Biology
Breach
April 17, 2014, from University of Minnesota
A first-of-its-kind study has found that on average in the U.S., people of color are exposed to 38 percent higher levels of nitrogen dioxide outdoor air pollution compared to white people. The health impacts from the difference in levels between whites and nonwhites found in the study are substantial. For example, researchers estimate that if nonwhites breathed the lower NO2 levels experienced by whites, it would prevent 7,000 deaths from heart disease alone among nonwhites each year.
April 17, 2014, from Huffington Post
A new study released Wednesday finds there are almost 10,000 schools across the country located within a mile of a chemical facility.
The research was released ahead of the April 17 anniversary of an explosion at a West, Texas, fertilizer plant, which killed 15 people and injured hundreds of others. The explosion left many people wondering why schools and homes were located so close to the plant.
The report finds that 4.6 million children attend a school located within a mile of a facility that stores potentially risky chemicals.
April 17, 2014, from Midwest Energy News
Feeling that elected officials have betrayed them in the battle over piles of petroleum coke on the Southeast Side of Chicago, residents have vowed to take the fight to the streets and into their own hands... residents are furious that at the April 1 City Council meeting where the zoning committee was to vote on the ordinance, a substitute ordinance was introduced that allows continued increased petcoke storage provided the material is burned on-site... "I assure you over the next few months we'll get a lot more people involved," Esquivel said. "A lot of people still don't really know or care. But we've been educating ourselves, and hopefully we will be able to open their eyes and get them mad. We have to keep getting louder and louder and stronger and stronger. Because this is not a dumping ground, this is our home."
April 17, 2012, from London Daily Mail
A study of pregnant women and their children in New York City has provided clinical evidence that links environmental pollution with childhood obesity.
The most up-to-date statistics show that 17 per cent of children in the U.S. are obese, and that figure rises to 25 per cent in built-up, inner-city neighborhoods.
While poor diet and lack of exercise are still the major contributors to the national epidemic, this new evidence suggest that air pollution can play a role. Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health conducted the study of expecting mothers in New York, and found that those exposed to higher concentrations of airborne chemicals were more than twice as likely to have children who were obese by the age of seven.
April 17, 2012, from Charleston Gazette
A team of experts revealed Monday that it has found a "probable link" between C8 and human cancers, rebuffing DuPont Co.'s longstanding contention that exposure to the chemical is harmless.
The three-person C8 Science Panel said it is "more probable than not" that exposure to C8 put residents of the Mid-Ohio Valley at a greater risk of kidney and testicular cancers....In West Virginia, DuPont has used C8 since the 1950s as a processing agent to make Teflon and other nonstick products, oil-resistant paper packaging and stain-resistant textiles.
April 17, 2012, from New York Times
Scientists from the United States Geological Survey have cautiously weighed in on a subject that has sparked public concern in some parts of the country: spates of small earthquakes in oil- and gas-producing areas.
In a report to be presented next week at a meeting of seismologists in San Diego, the scientists say that increases in the number of quakes in Arkansas and Oklahoma in the last few years are "almost certainly" related to oil and gas production.
April 17, 2011, from Popular Science
Nanotech is looked upon by many as the next great enabling technology that will revolutionize (and is revolutionizing) everything from materials science to disease therapies to game-changing new energy technologies. But, according to a new study by Queen's University researchers, some commonly used nanoparticles found in everything from sunscreen to cosmetics to socks could be destroying soil systems, and by extension the very ecosystems upon which we rely for life.
Among the millions of tons of nanoparticles manufactured annually, silver nanoparticles are a particular favorite as they work as antibacterial agents in surgical tools, water treatment, wound dressings, and in a variety of other roles. They've even been used in the cathodes of batteries....
The researchers had begun to wonder what the impact of nanoparticles were on the environment, and having received a chunk of Arctic soil as part of the International Polar Year they decided to experiment on this piece of uncontaminated earth. They first studied the sample to see what kind of microbe communities were living in the soil, and identified a certain beneficial and prevalent microbe that helps fix nitrogen to plants. Plants can't do this on their own and nitrogen is critical to their growth, so this particular microbe is essential to plant life.
The researchers then added three different kinds of nanoparticles to the soil and let it sit for six months. When they re-examined it, they found that this microbe had largely been extinguished, and laboratory analysis showed that silver nanoparticles were the culprit. Given the high number of silver nanoparticles slipping into the environment on a daily basis, such findings are concerning.
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Climate
Chaos
April 17, 2014, from Bloomberg News
Charles and David Koch, the billionaire brothers who run Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries Inc., added $1.3 billion to their collective fortune yesterday on reports that U.S. industrial production gained more than forecast. The surge elevated their net worth to more than $100 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
The Koch's ascent comes as Freedom Partners, one of their fundraising networks, last week aired its first batch of television ads targeted at this year's U.S. Senate races...
April 17, 2012, from The Daily Climate
Locked in frozen vaults on Antarctica and Greenland, a lost world of ancient creatures awaits another chance at life. Like a time-capsule from the distant past, the polar ice sheets offer a glimpse of tiny organisms that may have been trapped there longer than modern humans have walked the planet, biding their time until conditions change and set them free again. With that ice melting at an alarming rate, those conditions could soon be at hand. Masses of bacteria and other microbes -- some of which the world hasn't seen since the Middle Pleistocene, a previous period of major climate change about 750,000 years ago -- will make their way back into the environment.
April 17, 2012, from EnvironmentalResearchWeb
Now, with ten years of observations using its Advanced Synthetic Aperture Radar (ASAR), Envisat has mapped an additional loss in Larsen B's area of 1790 sq km over the past decade....
"The northern Antarctic Peninsula has been subject to atmospheric warming of about 2.5 degrees C over the last 50 years - a much stronger warming trend than on global average, causing retreat and disintegration of ice shelves."...
The Envisat observations of the Larsen Ice Shelf confirm the vulnerability of ice shelves to climatic warming and demonstrate the importance of ice shelves for the stability of glaciers upstream.
April 17, 2011, from Hot Topic
If we want to give ourselves a 75 percent chance of coming in below a 2 degree C rise in the global average temperature, then we (as in all humanity) can emit around one trillion tonnes of CO2 (for more see Meinshausen et al here, discussed in the context of emissions targets at HT in this post). It doesn't much matter when we do the emitting, because CO2 hangs around in the atmosphere for a long time, but stick to that limit we must if we're serious about avoiding damaging warming. I like that way of thinking about the issue, as I noted in my report on the Forum, but it seems that I may have been rather optimistic about the height of the ceiling we're living under, and our chances of hitting a 2 degree C target. A new study by a team of Canadian climate modellers, Arora et al, Carbon emission limits required to satisfy future representative concentration pathways of greenhouse gases in Geophysical Research Letters..., suggests that:
"... we have already surpassed the cumulative emission limit and so emissions must ramp down to zero immediately. The unprecedented reduction in fossil‐fuel emissions implied by either of these scenarios suggests that it is unlikely that warming can be limited to the 2 degrees C target agreed to in the 2009 Copenhagen Accord."
Bugger.
April 17, 2009, from Agence France-Presse
Forests that today soak up a quarter of carbon pollution spewed into the atmosphere could soon become a net source of CO2 if Earth's surface warms by another two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), cautions a report to be presented Friday at the UN.
Plants both absorb and exhale carbon dioxide, but healthy forests -- especially those in the tropics -- take up far more of the greenhouse gas than they give off.
When they are damaged, get sick or die, that stored carbon is released....Authored by 35 of the world's top forestry scientists, the study provides the first global assessment of the ability of forests to adapt to climate change.
Manmade warming to date -- about 0.7 C since the mid-19th century -- has already slowed regeneration of tropical forests, and made them more vulnerable to fire, disease and insect infestations. Increasingly violent and frequent storms have added to the destruction.
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Resource
Depletion
April 17, 2009, from London Daily Guardian
Australia's biggest river is running so low that Adelaide, the country's fifth-largest city, could run out of water in the next two years.
The Murray river is part of a network of waterways that irrigates the south-eastern corner of Australia, but after six years of severe drought, the worst dry spell ever, its slow moving waters are now almost stagnant.
Water levels in the Murray in the first three months of this year were the lowest on record and the government agency that administers the river, the Murray-Darling Basin Authority (MDBA), said the next three months could be just as grim.
With meteorologists predicting another year of below-average rainfall, the MDBA, is bracing for worse to come.
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Recovery
April 17, 2014, from Reuters
...Toyota Motor Corp will next year launch a hydrogen-powered car in the United States, Japan and Europe. For now, people at Toyota are calling it the 2015 FC car, for fuel-cell.
Fuel-cell cars use a "stack" of cells that electro-chemically combine hydrogen with oxygen to generate electricity that helps propel the car. Their only emission, bar heat, is water vapor, they can run five times longer than battery electric cars, and it takes just minutes to fill the tank with hydrogen - far quicker than even the most rapid charger can recharge a battery electric car... Safety is also a concern. Hydrogen is a highly flammable element when not handled properly.
April 17, 2014, from NPR
A group of scientists and food activists is launching a Thursday to change the rules that govern seeds. They're releasing 29 new varieties of crops under a new "open source pledge" that's intended to safeguard the ability of farmers, gardeners and plant breeders to share those seeds freely.
It's inspired by the example of open source software, which is freely available for anyone to use but cannot legally be converted into anyone's proprietary product...
, director of intellectual property for the seed company HM Clause and the incoming president of the American Seed Trade Association, says his company may avoid using open source seed to breed new commercial varieties "because then we'd ... have limited potential to recoup the investment." That's because the offspring of open source seeds would have to be shared as well, and any other seed company could immediately sell the same variety.
April 17, 2009, from Naples Daily News
LEE COUNTY -- Planned mega-development Babcock Ranch will be the world's first entirely solar-powered city, developer Syd Kitson and an official from Florida Power & Light announced Thursday morning during a Washington D.C. press conference.
The ambitious Charlotte County development will draw all of its electricity from a 75-megawatt photovoltaic solar power plant to be built by FPL. Construction on the facility could start by the end of this year.... The facility will be carbon-free, use no water and produce no waste. It will avoid the 61,000 tons of greenhouse gas emissions a fossil fuel plant of equal size would release each year...Plans for Babcock Ranch include 19,500 homes in neighborhoods situated around a city center... Population at build-out is expected to reach 45,000.
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