Biology
Breach
April 21, 2011, from Reuters
Under pressure from industry, Congressional Republicans are urging the U.S. EPA to further delay long-overdue rules that would limit more than 80 air toxics emitted by coal-burning power plants, barely a month after the agency announced them.
At least one lawmaker, Rep. Edward Whitfield of Kentucky -- a state which gets more than 90 percent of its power from coal -- has said he will soon introduce legislation to postpone implementation of the regulations... According to EPA, the mercury and air toxics standards alone would prevent up to 17,000 premature deaths and 11,000 heart attacks each year.
Utilities and business groups say the anti-pollution rules would be too costly to implement and would force early shutdowns of power plants, threatening jobs and economic recovery.
April 21, 2011, from Wall Street Journal
A blowout at a natural gas well in rural northern Pennsylvania spilled thousands of gallons of chemical-laced water Wednesday, contaminating a stream and leading officials to ask seven families who live nearby to evacuate as crews struggled to stop the gusher.
Chesapeake Energy Corp. lost control of the well site near Canton, in Bradford County, around 11:45 p.m. Tuesday, officials said. Tainted water flowed from the site all day Wednesday, though by the mid-afternoon, workers had managed to divert the extremely salty water away from the stream.
April 21, 2011, from Scientific American
After the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded on April 20, 2010, more than 200 million gallons of oil flowed out of the Macondo well and into the Gulf of Mexico before the leak was finally plugged. Add to that the nearly 2 million gallons of the dispersant Corexit subsequently applied to the spill and it's no wonder that the government, scientists and the public alike are wondering what sort of effects this chemical cocktail will have on the Gulf ecosystem, and especially seafood. While the mainstream media has widely covered the debate over seafood safety, these stories do not delve into the science behind the issue, nor do they highlight the dangers that chemically dispersed oil poses to the marine food web. Not only is there concern about the current safety of Gulf seafood, but there are concerns about the long-term effects dispersed oil may have on fish populations, further jeopardizing Gulf fisheries in the future....
The current FDA risk assessment protocol is based on a 176-pound man eating four shrimp a week. That doesn't account for women or children, whose body weights are lower, let alone local seafood consumption along the Gulf coast. "Nobody in the Gulf really eats four shrimp a week, so it's unrealistic the way they are assessing risk of consumption," says Shaw....
Solomon reports that many people she talked to on the Gulf coast told her, "Four shrimp?! That's not even one po' boy!"
April 21, 2011, from Guardian
Senior executives in the fossil fuel industry have launched an all-out assault on renewable energy, lobbying governments and business groups to reject wind and solar power in favour of gas, in a move that could choke the fledgling green energy industry.
Multinational companies including Shell, GDF Suez and Statoil are promoting gas as an alternative "green" fuel. These companies are among dozens around the world investing in new technologies to exploit shale gas, a controversial form of the fuel that has rejuvenated the gas industry because it is plentiful in supply and newly accessible due to technical advances in gas extraction known as "fracking"....
Burning gas in power stations releases about half the carbon emissions of coal, allowing gas companies to claim it is a "green" source of fuel.
Central to the lobbying effort is a report claiming that the EU could meet its 2050 carbon targets 900 billion euros more cheaply by using gas than by investing in renewables. But the Guardian has established that the analysis is based on a previous report that came to the opposite conclusion - that renewables should play a much larger role. The report being pushed by the fossil fuel industry has been disowned by its original authors who referred to it as "biased" in favour of gas....
For the last two months, company lobbyists have been besieging government officials in Europe, the US and elsewhere to push the report. Their efforts are being boosted through alliances with energy-intensive industries, which are joining in the pressure on government in the hope of securing cheap energy.
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Climate
Chaos
April 21, 2011, from EnvironmentalResearchWeb
An 18-year study of 27,000 individual trees by National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded scientists finds that tree growth and fecundity - the ability to produce viable seeds - are more sensitive to climate change than previously thought.
The results, published tomorrow in the journal Global Change Biology, identify earlier spring warming as one of several factors that affect tree reproduction and growth.
They also show summer drought as an important but overlooked risk factor for tree survival, and that species in four types of trees - pine, elm, beech, and magnolia - are especially vulnerable to climate change....
"The problem is, the models scientists have used to predict forest responses focus almost solely on spatial variation in tree species abundance - their distribution and density over geographic range."...
"Trees are much more sensitive to climate variation than can be interpreted from regional climate averages."
April 21, 2009, from Discovery News
Nearly 25 percent of land around the world is in bad shape and getting worse, according to a new study, and human activities are to blame.
It's the first study to directly measure the extent of human-induced global land degradation. The phenomenon describes a decline in the quality of soil and vegetation that the land can't recover from on its own.... One and a half billion people currently live in degraded areas. And as soils decline, people reach a point where they can't grow enough food to feed themselves. They move on, leaving the dead land behind....The scientists calculated that all of the vegetation that has been lost from the world's degraded land would have removed an extra billion tons of carbon out of the atmosphere if it were still healthy and green.
April 21, 2009, from Press Association
The number of people hit by climate-related disasters around the world will increase by more than half in the next six years, aid agency Oxfam has warned.
The charity predicted the number affected by events such as flooding, storms and drought would rise from 242 million people to hit 375 million a year by 2015.
And with the humanitarian aid system already a "postcode lottery on a global scale", it is already barely able to cope with current levels of disasters and could be overwhelmed by increases in the next few years, Oxfam warned.
The aid agency said the expected rise of 133 million at risk stemmed from a combination of existing poverty and people migrating to densely populated slum areas which would be prone to increasingly frequent climate-related crises.... A new campaign by Oxfam, Here and Now, aims to tackle climate change and ensure the world's poorest and most vulnerable people get a fair deal as the world tackles global warming.
April 21, 2009, from Yale Environment 360
...A number of studies indicate that global warming will rob many species of their current habitat, pushing them towards extinction. Some conservation biologists argue that the only way to save some species may be to move them to new ranges that they can’t get to themselves.
This strategy — which goes by various names including assisted migration, assisted colonization, and, most recently, managed relocation — only emerged in the scientific literature in 2007. Over the past two years it has attracted widespread interest. A number of scientists are now investigating how they can pick new homes for endangered species and move them safely.
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Resource
Depletion
April 21, 2009, from Boston Globe
...Officials at the Kingston campus set out to see if they could change student behavior around some of the most common and wasteful energy habits on campus: leaving computers on when not in use, keeping the heat and/or air conditioners on when they leave a room, and taking excessively long showers....Based on an initial survey, URI students took showers that lasted an average of 13 minutes each. After the first semester, shower length remained virtually unchanged, but students reduced the number they took from eight to 6.8 per week. "Shower length is the most difficult behavior to change; it seems to be ingrained in people as a right," said Scott Finlinson, coordinator of the project for NORESCO, the energy services company hired by the University.
"While men tend to be willing to reduce the length of their showers, women say that they have too much to do in the shower to cut back on the time spent there."
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Recovery
April 21, 2009, from London Guardian
The secretary for future vision is considering how many South Koreans it takes to change a million lightbulbs. No joke.
Kim Sang-hyo, the president's extravagantly titled right-hand man, is trying to create more than 940,000 green jobs and improve his country's energy efficiency at the same time. Switching every bulb in every public building in South Korea to light-emitting diodes by the end of this year is one, very small, element in the master plan of what has been described as the greenest new deal on the planet....Over the next four years, the government promises to build a million green homes, improve the energy efficiency of a million more, invest £1.2bn on research into low-carbon technologies and spend £4.8bn on high-speed railways and other forms of "clean" transport.
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