout in global energy policy. Specifically, the students are demanding that the U.S. government start reducing national emissions of carbon dioxide by at least six percent per year beginning in 2013.
"I think a lot of young people realize that this is an urgent time, and that we're not going to solve this problem just by riding our bikes more," Loorz said in an interview.
May 9, 2011, from New York Times
Cruising through cities in cars has been a part of urban life for decades. But for some European drivers, that pastime could be coming to an end where the authorities want to bar the most polluting vehicles.
"The future in city centers belongs to small cars and electric vehicles," Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, the French minister for ecology and transport, told a French newspaper, Le Parisien, last month.
Ms. Kosciusko-Morizet was announcing plans for eight of the largest French cities, including Paris and Nice, to restrict or bar access by passenger cars made before 1997, when stricter emissions standards took effect in Europe.
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