Biology
Breach
July 14, 2014, from ThinkProgress.org
The company responsible for letting 10,000 gallons of a mysterious chemical seep into West Virginia's drinking water supply this past January was fined $11,000 by the U.S. Department of Labor on Monday, just two days before the six-month anniversary of the historic spill.
After inspecting the facilities at Freedom Industries' chemical storage site in Charleston, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) found that, at the time of the spill, Freedom Industries' chemical tanks containing crude MCHM had been surrounded by a wall that was not liquid tight. That violation that warranted a $7,000 fine.
OSHA also hit Freedom Industries with an additional $4,000 fine for not having railings on an elevated platform used for loading and storing the chemical in the tanks. Both violations were labeled by OSHA as "serious," warranting monetary penalties....
Wednesday marks the sixth month anniversary of the day when Freedom's tanks spilled 10,000 gallons of crude MCHM -- the licorice-scented chemical mixture used in the coal production process -- into West Virginia's Elk River, tainting the water supply for 300,000 civilians. In the aftermath, nearly 600 people checked themselves into local hospitals with what federal epidemiologists called "mild" illnesses, such as rash, nausea, vomiting, abdominal pain, and diarrhea.
July 14, 2009, from London Daily Telegraph
Creatures such as the Chinese mitten crab, which is on the rise in the Thames and other English rivers, have been able to establish themselves in new habitats after being transported from their natural homes in ballast water.
Around 7,000 marine and coastal species travel across the world's oceans every day, a report for conservation charity WWF said. Some of them become invasive in new sites, breeding prolifically by "escaping" the predators or diseases which would normally keep their numbers under control, competing with local species, disrupting food chains or damaging habitats.
The report estimated that in the last five years, invasive species have cost marine and coastal activities including fisheries, aquaculture, industrial infrastructure and harbours some £31 billion worldwide.
July 14, 2009, from Chicago Tribune
Annual water quality reports mailed to Chicagoans this month didn't say a word about sex hormones, painkillers or anti-cholesterol drugs, even though city officials found traces of pharmaceuticals and other unregulated substances in treated Lake Michigan water during the past year.
Like other cities, Chicago must notify the public if its drinking water contains certain regulated contaminants, including lead, pesticides and harmful bacteria.
But pharmaceutical chemicals, which have been detected in drinking water across the country, are not on that list.
July 14, 2009, from CNN
Pamela Hampton stands at the kitchen sink, her gaze trained out of the window of her family's small hillside home. The disaster site is not visible from where she stands, but she knows it is there, down the hill, around a short stretch of highway, less than a mile away. Six months after the largest industrial spill in U.S. history, Hampton, her husband, Charles, and their three young children say they still do not feel comfortable going outside... "It's like dumping the periodic table into everyone's drinking water," said Anna George, a scientist with the Tennessee Aquarium Research Institute who has for months been testing the waters and fish near the spill site.
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Climate
Chaos
July 14, 2013, from The Independent
"In the course of the mission, it has become apparent that ice sheets are losing substantial amounts of ice - about 300 billion tonnes a year - and that the rate at which these losses occurs is increasing," said Bert Wouters of Bristol University's Glaciology Centre....
In its last report in 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that average sea levels are rising by about 2 millimetres a year. But, other scientists calculated last year that the true rate is about 3.2mm a year - about 60 per cent faster.
"Compared to the first few years of the Grace mission, the ice sheets' contribution to sea-level rise has almost doubled in recent years," added Dr Wouters, the lead author of the study published in the Earth sciences journal Nature Geoscience.
July 14, 2011, from Guardian
Sea ice in the Arctic is melting at a record pace this year, suggesting warming at the north pole is speeding up and a largely ice-free Arctic can be expected in summer months within 30 years.
The area of the Arctic ocean at least 15 percent covered in ice is this week about 8.5m sq kilometres - lower than the previous record low set in 2007 - according to satellite monitoring by the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado. In addition, new data from the University of Washington Polar Science Centre, shows that the thickness of Arctic ice this year is also the lowest on record.
In the past 10 days, the Arctic ocean has been losing as much as 150,000 square kilometres of sea a day, said Mark Serreze, director of the NSIDC.
"The extent [of the ice cover] is going down, but it is also thinning. So a weather pattern that formerly would melt some ice, now gets rid of much more. There will be ups and downs, but we are on track to see an ice-free summer by 2030. It is an overall downward spiral."
July 14, 2011, from Huffington Post
The notion that nature itself will act as a check on the atmospheric excesses of humanity has long held a fair amount of appeal, not least because it draws on a nugget of high-school science that most people can quickly comprehend. Plants inhale carbon dioxide, after all -- they need it to grow. Add more CO2 to the air, as human civilization has been doing in copious amounts since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and the result will surely be thicker, more expansive biomass....
It's a conviction readily embraced by climate skeptics....
But scientists generally agree that the influence of increased biomass will be modest, essentially acting like a brake on a runaway freight train. It might be able to slow steadily rising temperatures, but it will hardly be enough to stop global warming in its tracks....
"To solve the carbon-climate problem, we need to transform our energy system into one that does not dump its waste into the sky," Caldeira said. "Land plants help. It looks like they won't help quite as much as we thought they would. Clearly, we can't expect nature to solve our problems for us."
July 14, 2009, from Inderscience via ScienceDaily
Attempting to tackle climate change by trapping carbon dioxide or switching to nuclear power will not solve the problem of global warming, according to energy calculations published in the July issue of the International Journal of Global Warming... The researchers have calculated that the heat energy accumulated in the atmosphere corresponds to a mere 6.6 percent of global warming, while the remaining heat is stored in the ground (31.5 percent), melting ice (33.4 percent) and sea water (28.5 percent). They point out that net heat emissions between the industrial revolution circa 1880 and the modern era at 2000 correspond to almost three quarters of the accumulated heat, i.e., global warming, during that period.
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Resource
Depletion
July 14, 2009, from New York Times via Common Dreams
JUBAISH, Iraq... The Euphrates is drying up. Strangled by the water policies of Iraq's neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now.
The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.
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Recovery
July 14, 2013, from OccupyMonsanto
On 5th July, Hon Justice Prabha Sridevi, Chair of the Intellectual Property Appellate Board of India, and Hon Shri DPS Parmar, technical member, dismissed Monsanto's appeal against the rejection of their patent application to the Patent office for "Methods of Enhancing Stress Tolerance in plants and methods thereof." The title of the patent was later amended to "A method of producing a transgenic plant, with increasing heat tolerance, salt tolerance or drought tolerance"....
270,000 farmers in India have committed suicide in India in the last decade and a half. Most of these suicides are in the cotton belt. Monsanto now controls 95 percent of the cotton seed supply through its GMO Bt cotton, and the associated Intellectual property claims. Costs of cotton seed jumped 8000 percent with the introduction of Bt cotton.
In defining seed as their creation and invention, corporations like Monsanto shaped the Global Intellectual Property and Patent Laws so that they could prevent farmers from seed saving and sharing and force them into dependence on their patented GMO seeds. This is how the Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) Agreement of the World Trade Organization was born.
July 14, 2009, from University of California - Los Angeles via ScienceDaily
...researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science are working hard to help alleviate the state's water deficit with their new mini-mobile-modular (M3) "smart" water desalination and filtration system... Though the system is compact enough to be transported anywhere in the back of a van, it can generate 6,000 gallons of drinking water per day from the sea or 8,000 to 9,000 gallons per day from brackish groundwater. By [Yoram Cohen, professor of chemical and biomolecular engineering and lead investigator on the team]'s estimate, that means producing enough drinking water daily for up to 6,000 to 12,000 people.
July 14, 2009, from Climate Wire
Federal regulators are preparing to launch "a very serious look" at requiring corporations to assess and reveal the effects of climate change on their financial health, according to a commissioner on the Securities and Exchange Commission. Initial efforts are under way, moving the commission toward a conclusion that investment groups had sought unsuccessfully throughout much of the Bush administration: forcing public companies to report the dangers they face from releasing carbon dioxide and its warming aftermath... Big emitters like oil and gas companies, for example, might have to formally reveal the output of their greenhouse gases and the disadvantages they face from federal efforts to charge polluters for every ton of carbon that's released.
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