Biology
Breach
November 10, 2009, from New York Times
Light bulbs, bottle caps, toothbrushes, Popsicle sticks and tiny pieces of plastic, each the size of a grain of rice, inhabit the Pacific garbage patch, an area of widely dispersed trash that doubles in size every decade and is now believed to be roughly twice the size of Texas. But one research organization estimates that the garbage now actually pervades the Pacific, though most of it is caught in what oceanographers call a gyre like this one -- an area of heavy currents and slack winds that keep the trash swirling in a giant whirlpool.... PCBs, DDT and other toxic chemicals cannot dissolve in water, but the plastic absorbs them like a sponge. Fish that feed on plankton ingest the tiny plastic particles. Scientists from the Algalita Marine Research Foundation say that fish tissues contain some of the same chemicals as the plastic. The scientists speculate that toxic chemicals are leaching into fish tissue from the plastic they eat.
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Climate
Chaos
November 10, 2011, from Anchorage Daily News
At its peak, the storm surge and high tide rose seas about 10 feet above normal water levels tonight, Kearney said. "The sea level will remain steady into the early morning hours and then start to come down tomorrow morning."
To the east of Nome, in Norton Sound, peak water levels were expected to arrive later tonight with the Weather Service warning of "significant impacts" in the village of Golovin....
Winds of 93 mph were clocked late Tuesday and early Wednesday on Diomede....
Two anemometers on the island measured the hurricane-force blasts....
But "by the time it got light it was obvious that there were serious problems. We just didn't appreciate what we were experiencing until we saw it."
Waves over 30 feet high wiped everything off the whole southern portion of the island, Schmitt said. Heavy equipment and at least two metal Connex storage units were claimed by the water. A Connex weighs about 2,500 pounds empty, he said. One of the units was full of steel. It was rolled into a mangled mess. An empty Connex was washed away along with other supplies and equipment, Schmitt said. "The old man of the sea's got 'em now."
November 10, 2009, from RealClimate
... the 1978 publication by the late John Mercer, Ohio State U., who argued that a major deglaciation of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may be in progress within 50 years. This conclusion was based on the fact that the WAIS margin was ringed with stabilizing ice shelves, and that much of the ice sheet is grounded below sea level. The loss of ice shelves -- Mercer proposed -- would allow the ice sheet to thin, grounding lines to retreat and the ice sheet to disintegrate via calving. This is a much faster means of losing mass than melting in place. Mercer further commented that the loss of ice shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula, as has since been observed, would be an indicator that this process of ice sheet loss due to global warming was underway.... The increase from 2006 to 2007 was 6.4 percent at 55 km from the terminus and 4.1 percent at 171 km inland.... A separate data set, radar based was used by Rignot (2008) to identify a 42 percent acceleration of PIG between 1996 and 2007 accompanied by most of its ice plain becoming ungrounded.... Scott and others (2009) pointed out that the greater thinning toward the grounding line and terminus increased the surface slope and the gravitational driving stress, further promoting acceleration. Then Wingham and others (2009) reported that the 5400 km2 central trunk of the glacier had experienced a quadrupling in the average rate of volume loss quadrupled from 2.6 km3 a year in 1995 to 10.1 km3 a year in 2006.
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Resource
Depletion
November 10, 2014, from Kunstler, via Zero Hedge
... All of these systems have something in common: they've exceeded their fragility threshold and crossed into the frontier of criticality. They have nowhere to go except failure. It would be nice if we could construct leaner and more local systems to replace these monsters, but there is too much vested interest in them. For instance, the voters slapped down virtually every major ballot proposition to invest in light rail and public transit around the country. The likely explanation is that they've bought the story that shale oil will allow them to drive to WalMart forever.
That story is false, by the way. The politicos put it over because they believe the Wall Street fraudsters who are pimping a junk finance racket in shale oil for short-term, high-yield returns. The politicos want desperately to believe the story because the background reality is too difficult to contemplate: an American living arrangement with no future.
The public, of course, is eager to believe the same story for the same reasons, but at some point they'll flip and blame the story-tellers, and their wrath could truly wreck what remains of this polity. When it is really too late to fix any of these things, they'll beg someone to tell them what to do, and the job-description for that position is dictator....
November 10, 2009, from Telegraph.co.uk
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has been underplaying the rate of decline at existing oil fields and overestimating the potential of new reserves to avoid panic buying, a senior official alleged.
The agency last year claimed that oil production could be raised from its current rate of 83 million barrels a day to 105 million.... "Many inside the organisation believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90 million to 95 million barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further," the newspaper quoted the whistle-blower as saying.
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Recovery
November 10, 2011, from BBC
Hundreds of people - including government officials and traditional leaders - have been coming to see how the walls are built in the round architectural shape popular in northern Nigeria.
The bottles, packed with sand, are placed on their side, one on top of the other and bound together with mud... Yahaya Ahmed of Nigeria's Development Association for Renewable Energies, estimates that a bottle house will cost one third of what a similar house made of concrete and bricks would cost.
It is also more durable.
"Compacted sand inside a bottle is nearly 20 times stronger than bricks," he says. "We are even intending to build a three-storey building."
November 10, 2009, from Doc Jim
Hundreds packed the IUPUI Campus Center in Indianapolis on Monday afternoon, Nov. 9, to listen to a "professional bummer-outer." Yes, that's what Bill McKibben called himself as he opened his talk.
It was 20 years ago that McKibben published what is now considered the first general-reader book about climate change, The End of Nature. Yet, 20 years later, we are still in the pickle of a lifetime, on the brink of climate collapse for many species on the planet, including our own. It's easy to conclude, here on the eve of Copenhagen climate talks, that no progress has been made as our planet's peril becomes more irrefutable every day.
McKibben, though, is fresh from the success of International Day of Climate Action Day, Oct. 24, instigated by his 350.org group, and is in no bummer-outer mode at all. International Day of Climate Action Day was a world-wide public protest/awareness-raising, that included 5200 actions on planet Earth, all pertaining to a single data point: 350 ppm.
350 ppm is the level of CO2 emissions that our planet can handle -- without stirring up extreme weather patterns or disturbing the hydrologic cycle or causing mass extinction or massive climate migration, etc. You know, the kind of thing we ApocaDocs post every day.
You know that we've already far exceeded 350; we're hovering around 390, in fact, but still, 182 countries were represented and McKibben's slideshow at IUPUI of the actions people made were poignant and inspiring. See www.350.org to see the photos. CNN called it the "most widespread day of political action in the planet's history."
In his talk, McKibben walked us through a short history of consumerism, pointing out that 1956 was the peak year for people responding a survey that they were "very satisfied" with their lives. Now, that number is around one quarter of those surveyed. The reason for this deterioration of happiness is that we've lost our "web of connections." People cite "half the number of friends" that they used to have (and we're not counting the amorphous, quasi-fictional friends we have on Facebook).
Over these 50 years, he says, "We've built bigger and bigger houses farther apart from each other," encouraging that lack of human contact. Meanwhile, the consumer lifestyle created by readily-available (and affordable) fossil fuels is beginning to run out. And the effects of global warming are now visible almost everywhere, from the melting arctic ice to the desertification of Australia.
McKibben says our average global temp has risen one degree -- many scientists believe we'll go up 4 or 5 degrees if we don't change, fast, and McKibben remarks "we don't want to know" what a world like that will be.
To free ourselves from the trap of consumerism, we need to head in a "new direction"... that direction being how we deal with food. McKibben calls food "our basic economy" -- and points out that it's the resurgence of farmers markets that has created the context for people to interact again. Food, he points out, is usually a net gain when it comes to energy issues, but is definitely a plus when it comes to taste as well as the overall experience of buying locally-grown produce, conversing with farmers and growers, as well as other customers.
Given McKibben's activism with Step It Up and now 350.org, this college prof and Sunday School teacher has moved far beyond his role as writer -- and bummer-outer. In fact, McKibben is one of the most vital voices we have, inciting us to think deeply about sustainability and how the "local" is linked to the "global."
November 10, 2009, from Science Daily
Large blooms of tiny marine plants called phytoplankton are flourishing in areas of open water left exposed by the recent and rapid melting of ice shelves and glaciers around the Antarctic Peninsula. This remarkable colonisation is having a beneficial impact on climate change. As the blooms die back phytoplankton sinks to the sea-bed where it can store carbon for thousands or millions of years. Reporting recently in the journal Global Change Biology, scientists from British Antarctic Survey (BAS) estimate that this new natural 'sink' is taking an estimated 3.5 million tonnes* of carbon from the ocean and atmosphere each year.... *The 3.5 million tonnes of carbon taken from the ocean and atmosphere is equivalent to 12.8 million tonnes of CO2.
Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and land use change reached 8.7 billion tonnes of carbon in 2007.
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