Biology
Breach
August 19, 2014, from Associated Press
Man-made earthquakes, a side effect of some high-tech energy drilling, cause less shaking and in general are about 16 times weaker than natural earthquakes with the same magnitude, a new federal study found.
People feeling the ground move from induced quakes -- those that are not natural, but triggered by injections of wastewater deep underground-- report significantly less shaking than those who experience more normal earthquakes of the same magnitude, according to a study by U.S. Geological Survey geophysicist Susan Hough.
August 19, 2013, from Philadelphia Inquirer
About 10,000 chemicals are added to Americans' food to make it taste better or look better, to thicken it, preserve it, or otherwise improve it. That's an awful lot of chemicals for the federal Food and Drug Administration to monitor. How do they do it? It turns out that, often, they don't. According to the authors of a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this month, the agency doesn't even know what all the food additive chemicals are.
August 19, 2013, from Wiley
Since records began in 1776, the people of Youngstown, Ohio had never experienced an earthquake. However, from January 2011, 109 tremors were recorded and new research in Geophysical Research-Solid Earth reveals how this may be the result of shale fracking. The study authors analyzed the Youngstown earthquakes, finding that their onset, cessation, and even temporary dips in activity were all tied to the activity at the Northstar 1 well. The first earthquake recorded in the city occurred 13 days after pumping began, and the tremors ceased shortly after the Ohio Department of Natural Resources shut down the well in December 2011.
August 19, 2011, from EcoHearth
Other instances of leaking oil from just the past 30 odd years (millions of gallons noted in parentheses) have occurred in Kuwait during the Gulf War (240-336); Bay of Campeche, Mexico (140); Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies (88.3); Fergana Valley, Uzbekistan (87.7); Nowruz Oil Field, Persian Gulf (80); Angolan coast (80); Saldanha Bay, South Africa (78.5); off Brittany, France (68.7); off Nova Scotia, Canada (43); Genoa, Italy (42); Exxon Valdez spill off Alaska (11); and BP's Deepwater Horizon platform leak in the Gulf of Mexico (205). This in-depth EcoHearth report indicates these are but a prelude more numerous catastrophes to come....
Each day hundreds of thousands of abandoned leaking oil wells and natural-gas wells spew toxic pollutants into the environment--and tens of millions more will soon join them--thanks to fatally flawed gas and oil-well capping and lax or nonexistent industry and government oversight. A three-month EcoHearth.com investigation has revealed this developing environmental calamity that almost no one is paying attention to and that gravely threatens ecosystems worldwide.
There are at minimum 2.5 million abandoned oil and gas wells--none permanently capped--littering the US, and an estimated 20-30 million globally. There is no known technology for securely sealing these tens of millions of abandoned wells. Many--likely hundreds of thousands--are already hemorrhaging oil, brine and greenhouse gases into the environment. Habitats are being fundamentally altered. Aquifers are being destroyed. Some of these abandoned wells are explosive, capable of building-leveling, toxin-spreading detonations. And thanks to primitive capping technologies, virtually all are leaking now--or will be.
August 19, 2009, from Associated Press
No fish can escape mercury pollution. That's the take-home message from a federal study of mercury contamination released Wednesday that tested fish from nearly 300 streams across the country.
The toxic substance was found in every fish sampled, a finding that underscores how widespread mercury pollution has become.... Mercury consumed by eating fish can damage the nervous system and cause learning disabilities in developing fetuses and young children. The main source of mercury to most of the streams tested, according to the researchers, is emissions from coal-fired power plants. The mercury released from smokestacks here and abroad rains down into waterways, where natural processes convert it into methylmercury — a form that allows the toxin to wind its way up the food chain into fish.
August 19, 2009, from American Chemical Society, via EurekAlert
In the study, Lorence Oki, Darren Haver and colleagues explain that runoff results from rainfall and watering of lawns and gardens, which winds up in municipal storm drains. The runoff washes fertilizers, pesticides and other contaminants into storm drains, and they eventually appear in rivers, lakes and other bodies of water.... Preliminary results of the study suggest that current models may underestimate the amount of pollution contributed by homes by up to 50 percent. That's because past estimates focused on rain-based runoff during the wet season. "Use of pesticides, however, increases noticeably during the dry season due to gardening, and our data contains greater resolution than previous studies," Oki says.
August 19, 2009, from Press-Enterprise (CA)
An estimated 10 million to 15 million tiny baitfish went belly up at Lake Elsinore last weekend, the worst fish die-off since 2002, officials said.
Piles of dead threadfin shad still clogged the lake's shoreline Tuesday. In some spots, the stench was overpowering for drivers who had the misfortune of rolling down their windows down near the lake.
Mass fish die-offs have been a historic problem at Lake Elsinore, more so than at other Inland lakes. A shallow, naturally occurring lake about 20 miles northwest of Temecula, Lake Elsinore is replenished by runoff and recycled water, unlike other area lakes that are actually man-made reservoirs and have water imported through aqueducts.... [T]he deaths appeared to come from a combination of the seasonal shrinking of the lake due to evaporation, an increase in water temperature to about 80 degrees and possibly an algae bloom.
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Climate
Chaos
August 19, 2014, from Ecowatch
Last month, Earth's ocean surfaces tied the previous record for the hottest July during the 130 years the U.S. government has been compiling data. The National Climatic Data Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported that the average temperature was 62.56 degrees Fahrenheit, 1.06 degrees above the 20th-century average. The ocean surfaces also reached that temperature in July 2009. It's the third straight month this year that ocean surface temperatures set a record.
August 19, 2014, from Bloomberg
In stark contrast to their party's public stance on Capitol Hill, many Republicans privately acknowledge the scientific consensus that human activity is at least partially responsible for climate change and recognize the need to address the problem.... Most say the reluctance to publicly support efforts to address climate change has grown discernibly since the 2010 congressional elections, when Tea Party-backed candidates helped the Republican Party win control of the House, in part by targeting vulnerable Democrats for their support of legislation establishing a national emissions cap-and-trade system.
However, they see little political benefit to speaking out on the issue, since congressional action is probably years away, according to former congressmen, former congressional aides and other sources.
August 19, 2013, from Reuters
... Drafts seen by Reuters of the study by the U.N. panel of experts, due to be published next month, say it is at least 95 percent likely that human activities - chiefly the burning of fossil fuels - are the main cause of warming since the 1950s.
That is up from at least 90 percent in the last report in 2007, 66 percent in 2001, and just over 50 in 1995, steadily squeezing out the arguments by a small minority of scientists that natural variations in the climate might be to blame.
August 19, 2012, from Harvard, via EurekAlert
... "Over the past 19 years, a warming climate has been reshaping Massachusetts butterfly communities." Subtropical and warm-climate species such as the giant swallowtail and zabulon skipper--many of which were rare or absent in Massachusetts as recently as the late 1980s--show the sharpest increases in abundance. At the same time, more than three quarters of northerly species--species with a range centered north of Boston--are now declining in Massachusetts, many of them rapidly. Most impacted are the species that overwinter as eggs or small larvae: these overwintering stages may be much more sensitive to drought or lack of snow cover.
The study creates new questions for managing threatened species. "For most butterfly species, climate change seems to be a stronger change-agent than habitat loss. Protecting habitat remains a key management strategy, and that may help some butterfly species. However, for many others, habitat protection will not mitigate the impacts of warming," says Breed.
August 19, 2011, from Washington Post
Across the globe, plants and animals are creeping, crawling, slithering and winging to higher altitudes and latitudes as temperatures climb.
Moreover, the greater the warming in any given region, the farther its plants and animals have migrated, according to the largest analysis to date of the rapidly shifting ranges of species in Europe, North America, Chile and Malaysia....
"This more or less puts to bed the issue of whether these shifts are related to climate change. There isn't any obvious alternative explanation for why species should be moving poleward in studies around the world."...
On average, species migrated uphill 36 feet per decade and moved away from the equator -- to cooler, higher latitudes -- at 10 miles per decade. The rates are two to three times those estimated by the last major migration analysis, published in 2003....
As species shift ranges, they're coming into contact with other species in new patterns, Chen said, a phenomenon called reshuffling. But ecologists are just beginning to study how species reshuffling may affect ecosystems.
August 19, 2009, from Climate Wire
The World Bank ignored its own environmental and social protection standards when it approved nearly $200 million in loan guarantees for palm oil production in Indonesia, a stinging internal audit has found. The report, detailing five years of funding from the International Finance Corp. (IFC), the private-sector arm of the World Bank, lambastes the agency for allowing commercial pressures to influence four separate loans aimed at developing the industry.
"The IFC was aware for more than 20 years that there were significant environmental and social issues and risks inherent in the oil palm sector in Indonesia," auditors wrote. "Despite awareness of the significant issues facing it, IFC did not develop a strategy for engaging in the oil palm sector. In the absence of a tailored strategy, deal making prevailed."
August 19, 2009, from New York Times
Hard on the heels of the health care protests, another citizen movement seems to have sprung up, this one to oppose Washington’s attempts to tackle climate change. But behind the scenes, an industry with much at stake — Big Oil — is pulling the strings. The event on Tuesday was organized by a group called Energy Citizens, which is backed by the American Petroleum Institute, the oil industry’s main trade group. Many of the people attending the demonstration were employees of oil companies who work in Houston and were bused from their workplaces.
August 19, 2009, from COP15
Temperatures in the Tibetan highland are increasing far more rapidly than the global average, causing concern over Asian water supplies. Feedback may be present, leading to an acceleration of global warming.... Several major Asian rivers, including the Yangtze, begin in the Himalayas. A population of 2.7 billion depends on water supplies that originate in the mountain region.
Average temperatures in Tibet rose by 0.32 degrees C every 10 years between 1961 and 2008. This is significantly more than the rise in global mean temperature. In July this year the measured average temperature in Tibet was the highest since 1951, CMA has found. During the same month, between 30 and 80 percent less rain than normal fell in various Tibetan districts.
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Resource
Depletion
August 19, 2014, from The Conversation, via TruthOut
The world's oceans are plagued with the problem of "dead zones", areas of high nutrients (such as nitrogen and phosphorus) in which plankton blooms cause a major reduction of oxygen levels in the water. Sea creatures need oxygen to breathe just as we do, and if oxygen levels fall low enough marine animals can suffocate. This commonly happens around coastlines where fertilisers are washed from fields into rivers and the sea, but also mid-ocean, where currents trap waters in gyres (large systems of rotating ocean currents).
To date most studies have shown that these dead zones have been growing with global warming. But a recent study published in Science by Curtis Deutsch and colleagues suggests that the ocean's largest anoxic zone - where there has been a total depletion of oxygen - in the eastern tropical North Pacific, may in fact shrink due to weakening trade winds caused by global warming....
Warming also encourages water stratification, where the water separates into layers based on temperature or salinity, creating a physical barrier that prevents oxygen reaching deeper waters.
Previous studies have predicted a weakening of trade winds in tropical areas, but have also forecasted changes to low-pressure weather fronts over coastlines that would lead to stronger winds, sufficient to replace any upwelling effect lost by weaker trade winds.
August 19, 2012, from PhysOrg
With drought parching farms in the United States and near the Black Sea, weak monsoon rains in India and insidious hunger in Africa's Sahel region, the world could be headed towards another food crisis, experts say....
"We have had quite a few climate events this year that will lead to very poor harvests, notably in the United States with corn or in Russia with soja," warned Philippe Pinta of the French farmers federation FNSEA. "That will create price pressures similar to what we saw in 2007-2008," he added in reference to the last global food alert, when wheat and rice prices nearly doubled. In India, "all eyes will be on food inflation - whether the impact of a weak monsoon feeds into food prices," Samiran Chakraborty, regional head of research at Standard Chartered Bank was quoted by Dow Jones Newswires as saying.
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Recovery
August 19, 2013, from USA Today
Cities, residents and even airports are bringing in herds to clear overgrown parcels of land as an alternative to using chemicals... Goats have been used to clear brush worldwide for centuries, but they're now "catching on" in the eastern USA as a sustainable method to clear land, and more companies are deploying the animals, says Brian Knox, president of Sustainable Resource Management, which focuses on the protection and management of natural resources.
August 19, 2011, from Guardian
A cap on energy consumption is expected to be at the heart of a Chinese low-carbon plan to be issued this year, experts believe, amid reports that officials have now agreed its level.
China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, making up a quarter of the global total. Experts say setting an energy limit would add certainty to the country's attempts to rein in emissions and should make it easier for emissions trading schemes to get off the ground.
The cap has been anticipated for some time but is now thought likely to emerge in the low-carbon plan understood to have been broadly approved by a panel set up by the state council, China's cabinet, and chaired by the premier, Wen Jiabao. It should be formally passed later this year.
Reuters reported that officials have settled on a total energy cap of 4.1bn tonnes of coal equivalent (TCE) by 2015 - a level more than 25 percent higher than last year.
Analysts warn that the plan has yet to be nailed down and that a cap could still be delayed by disagreements, to re-emerge in a later policy document.
August 19, 2009, from BBC
Poor farmers in the heart of Bolivia's Amazon are being encouraged to embrace the annual floods - by using a centuries-old irrigation system for their crops.
They are experimenting with a sustainable way of growing food crops that their ancestors used.
It could provide them with better protection against the extremes of climate change, reduce deforestation, improve food security and even promise a better diet.... About 400 families are now enrolled in the project in five locations, growing mainly maize, cassava and rice.
Many of the sites are still in an experimental phase, but the early signs are promising. Productivity appears to be on the increase.
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