Biology
Breach
August 27, 2014, from Daily Kos
In a reckless, "hope-for-the-best" approach that puts us all at risk, U.S. policy allows the release of synthetic chemicals into the environment--before their potentially devastating impacts have been adequately evaluated. Multiple Senate bills to fix this toxic system over the past decade have been snuffed out.
On July 24, 2014, U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley (D-OR) introduced a bill, the "Protecting American Families from Toxic Chemicals Act" (S. 2656), which would ban a number of "persistent, bioaccumulative, and toxic" synthetic chemicals such as brominated fire (or flame) retardants (BFRs)....
BFRs enter our bodies mainly when we inhale or swallow dust. Various BFRs have been linked to cancer, thyroid disruption, memory and learning problems, delayed mental and physical development, lower IQ, early puberty, and reduced fertility. Ironically, BFRs start "fires" in our bodies by causing inflammation.
August 27, 2013, from Xinhua
Researchers from the University of Maryland and other institutions looked at records of alkalinity trends in 97 rivers from the U.S. state of Florida to the state of New Hampshire over the past 25 to 60 years and found that two-thirds of the region's rivers are becoming "significantly more alkaline."
Among the rivers impacted are those that provide water for big cities such as Washington D.C., Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Atlanta, the researchers said.
Increased alkalinity complicates drinking water and wastewater treatment, encourages algae growth, and can hasten the corrosion of metal pipe infrastructure. At high alkalinity levels, ammonia toxicity can also harm irrigated crops and fish in rivers, according to the researchers....
"This is because acid rain, acidic mining waste, and agricultural fertilizers speed the breakdown of limestone, other carbonate rocks, and even concrete and cement," the researchers said in a statement. "The result: alkaline particles are washed off of the landscape and into streams and rivers."
August 27, 2012, from New York Times
Scenes of destruction extended for blocks through the working-class neighborhood near the Amuay oil refinery on Sunday, as firefighters struggled to control blazes still burning in the plant's huge fuel storage tanks after an explosion early Saturday that has killed at least 41 people.
August 27, 2009, from Environmental Health News
Thirty years ago, a Canadian marine biologist noticed something mysterious was happening to beluga whales in the St. Lawrence Estuary. Decades of over-hunting had decimated the population, but several years after the government put a stop to the practice, the belugas still hadn't recovered.
Two decades and hundreds of carcasses later, he had an answer.
"They were dying of cancer," said Daniel Martineau, now a professor of pathology at the University of Montreal.
The white whales were victims of intestinal cancers caused by industrial pollutants released into the St. Lawrence River by nearby aluminum smelters.
Now research points to environmental pollutants as the cause of deadly cancers in several wildlife populations around the world. Normally rare in most wildlife, cancers in California sea lions, North Sea flounder and Great Lakes catfish seem to have been triggered or accelerated by environmental contaminants.
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Climate
Chaos
August 27, 2013, from Xinhua, via DesdemonaDespair
Persistent rain has brought chaos to 56 county-level regions of the province, forcing 239,000 people to be evacuated, according to the provincial civil affairs department.
At least 585,000 hectares of crops have been damaged, some 12,000 rooms destroyed, with another 146,000 damaged, leading to direct economic losses of over 10 billion yuan(1.7 billion U.S.dollars).
Rainstorms have also swept Heilongjiang and Liaoning provinces, also in northeastern China. As of Tuesday, 85 people were confirmed dead and 105 were missing in the worst floods to hit northeast China in more than a decade.
August 27, 2012, from The Hill
A spokesman for President Obama's reelection campaign suggested Thursday that climate change is unlikely to take center stage in the 2012 White House battle, noting that Obama's contrast with GOP rival Mitt Romney is already apparent.
"Clearly [climate change] is something that is important to the administration, but right now we are obviously going to be focusing on jobs and the economy and talking about what our contrast is," said Tom Reynolds.
Climate change has played little role in the Obama-Romney match-up, disappointing advocates including Al Gore.
August 27, 2012, from Washington Post
The extent of Arctic sea ice has reached a record low, a historic retreat that scientists said is a stark signal of how climate change is transforming the global landscape.
Scientists at the University of Colorado's National Snow and Ice Data Center and NASA said that, as of Sunday, the Arctic sea ice cover had shrunk to 1.58 million square miles, the smallest area since satellite measurement began in 1979. With the melting season not yet over, the ice will almost certainly contract further in the coming weeks before it begins to re-form.
August 27, 2012, from New York Times
... With many zoos and aquariums now working with conservation organizations and financed by individuals who feel strongly about threatened habitats and species, managers have been wrestling with how aggressive to be in educating visitors on the perils of climate change.
Surveys show that American zoos and aquariums enjoy a high level of public trust and are ideally positioned to teach.
Yet many managers are fearful of alienating visitors -- and denting ticket sales -- with tours or wall labels that dwell bleakly on damaged coral reefs, melting ice caps or dying trees.
August 27, 2012, from Los Angeles Times
With its bid to launch offshore drilling in the Arctic Ocean running up against a deadline to protect against sea ice, Shell Alaska has requested an extension in its window for drilling in the Chukchi Sea.
Peter E. Slaiby, vice president of the Alaska venture, said Sunday that the company has proposed extending the time allowed for drilling in the Chukchi by slightly less than two weeks beyond the Sept. 24 deadline set by the U.S. Department of Interior to allow time for cleanup of any oil spill before the onset of winter sea ice.
Meeting with reporters at an Arctic Imperative Summit here, Slaiby said the company's latest models for forecasting the onset of winter sea ice now show the first freeze-up occurring somewhat later than originally envisioned when federal officials imposed their initial deadline for ending operations in the Chukchi Sea.
August 27, 2012, from SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry
The summer's dry weather, combined with recent cool nights, could combine for a colorful fall foliage season in the Northeast, U.S. "Right now, without knowing what's going to happen in the middle of October when the fall colors start to peak regionally, it looks like it's going to be a good year for fall colors," said Dr. Donald J. Leopold, a dendrologist and Distinguished Teaching Professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry.
August 27, 2011, from New York Times Environment
For two decades, the world's governments have failed to meet their own commitment to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, the main heat-trapping gas. As frustration builds among scientists, some of them have begun to argue for research on a potential last-ditch option in case global warming starts to get out of control. It is called geoengineering -- or directly manipulating the Earth's climate....
Perhaps the single most prominent idea is to scatter sulfur compounds into the upper atmosphere, mimicking volcanic eruptions and causing some of the sun's light to bounce back to space. Other ideas include designing machines to capture carbon dioxide from the air and store it underground or in the deep ocean.
Most scientists who support this kind of research are emphatically not advocating that geoengineering schemes be undertaken now, and most of them hope society will never reach that point. But they do want a research program to quantify the potential risks and benefits, so that future political leaders will have some scientific basis if they ever have to make decisions on the issue....
The Government Accountability Office, an auditing and analysis arm of Congress, found that no geoengineering scheme could be responsibly deployed today, given the uncertainties. But it also found that a large majority of experts it interviewed were in favor of research to narrow those uncertainties. And the agency did public-opinion research that suggested the American people would favor such research, too, while also being concerned about the potential harm.
August 27, 2009, from New Scientist
Nitrous oxide, commonly known as laughing gas, is now the dominant ozone-depleting substance emitted by humans -- and is likely to remain so throughout the century, a new study suggests.
Researchers suggest use of the compound -- which is produced by the breakdown of nitrogen in fertilisers and sewage treatment plants -- should be reduced to avoid thinning the protective ozone layer that blankets the Earth....
Scientists say humans' role in producing the harmful gas has largely been overlooked. Thanks to fossil fuel combustion, which produces the gas, as well as nitrogen-based fertilisers, sewage treatment plants and other industrial processes that involve nitrogen, about one-third of the nitrous oxide emitted per year is anthropogenic.
Although supersonic transport never got off the ground, current emissions are equivalent to flying 500 such planes a day. Emission levels have increased by 0.25 per cent a year since pre-industrial times.
"Nitrous oxide is kind of the forgotten gas," says Don Wuebbles of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, who invented the method of quantifying a chemical's ozone-depletion potential but was not involved in this work. "It was always thought of as a natural thing. People have forgotten that it's been increasing."
August 27, 2009, from Environmental Research Web
Massive burning of forests for agriculture thousands of years ago may have increased atmospheric carbon dioxide enough to alter global climate and usher in a warming trend that continues today, according to a new study that appears online Aug. 17 in the journal Quaternary Science Reviews.... "They used more land for farming because they had little incentive to maximize yield from less land, and because there was plenty of forest to burn," said William Ruddiman, the lead author and a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. "They may have inadvertently altered the climate."
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Resource
Depletion
August 27, 2013, from KSU, via PNAS and ScienceDaily
If current irrigation trends continue, 69 percent of the groundwater stored in the High Plains Aquifer of Kansas will be depleted in 50 years. But immediately reducing water use could extend the aquifer's lifetime and increase net agricultural production through the year 2110....
The study investigates the future availability of groundwater in the High Plains Aquifer -- also called the Ogallala Aquifer -- and how reducing use would affect cattle and crops. The aquifer supplies 30 percent of the nation's irrigated groundwater and serves as the most agriculturally important irrigation in Kansas.
August 27, 2009, from SeekingAlpha, via DesdemonaDespair
The eighth largest oil field in the world will be dead by the end of next year. Shall I repeat that, or did you get it the first time?... The result is that Cantarell was pumped out effectively and hard, especially after the technique to re-pressurize the field was adopted. This allowed for a spike high of daily production to be captured for several years, late in its life when a field would otherwise go into gentle decline. The result? Quicker monetization of the oil for the benefit of the Mexican state. But then the price: a catastrophic, fast crash.
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Recovery
August 27, 2013, from Mongabay
Environmental activists are petitioning the World Meteorological Organization (WHO) to start naming storms after policy makers who deny human's role in driving climate change.
Campaigners with 350.org, an advocacy organization that is pushing to reduce carbon dioxide levels from the current 400 ppm to 350 ppm, have launched ClimateNameChange.org to rally support for their proposal to revise the WHO's naming system for tropical storms. Currently hurricanes, cyclones, and typhoons receive randomly selected names in alphabetical order.
Instead 350.org wants storms to be named after politicians who refuse to accept that greenhouse gas emissions are contributing to rising global temperatures. It cites Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) as examples of prominent climate change deniers.
August 27, 2011, from Summit County Voice
Working in a laboratory setting, Oregon State researchers say they've discovered a freshwater organism that eats the free-swimming spores of a fungal pathogen that's been devastating amphibian populations worldwide, including Colorado's endangered boreal toad.
This tiny zooplankton, called Daphnia magna, could provide a desperately needed tool for biological control of this deadly fungus if field studies show that the same process works in a natural setting....
"These are just your average Daphnia," zoologist and lead author Julia Buck said Friday in a telephone interview before heading into the field for more research. The small organisms are sometimes described as aquatic fleas. They're native northern and western North America and have been used for decades to test water for toxins.
"They're filter feeders ... so they're just taking in these zoospores," she said.
"There was evidence that zooplankton would eat some other types of fungi, so we wanted to find out if Daphnia would consume the chytrid fungus," said Buck, an OSU doctoral student in zoology and lead author on the study. "Our laboratory experiments and DNA analysis confirmed that it would eat the zoospore, the free-swimming stage of the fungus."
August 27, 2009, from London Times
Giant fly-swat shaped "synthetic trees" line the road into the office, where blooms of algae grow in tubes up the walls and the roof reflects heat back into the sky -- all reducing the effects of global warming.
All this could be a familiar sight within the next two decades, under proposals devised by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers to alter the world's climate with new technology.
A day after John Prescott, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Secretary, warned that negotiations for a global deal to cut carbon emissions were in danger of collapsing, the institution is recommending a series of technical fixes to "buy time" to avert dangerous levels of climate change.
It says that the most promising solution is offered by artificial trees, devices that collect CO2 through their "leaves" and convert it to a form that can easily be collected and stored.
August 27, 2009, from New York Times
...[T]he cost of solar panels has plunged lately, changing the economics for many homeowners. Mr. Hare ended up paying $77,000 for a large solar setup that he figures might have cost him $100,000 a year ago.
"I just thought, 'Wow, this is an opportunity to do the most for the least,'" Mr. Hare said.
For solar shoppers these days, the price is right. Panel prices have fallen about 40 percent since the middle of last year, driven down partly by an increase in the supply of a crucial ingredient for panels, according to analysts at the investment bank Piper Jaffray.... The price drops -- coupled with recently expanded federal incentives -- could shrink the time it takes solar panels to pay for themselves to 16 years, from 22 years, in places with high electricity costs, according to Glenn Harris, chief executive of SunCentric, a solar consulting group.
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