Biology
Breach
November 8, 2011, from Wall Street Journal
Congested cities are fast becoming test tubes for scientists studying the impact of traffic fumes on the brain.
As roadways choke on traffic, researchers suspect that the tailpipe exhaust from cars and trucks -- especially tiny carbon particles already implicated in heart disease, cancer and respiratory ailments -- may also injure brain cells and synapses key to learning and memory. New public-health studies and laboratory experiments suggest that, at every stage of life, traffic fumes exact a measurable toll on mental capacity, intelligence and emotional stability.
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Climate
Chaos
November 8, 2013, from Globe and Mail
In e-mails the Alberta government released under Access to Information, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers warns against the province's proposal that oil-sands companies be forced to gradually cut emissions per barrel by 40 per cent, and pay a $40 levy for every tonne in excess their target. That would add $1 to the cost of producing every barrel....
Greenpeace Canada researcher Keith Stewart questioned CAPP's insistence that a $1-per-barrel carbon tax would seriously undermine the oil sands' competitiveness. He noted that, in the debate over the Keystone XL project, the industry has said approval of the pipeline would not affect investment or production levels in the oil sands because companies would turn to rail to move crude, which would cost $5 more per barrel.
"The industry in these documents is clearly saying delay, delay, delay and then do as little as possible," Mr. Stewart said on Friday. "And the federal government seems to be taking that as marching orders."
November 8, 2011, from Access Hollywood
The Duggars have their 20th child on the way!
"19 Kids and Counting" stars Michelle and Jim Bob will welcome their next child in the spring, People reported. "We are so excited," the Duggar mother, 45, who is three-and-a-half months along, told the mag. "I feel good. I am past the sickness stage now."
The couple's most recent child, Josie, born on Dec. 10, 2009, is doing well after being born premature at just 25 weeks.... The season finale of "19 Kids and Counting" airs tonight at 9 PM on TLC.
November 8, 2011, from Los Angeles Times
Birds in central California are significantly larger than they were 25 to 40 years ago, and researchers believe it may be because they are bulking up in body weight to ride out severe storms related to global climate change.
Over the last 25 years, a robin, for example, has increased about an eighth of an inch in wing length and about 0.2 ounces in mass, according to a paper published online in Global Change Biology.
The findings fly in the face of assumptions based on an ecological benchmark known as Bergmann's rule: Birds and mammals tend to be larger at higher latitudes, perhaps to conserve body heat. Under this reasoning, birds and mammals would get smaller as they adapted to rising global temperatures.
November 8, 2011, from The Independent
Britain's carbon emissions grew faster than the economy last year for the first time since 1996, as a cash-strapped population relegated the environment down its league of concerns and spent more money keeping warm, according to a new report....
The rise in Britain's so-called carbon intensity increases the danger that the country will miss legally binding targets on reducing emissions, warns PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), the consultancy behind the report.
Furthermore, it found that Britain's rising carbon intensity is part of a worldwide trend which threatens to push global warming above a two-degree Celsius increase on pre-industrial levels.
This is the temperature that the G8 group of leading economies has pledged not to breach in the hope of avoiding the worst consequences of climate change....
Jonathan Grant, director of sustainability and climate change at PwC, said: "When money is tight people's attention goes elsewhere and it becomes harder to implement high-cost, low-carbon technologies.
"Many people have higher priorities than climate change right now, it is probably fair to say. Maybe people are taking their eye off the ball a bit."
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Resource
Depletion
November 8, 2009, from Cornell, via EurekAlert
As the climate gets warmer, arid soils lose nitrogen as gas, reports a new Cornell study. That could lead to deserts with even less plant life than they sustain today, say the researchers.
"This is a way that nitrogen is lost from an ecosystem that people have never accounted for before," said Jed Sparks, associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of the study, published in the Nov. 6 issue of Science. "It allows us to finally understand the dynamics of nitrogen in arid systems"
Available nitrogen is second only to water as the biggest constraint to biological activity in arid ecosystems, but before now, ecologists struggled to understand how the inputs and outputs of nitrogen in deserts balance.
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Recovery
November 8, 2012, from The Telegraph
A ''super-Earth'' that could have a life-supporting climate has been discovered in a multi-world solar system 42 light years from the Sun.
The planet, which is several times more massive than the Earth, lies just the right distance from its star to allow the existence of liquid surface water.
It orbits well within the star's ''habitable'' or ''Goldilocks'' zone - the region where temperatures are neither too hot nor too cold to sustain life.
The new world is one of six, all with masses a few times that of the Earth, believed to circle the dwarf star HD 40307 in the constellation Pictor.
November 8, 2011, from Truthout
...Wait a minute. Broke? I'm sending in my share of hard-earned cash every month and so are you!
Now, what we've got to work with shrinks a lot thanks to corporate tax loopholes and unprecedented tax breaks for the richest 1 percent.
But even after those, we've still got over a trillion dollars.
So if we're broke, what's happening to all that money?
I decided to look into it and it turns out this whole "broke" story hides a much bigger story -- a story of some really dumb choices being made for us -- but that actually work against us. The good news is that these are choices, and we can make different ones.
November 8, 2011, from Earth Policy Institute
Between 2007 and 2011, carbon emissions from coal use in the United States dropped 10 percent. During the same period, emissions from oil use dropped 11 percent. In contrast, carbon emissions from natural gas use increased by 6 percent. The net effect of these trends was that U.S. carbon emissions dropped 7 percent in four years. And this is only the beginning.
The initial fall in coal and oil use was triggered by the economic downturn, but now powerful new forces are reducing the use of both... In August, the American Economic Review -- the country's most prestigious economics journal -- published an article that can only be described as an epitaph for the coal industry. The authors conclude that the economic damage caused by air pollutants from coal burning exceeds the value of the electricity produced by coal-fired power plants. Coal fails the cost-benefit analysis even before the costs of climate change are tallied.
November 8, 2009, from Gibbs Smith
Be the Change
By Thomas Linzey with Anneke Campbell
Gibbs Smith; $12.99 (2009)
This small, easy-to-finish-in-one-afternoon book may be the most inspiring thing you'll read all year.
Be the Change is the story of Thomas Linzey and the growing grassroots movement of people taking back their communities from the corporations who seek to destroy them -- whether through contamination (mining, building quarries) or through theft of resources (aquifers). It is a movement that has no partisan pitch. It is your classic David vs. Goliath, and boy, are the Goliaths huge.
Thwarted by our own U.S. Consitution "finding" that corporations having the standing as "persons," everyday citizens have repeatedly fought -- and lost -- the battle to keep CAFOs and mining companies from ruining their land. In Be the Change, Linzey and Campbell walk us through the success stories, while never sugar-coating the intense, harrowing process of organizing and sustaining a drive.
We learn about the people of Blaine Township in Pennsylvania, who kept Consol Energy Company from mining coal in their community. We learn about the people of Nottingham, New Hampshire, who united to pass an ordinance to keep USA Springs from taking 430,000 gallons of water a day from their aquifer. And we are walked through Envision Spokane, an effort by citizens of an entire city to figure out how to determine their own fate by writing their Bill of Rights, stating, for example, "The natural environment has the right to exist and flourish."
Over the course of this book, Linzey and Campbell remind us that the root question is asking yourself: "What kind of community do you want to live in?" Rather than getting into a room with regulators and politicians and trying to minimize the damage that a corporation wants to do, assert your rights as citizens to make the decisions you think are in the best interest of your community.
Isn't that the Democracy we are taught to believe in?
Instead, we get what Linzey calls "the illusion of Democracy." He emphasizes in workshops and speeches -- I myself have heard him speak in California and Indiana -- that the minute you get into a room with the power elite, you've lost.
Define the vision of your community, then figure out how to rewrite the existing laws and ordinances in your world, aided by Linzey's Democracy School workshop. Then dig in and get your fellow citizens on board. Build a movement. Rise up.
Does it work? There are many instances in this book where it does, and in 2008 an entire country did it! In 2008, Ecuador rewrote their constitution to invoke the rights of nature as transcendent over the rights of corporations.
Who helped them do that? Thomas Linzey.
In the end, the authors stress, it's not about stopping mining or polluting or the theft of your resources, it's about who gets to decide. Corporations and politicians? Or people. If you agree it's people, then Be the Change can jumpstart your own, homespun revolution.
So for that gloom-and-doom Apocalypse acolyte in your family or subculture, you can do no better than handing them Be the Change and tell them to quit bitchin' -- and get to work.
Be the Change can be purchased in all the usual places. For more on Linzey, see www.celdf.org.
November 8, 2009, from PhysOrg.com
By all accounts, they should be extinct. Instead, their numbers have quadrupled to 200 since 1996, an unlikely boon experts credit to the concurrence of an impoverished government keen for revenue that has enacted laws to protected them, a conservation program that encourages people to support them, and a rare harmony with humans who have accepted their presence.
November 8, 2009, from BBC (UK)
They said models that analyse vast areas often failed to take into account local variations, such as topography and microclimates.
Local-scale simulations, which did include these factors, often delivered a more optimistic outlook, they added.
The findings have been published in the journal, Science.... However, they added that the overall picture for biodiversity loss was still bleak, especially once the rate of habitat loss and fragmentation was taken into account.
"Predicting the fate of biodiversity in response to climate change combined with habitat fragmentation is a serious undertaking fraught with caveats and complexities," they observed.
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