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SEPTEMBER 2004
STUDY: WORLD'S HIGHEST ICE FIELDS WILL
NOT LAST 100 YEARS
JONATHAN WATTS, GUARDIAN - The
world's highest ice fields are melting so quickly that they are
on course to disappear within 100 years, driving up sea levels,
increasing floods and turning verdant mountain slopes into deserts,
Chinese scientists warned yesterday. After the most detailed
study ever undertaken of China's glaciers, which are said to
account for 15% of the planet's ice, researchers from the Academy
of Science said that urgent measures were needed to prepare for
the impact of climate change at high altitude. . . Until now,
most research on the subject has looked at the melting of the
polar ice-caps. Evidence from the inventory suggests that the
impact is as bad, if not worse, on the world's highest mountain
ranges - many of which are in China.
HURRICANES AND CLIMATE CHANGE
WIRED - Hurricane Ivan is among
the most powerful Atlantic storms in recent history, and more
such storms are likely in the future due to global warming, say
climate experts. "Global warming is creating conditions
that (are) more favorable for hurricanes to develop and be more
severe," said Kevin Trenberth, head of the climate analysis
section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder,
Colorado.
While few climate and hurricane
experts are willing to go that far publicly, there is little
debate that the Earth is retaining more of the sun's energy than
in the past. Emissions of gases such as carbon dioxide act as
an extra blanket that keeps some of the sun's energy from dissipating
into space. The extra energy from this "greenhouse effect"
has already warmed the Earth by about 1 degree Fahrenheit, according
to the 2001 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. The report is based on evidence and research from more
than 2,500 scientists from about 100 countries. . .
Hurricanes need exactly the
right conditions to form, and warm water and high water-vapor
levels are just two of the ingredients, said David Battisti,
an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington. However,
global warming is greatly increasing the odds in favor of more
intense and more frequent hurricanes and cyclones, Battisti said.
Where these storms will appear is very difficult to predict.
Traditional hurricane zones may not see any increase while countries
that have never experienced them will, he said.
NATURAL DISASTERS INCREASING
WITH CLIMATE CHANGE
NEWSDAY - Hurricanes, floods
and other natural disasters hit a growing number of people worldwide
and are on the increase due partly to global warming, the United
Nations' disaster reduction agency said on Friday. More than
254 million people were affected by natural hazards last year,
a near three-fold jump from 1990, according to data released
by the inter-agency secretariat of the International Strategy
for Disaster Reduction.
The random nature of disasters
renders mapping their impact more difficult as droughts in 2002
pushed the figure of people affected above 734 million. But the
long-term trend over the past decade shows a steady rise in victims,
according to the statistics from the Centre for Research on the
Epidemiology of Disaters at the University of Louvain in Belgium.
"Not only is the world
globally facing more potential disasters, but increasing numbers
of people are becoming vulnerable to hazards," the UN ISDR
said in a statement.
'BALANCED' MEDIA REPORTS DISTORTED
CLIMATE SITUATION
JENNIFER MCNULTY, UCSC CURRENTS
- Reporters and editors at four of the nation's top newspapers
adhered to the journalistic norm of balance at the expense of
accurately reporting scientific understanding of the human contributions
to global warming, according to an analysis that appears in the
current issue of the journal Global Environmental Change.
Maxwell T. Boykoff says the
coverage of global warming findings has contributed to public
confusion. "By giving equal time to opposing views, these
newspapers significantly downplayed scientific understanding
of the role humans play in global warming," said researcher
Maxwell T. Boykoff, a UCSC doctoral candidate in environmental
studies, who coauthored the paper with his brother, Jules M.
Boykoff, a visiting assistant professor of politics at Whitman
College.
In a thorough analysis of 636
articles, the Boykoffs found that:
o 52.7 percent gave "roughly
equal attention" to the views that humans contribute to
global warming and that climate change is exclusively the result
of natural fluctuations.
o 35.3 percent emphasized the
role of humans while presenting both sides of the debate, which
the Boykoffs said more accurately reflected scientific thinking
about global warming.
In compiling their sample,
the researchers focused on news stories. Of 3,543 articles, approximately
41 percent came from the New York Times, 29 percent from the
Washington Post, 25 percent from the Los Angeles Times, and 5
percent from the Wall Street Journal. . . "We were not exploring
ideological bias in the news media--whether reporters are liberal
or conservative," said Boykoff. "We looked at how the
journalistic norm of presenting competing points of view contributed
to informational bias and the disconnect between scientific findings
and public understanding."
AUGUST 2004
BRAVE NEW WORLD: PROZAC FOUND IN BRITISH
DRINKING WATER
BBC - Traces of the antidepressant
Prozac can be found in the nation's drinking water, it has been
revealed. An Environment Agency report suggests so many people
are taking the drug nowadays it is building up in rivers and
groundwater. A report in Sunday's Observer says the government's
environment watchdog has discussed the impact for human health.
A spokesman for the Drinking Water Inspectorate said the Prozac
found was most likely highly diluted.
The newspaper says environmentalists
are calling for an urgent investigation into the evidence. It
quotes the Liberal Democrats' environment spokesman, Norman Baker
MP, as saying the picture emerging looked like "a case of
hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public". .
. The DWI said the Prozac was unlikely to pose a health risk
as it was so "watered down
CALIFORNIA TO BE HARD HIT BY GLOBAL
WARMING
DEAN E. MURPHY, NY TIMES -
A scientific study released on Monday presents an alarming view
of climate changes in California, finding that by the end of
the century rising temperatures could lead to a sevenfold increase
in heat-related deaths in Los Angeles and imperil the state's
wine and dairy industries. The study, published in the online
version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
offers the most detailed projection yet of changes in California
as temperatures rise around the world because of building concentrations
of heat-trapping gases.
Under one of two scenarios,
in which fossil fuel use continues at its present pace, the study
determined that summertime high temperatures could increase by
15 degrees in some inland cities, putting their climate on par
with that of Death Valley now. That scenario also foresaw a reduction
of 73 percent to 90 percent in the snow pack in the Sierra Nevada,
resulting in disrupted water supplies from the San Francisco
Bay Area to the Central Valley.
Even in the second scenario,
which assumed significant increases in the use of renewable energy
like wind and solar power, the study concluded that fossil fuel
emissions could push average high temperatures up by four to
six degrees - the difference, one author said, between the temperature
in Yosemite National Park and downtown Sacramento.
The study warned that the higher
temperatures could have devastating consequences for wine grapes,
which could ripen more quickly and be of poorer quality, and
for cows, which could produce less milk. In cities like Los Angeles,
it found, the number of days of extreme heat could increase by
four to eight times.
OCEANS TURN ACIDIC TO DEAL WITH POLLUTION
GEOFFREY LEAN, INDEPENDENT
- The world's oceans are sacrificing themselves to try to stave
off global warming, a major international research program has
discovered. Their waters have absorbed about half of the carbon
dioxide emitted by human activities over the past two centuries,
the 15-year study has found. Without this moderating effect,
climate change would have been much more rapid and severe. But
in the process the seas have become more acid, threatening their
very life. The research warns that this could kill off their
coral reefs, shellfish and plankton, on which all marine life
depends.
News of the alarming conclusions
of the research - headed by US government scientists - follows
the discovery, reported in Friday's Independent, of a catastrophic
failure of North Sea birds to breed this summer, thought to be
the result of global warming.
The disaster - forecast in The Independent on Sunday last October
- appears to have been caused by plankton moving hundreds of
miles to the north to escape from an unprecedented warming on
the sea's waters. Sand eels - millions of which normally provide
the staple diet of many seabirds and large fish - have disappeared,
because they, in turn, depend on the plankton.
DEAD ZONE RETURNS TO GULF OF MEXICO
JEFF FRANKS, REUTERS - A huge
"dead zone" of water so devoid of oxygen that sea life
cannot live in it has spread across 5,800 square miles of the
Gulf of Mexico this summer in what has become an annual occurrence
caused by pollution. The extensive area of uninhabitable water
may be contributing indirectly to an unusual spate of shark bites
along the Texas coast, experts said. A scientist at the Louisiana
Universities Marine Consortium said on Tuesday measurements showed
the dead zone extended from the mouth of the Mississippi River
in southeastern Louisiana 250 miles west to near the Texas border
and was closer to shore than usual because winds and currents.
"Fish and swimming crabs escape (from the dead zone),"
said Nancy Rabalais, the consortium's chief scientist for hypoxia,
or low oxygen, research. "Anything else dies."
PERUVIAN GLACIER 25% SMALLER THAN A QUARTER
CENTURY AGO
REUTERS - The snow atop Pastoruri,
one of the Andes most beautiful peaks and a big draw for mountaineers
and skiers, could disappear along with many of Peru's glaciers
in the next several years because of global warming, experts
say. At 17,000 feet in the northern Andes, the glacier which
covers famed Pastoruri has shrunk at a rate of 62 feet every
year since 1980. Today it covers a surface area of 0.7 square
miles, about 25 percent less than a quarter of a century ago.
. . "If climatic conditions remain as they are, all the
glaciers (in Peru) below 18,000 feet will disappear by around
2015," CONAM's President Patricia Iturregui told Reuters
in an interview.
JULY 2004
WHALES RAISE NEW QUESTIONS ABOUT NAVY SONAR
MARC KAUFMAN WASHINGTON POST
- Residents of Hanalei Bay on the Hawaiian island of Kauai woke
up last weekend to a distressing sight: As many as 200 melon-headed
whales, a small and sociable species that usually stays in deep
waters, were swimming in a tight circle as close as 100 feet
from the beach, showing clear signs of stress. To keep the animals
from beaching, the locals kept a vigil all day and through the
night, until a flotilla of kayaks and outrigger canoes could
be assembled to herd the animals back out to sea. So far, only
one young whale has been found dead.
But among increasingly worried
whale advocates and researchers, the event set off immediate
alarm bells: Melon-headed whales are not known to beach themselves,
and nothing like this mass stranding close call has occurred
in Hawaii for 150 years.
Attention quickly focused on
the Navy and its use of active sonar -- a wall of sound sent
out to find underwater objects that can reach the decibel levels
of a jet engine. Sonar has been implicated in several recent
mass whale strandings around the world, and the latest research
has strengthened the association and suggested that the number
of incidents may be far greater than anyone realized. The most
recent study found that over the past 40 years, mass strandings
of the most noise-sensitive whales off Japan occurred repeatedly
in the waters near a U.S.-run naval base, but were unknown in
comparable areas elsewhere.
Several hours after the Hanalei
Bay episode began, locals learned that a six-ship Navy fleet
20 miles out to sea had begun a sonar exercise the morning that
the melon-headed whales headed toward shore.
POLLUTION CHANGES SEX OF FISH
BBC - A third of male fish
in British rivers are in the process of changing sex due to pollution
in human sewage, research by the Environment Agency suggests.
A survey of 1,500 fish at 50 river sites found more than a third
of males displayed female characteristics. Hormones in the sewage,
including those produced by the female contraceptive pill, are
thought to be the main cause. The agency says the problem could
damage fish populations by reducing their ability to reproduce.
JUNE 2004
ANGIE WAGNER, ASSOCIATED
PRESS - The drought gripping the West could be the biggest in
500 years, with effects in the Colorado River basin considerably
worse than during the Dust Bowl years, scientists at the U.S.
Geological Survey said Thursday. "That we can now say with
confidence," said Robert Webb, lead author of the new fact
sheet. . .
The report said the drought has produced the lowest flow in the
Colorado River on record, with an adjusted annual average flow
of only 5.4 million acre-feet at Lees Ferry, Ariz., during the
period 2001-2003. By comparison, during the Dust Bowl years,
between 1930 and 1937, the annual flow averaged about 10.2 million
acre-feet, the report said. Scientists use tree-ring reconstructions
of Colorado River flows to estimate what conditions were like
before record-keeping began in 1895. Using that method, the lowest
five-year average of water flow was 8.84 million acre-feet in
the years 1590-1594. From 1999 through last year, water flow
has been 7.11 million acre-feet. The report said the river had
its highest flow of the 20th century from 1905 to 1922, the years
used to estimate how much water Western states would receive
under the Colorado River Compact.
ALARM
SOUNDED ON GLOBAL WARMING
JULIET EILPERIN WASHINGTON POST
- Ten of the nation's
top climate researchers warned yesterday that policymakers must
act soon to address the dangers associated with global warming,
which they described as a looming threat that will hit hardest
and soonest at the world's poor and at farmers. "By
mid-century, millions more poor children around the world are
likely to face displacement, malnourishment, disease and even
starvation unless all countries take action now to slow global
warming" and sea-level rises that will follow, Michael Oppenheimer,
who teaches geosciences and international affairs at Princeton
University, said at a conference. "Imagine the difficulties
faced by families in Bangladesh. An area where about 8 million
people now live would be underwater if global sea level were
to rise half a meter. Where are they going to go?"
The day-long conference, organized by Donald Kennedy, editor
of Science magazine, and Albert Teich, director of science and
policy for the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
was aimed at convincing the public and politicians that there
is ample evidence that the buildup of carbon dioxide is transforming
ecosystems worldwide. . . Kennedy called climate change "the
most serious issue" we face and said the scientific community
must "make a clear expression" on the subject. The
academics emphasized that if international leaders do not act
soon, they will not have the option of reversing global warming.
David S. Battisti, who teaches at the University of Washington,
said it is "a huge risk" not to curb greenhouse gases.
"You have to start doing things now," he said. "To
undo it or stop it is not possible."
DEAD
ZONES INCREASING IN WORLD'S COASTAL WATERS
EARTH POLICY INSTITUTE - Worldwide, there are some 146
dead zones--areas of water that are too low in dissolved oxygen
to sustain life. Since the 1960s, the number of dead zones has
doubled each decade. Many are seasonal, but some of the low-oxygen
areas persist year-round.
What is killing fish and other living systems in these coastal
areas? A complex chain of events is to blame, but it often starts
with farmers trying to grow more food for the world's growing
population. Fertilizers provide nutrients for crops to grow,
but when they are flushed into rivers and seas they fertilize
microscopic plant life as well. In the presence of excessive
concentrations of nitrogen and phosphorus, phytoplankton and
algae can proliferate into massive blooms. When the phytoplankton
die, they fall to the seafloor and are digested by microorganisms.
This process removes oxygen from the bottom water and creates
low-oxygen, or hypoxic, zones.
Dead zones range in size from small sections of coastal bays
and estuaries to large seabeds spanning some 70,000 square kilometers.
Most occur in temperate waters, concentrated off the east coast
of the United States and in the seas of Europe. Others have appeared
off the coasts of China, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand.
Forty-three of the world's known dead zones occur in U.S. coastal
waters. The one in the Gulf of Mexico, now the world's second
largest, disrupts a highly productive fishery that provides some
18 percent of the U.S. annual catch. Gulf shrimpers and fishers
have had to move outside of the hypoxic area to find fish and
shrimp. Landings of brown shrimp, the most economically important
seafood product from the Gulf, have fallen from the record high
in 1990, with the annual lows corresponding to the highly hypoxic
years.
STUDY: POWER
PLANT POLLUTION CAUSES HEART ATTACKS
POWER PLANT POLLUTION cuts short nearly 24,000 lives,
including 2,800 from lung cancer, and causes 38,200 heart attacks
each year according to a new study on the environment from Clear
the Air. The study found that each of those people whose lives
were cut short because of power plant pollution lost an average
of 14 years, dying earlier than they would have otherwise. Dirty
Air, Dirty Power is based on an analysis by the U.S. Environmental
Protection Agency's own air quality consultants using standard
EPA methodology.
The report
compares the premature deaths that would result under the Bush
administration's air pollution plan, the existing Clean Air Act,
and a proposal sponsored by Senator Jim Jeffords to strengthen
the Clean Air Act. The Administration's proposal would allow
4,000 preventable premature deaths each year compared with simply
enforcing current law, while repealing the very safeguards that
could save those lives.
SUPREME COURT APPROVES UNSAFE MEXICAN TRUCKS ON U.S.
ROADS
TOM
RAMSTACK WASHINGTON TIMES - The Supreme Court ruled unanimously
yesterday that the Bush administration can open U.S. roadways
to Mexican trucks without first doing an environmental study.
The ruling overturns a U.S. appeals court decision requiring
the Department of Transportation to review the impact of Mexican
trucks on air quality, and it means the roads can be opened to
them as soon as the administration wants.
Labor and environmental groups had opposed granting Mexican
trucks free access across the border, saying they do not meet
U.S. safety and environmental standards. The Bush administration
has said it would open the border to Mexican trucks as soon as
all legal obstacles are cleared to comply with the 1993 North
American Free Trade Agreement among the United States, Canada
and Mexico. . .
Teamsters General President James P. Hoffa said yesterday
the ruling was dangerous. "By allowing the Bush administration
to move forward with its plan to open the border, this decision
represents a setback for all who advocate for safe roads, clean
air and a secure America.
PUTTING AMERICA'S WATER SUPPLY ON DRUGS
ENIVRONMENTAL NEWS NETWORK - Every time you swallow a pill, some
of that medicine follows a circuitous path through your body,
down the toilet, through the sewage treatment plant (where if
is often resistant to traditional treatments) and into the nearest
river or lake, where it is eventually tapped again for the public
drinking water supply. According to Christian Daughton, chief
of environmental chemistry at the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency's National Environmental Research Laboratory in Las Vegas,
new technologies now allow scientists to detect in water extremely
low levels of prescription and over-the-counter drugs as well
as compounds found in personal care products like shampoo and
sun screen.
In Kansas City alone, more
than 40 percent of stream samples analyzed recently by the U.S.
Geological Survey had detectable amounts of over-the-counter-drugs
like ibuprofen and acetaminophen, antibiotics, and prescription
medications for high blood pressure. While the effects on human
health of drug residues in water are not yet a serious concern,
new studies show that fish and other aquatic species may be affected,
said Daughton. Antibiotics make some species more resistant to
pathogens, steroids can cause endocrine disruption that interferes
with reproductive processes, and antidepressants make fish tranquil
and more likely to succumb to predation.
FLYING HAS HUGE COST FOR EARTH
REUTERS - Environmentalists
say airlines rate as one of the most polluting forms of transport,
with 16,000 commercial jets producing over 600 million tons of
carbon dioxide every year. Climate change, caused by greenhouse
gases such as carbon dioxide, is deemed by many experts to be
the biggest long-term threat to mankind. They predict rapidly
rising temperatures prompting higher sea levels, devastating
floods and droughts.
The United Nations Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change estimates aviation causes 3.5 percent
of man-made global warming and that figure could rise to 15 percent
by 2050. NASA scientists say condensation trails from jet exhausts
create cirrus clouds that may trap heat rising from the Earth's
surface. This could account for nearly all the warming over the
United States between 1975 and 1994. And air travel is booming.
MAY 2004
NEW SCIENTIST, UK - Fears that the UK's nuclear plants
are vulnerable to a 9/11-style attack or accident are growing.
Evidence is emerging that the no-fly zones around nuclear plants
are regularly breached by both military and civilian aircraft.
And a report for the UK parliament leaked to New Scientist says
that such an attack might kill millions.
Since the 2001 attacks on New
York and Washington DC, the area of the ban has been doubled
to cover a radius of two nautical miles. Planes also have to
stay above a certain height, which varies for different sites.
But these restrictions have been flouted on numerous occasions.
Over the past five years, the operators of 19 nuclear sites around
Britain have lodged more than 100 complaints about aircraft flying
too close. The sites include reactors and stores of radioactive
waste or nuclear bombs.
Declassified reports from the
Ministry of Defence reveal that there were 56 alleged breaches
of the no-fly zones by military aircraft between 2000 and 2003.
CANADIAN JUDGES SIDE WITH MONSANTO IN GM CASE
KRISTEN PHILIPKOSKI, WIRED
- The Canadian Supreme Court Friday narrowly upheld a ruling
against a farmer who used genetically modified canola seeds patented
by Monsanto while replanting his field. In a 5-4 decision, the
court sided with the biotech giant, which sued Percy Schmeiser
in 1997 after Monsanto agents found the company's patented gene
in canola plants on his farm near Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. The
court agreed that he stole Monsanto's seed, even though Schmeiser
maintained that he inadvertently used seed that had blown into
his field.
Despite the ruling, Schmeiser,
73, said the decision is a personal victory because the court
also ruled that he did not profit from the seed. Schmeiser will
not have to pay the $200,000 sought by Monsanto to cover court
costs and the profit the company said Schmeiser had gained by
using its seed. "This has been a personal victory, because
the court ruled against Monsanto for the cost of trial and profits,"
Schmeiser said Friday morning during a press conference. "I
look at the big picture. It's not the victory we were looking
for, but I and my wife have done everything possible to bring
it this far, and to me that is a victory."
BUSH REGIME WANTS 'ORGANIC' TO BE AS MEANINGLESS
AS 'IRAQI SOVREIGNTY'
CAROL NESS, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
- A showdown is taking shape over the nation's organic food standards,
triggered by a spate of recent rule changes that some producers
and activists say are setting a pattern that could eventually
render the organic label meaningless.
The changes in the National
Organic Program standards, made in April, expand the use of antibiotics
and hormones in organic dairy cows, allow more pesticides in
the organic arsenal and for the first time let organic livestock
eat potentially contaminated fishmeal. Program administrators
also reversed themselves and said seafood, pet food and body
care products can use "organic" on their labels without
meeting any standards at all.
And in what the $11 billion
organic food industry, consumer and farm groups call a dangerous
precedent, program administrators made last month's changes in
three "guidances" and one "directive" without
seeking public comment or consulting with their own advisers
on the National Organics Standards Board. . .
A coalition of organic interests,
including the powerful Consumers Union, says the interpretations
represent major changes that could threaten the integrity of
the program, which set a high standard for what products qualify
as organic. And they say administrators risk undermining trust
in the program by leaving the public, including its own advisory
board, out of the decision- making. Sounding a national alarm,
the coalition is pressuring the U.S. Department of Agriculture
to retract the changes and keep the public involved.
EAGLE MAKES A COMEBACK
FELICITY
BARRINGER, NY TIMES - The bald eagle, whose majestic profile
was in danger of disappearing from the American wild 40 years
ago, has returned in such force that only two states lack breeding
pairs and the bird is likely to be removed from the list of threatened
species by the year's end. . . The tentative decision, likely
to go into effect more than five years after it was first proposed
by the Interior Department, is being hailed by some environmentalists
as a tribute to the effectiveness of the Endangered Species Act,
although some biologists have expressed concern that the expansion
of subdivisions and summer homes will deprive the burgeoning
eagle population of nesting sites.
Nonetheless,
"There's no question it's a fantastic conservation story,"
said Bryan D. Watts, the director of the Center for Conservation
Biology at the College of William and Mary in Virginia. . . Nationwide
last year there were 7,678 nesting pairs; only Vermont and Rhode
Island had none, according to federal statistics.
EUROPEAN COASTLINE ERODING
REUTERS
- A fifth of Europe's coastline is being eaten away by the sea
and increasingly frequent storms and floods, the European Commission
has found. A study commissioned by the European Union's executive
and published on Monday found that coastlines in the EU are retreating
on average by between 0.5 and two meters a year - up to 15 meters
in some cases - resulting in houses toppling into the ocean and
coastal roads crumbling.
Fifty-five
per cent of Poland's coastline was being eroded, the study said,
adding that the effects differed depending on the type of coastline.
One-quarter of the Belgian coast, for example, is eroding as
two-thirds of it consists of beaches. However, the Finnish coast
is hardly eroding as it is hard rock.
REGULATORS BLASTED
ON NUCLEAR PLANT OVERSIGHT
CLEVELAND
PLAIN DEALER - The Nuclear Regulatory Commission's refusal to
fix the deep oversight flaws that caused it to miss a rust hole
in the Davis-Besse nuclear reactor means there may be major incidents
at other plants, congressional investigators say. In a scathingly
critical report, the General Accounting Office concludes that
the NRC in November 2001 miscalculated the risk to the public
of letting Davis-Besse continue to run with suspected reactor
leaks. The pineapple-sized rust hole was found three months later.
The agency
has since estimated the plant was as close as 60 days to an accident
rivaling the partial meltdown at Three Mile Island. The agency's
handling of Davis-Besse is symptomatic of longstanding, deeply
rooted problems with the way the NRC polices the nation's 103
nuclear plants, investigators say.
WARMING ARCTIC FOILS EXPLORER
OTTOWA
CITIZEN - A British explorer who was forced to abandon his quest
to trek solo across the North Pole from Russia to Canada says
global warming has melted so much of the polar ice cap he doubts
anyone will be able to accomplish the feat. Briton Ben Saunders,
26, who reached the Pole last Tuesday, had to be rescued Friday
night about 50 kilometers on the Canadian side when open water
made it impossible for him to continue the journey. He was airlifted
to Ottawa Saturday night. "The weather this year was the
warmest since they began keeping records," Mr. Saunders
said yesterday. . .
This was
Mr. Saunders' third Arctic expedition, and given the changes
he has seen since 2001, he believes global warming has made it
unlikely that anyone will ever be able to complete a crossing
of the Arctic Ocean -- at least not by skiing or walking; although
a hybrid crossing with a boat may still be possible.
"I've
never seen myself as an eco-warrior," Mr. Saunders wrote
on his website a few days before reaching the Pole. "I've
been wary of taking a stance on climate change, as I don't believe
we know enough about what's going on, but it's obvious that things
are changing fast. It's an issue I'll certainly be taking far
more interest in."
COW MANURE POWERS FARMS
SUN, UK
- Farmers, in Marin Country [CA] have installed a new £160,000
methane digester to process [manure] and turn it into electricity.
Workers load the machine with dung from their herd of 270 cows
which then powers the farm and creamery. The machine is expected
to generate 600,000 kilowatts of electricity per year and save
around £4,000 in bills. The digester is the fifth of its
kind in California and has been welcomed by environmentalists
because it helps cut emissions of harmful gases.
EARTH GROWS DIMMER
KENNETH CHANG, NY TIMES
- In the second half of the 20th century, the world became, quite
literally, a darker place. Defying expectation and easy explanation,
hundreds of instruments around the world recorded a drop in sunshine
reaching the surface of Earth, as much as 10 percent from the
late 1950's to the early 90's, or 2 percent to 3 percent a decade.
In some regions like Asia, the United States and Europe, the
drop was even steeper. In Hong Kong, sunlight decreased 37 percent.
No one is predicting that
it may soon be night all day, and some scientists theorize that
the skies have brightened in the last decade as the suspected
cause of global dimming, air pollution, clears up in many parts
of the world. Yet the dimming trend - noticed by a handful of
scientists 20 years ago but dismissed then as unbelievable -
is attracting wide attention. . .
"There could be a
big gorilla sitting on the dining table, and we didn't know about
it," said Dr. Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate
and atmospheric sciences at the University of California, San
Diego. "There are many, many issues that it raises.".
. .
Pollution dims sunlight
in two ways, scientists theorize. Some light bounces off soot
particles in the air and goes back into outer space. The pollution
also causes more water droplets to condense out of air, leading
to thicker, darker clouds, which also block more light. For that
reason, the dimming appears to be more pronounced on cloudy days
than sunny ones. Some less polluted regions have had little or
no dimming. The dynamics of global dimming are not completely
understood. Antarctica, which would be expected to have clean
air, has also dimmed.
BUSH REGIME FAKING ORGANIC STANDARDS
UTNE READER
- Feeling confident that the fish you are frying for dinner is
"organic" or that the shampoo you slather into your
hair is free of the kinds of chemicals that could make it fall
out prematurely? Don't be too sure, now that the Bush administration
has pulled the plug on policing organic labels on non-agricultural
products. The decision made by the U.S. Department of Agriculture's
National Organic Program on April 14 is "literally opening
the door for unscrupulous companies to put bogus organic labels
on products such as fish, body care products, pet foods, fertilizer,
and clothing," writes the Organic Consumers Association
on its website.
As if
this isn't scary enough, the USDA announced controversial new
directives on national organic standards on April 28 that basically
state: "ignorance is bliss." The Organic Consumer Association
reports, "as long as the farmer and the organic certifier
don't know the specific ingredients of the pesticides applied
to the 'organic' plants, the crops can be sold as 'organic.'"
Meanwhile,
the USDA will now allow cattle and beef that were fed non-organic
fishmeal frequently containing mercury and other dangerous chemicals
to be sold as "organic."
TOP BRITISH SCIENTIST CALLS ICE AGE MOVIE
REALISTIC
[Your
faithful journal was raising this issue in the 1990s, but never
thought of writing a screenplay]
STEVE
CONNOR, INDEPENDENT, UK - The Hollywood blockbuster that depicts
a sudden ice age brought about by climate change is "remarkably
realistic" in parts, says the Government's chief scientist.
Sir David King said The Day After Tomorrow, which he watched
yesterday at a private screening in London, will increase the
public's awareness of a threat he once described as worse than
terrorism. But he added that it plays fast and loose with some
of the science of climate change. "I welcome the movie in
the sense that it raises the profile of a critically important
public debate about global warming and the need to persuade governments
to take action now," Sir David said.
The catastrophic
climatic events of the film's storyline are triggered by the
Gulf Stream - the warm current that flows into the North Atlantic
- coming to a sudden halt. This brings a dramatic and instant
ice age to North America and Europe. . .
Climate
scientists know that a warmer planet could slow down the Gulf
Stream, but none of the computer models predicts its complete
halt, and all suggest that climate change will result in a warmer
rather than colder world, Sir David said. "The current consensus
is that climate change may result in a weakening of the Gulf
Stream but not a complete halt," he said. "The cooling
caused by a weakened Gulf Stream would not actually counteract
the general warming caused by increased greenhouse gases. Northern
Europe is more likely to get warmer than colder."
EARTH GETTING WETTER TO FIGHT WARMING
AMANDA
HODGE, AUSTRALIAN - The Earth may be fighting back against global
warming, say scientists who believe the world is getting wetter
as it warms, improving the planet's ability to soak up carbon
dioxide. Research from Australian scientists released during
the annual science meeting of the Co-operative Research Centre
for Greenhouse Accounting, supports the notion that the Earth
is self-regulating. The canter's communiqué suggests that,
contrary to popular perceptions, the earth is getting wetter
- not necessarily through greater rainfall but through a reduction
in evaporation caused by cloudier days that prompt more efficient
photosynthesis. . .
In Australia
that trend could already be seen in the tropical north, where
grasslands were being replaced by woodlands, although scientists
had still to determine whether that was caused by warmer temperatures
or by factors including changes in grazing and fire regimes.
Scientists expect that trend will continue. "The CRC's work
suggests the global biosphere is more resilient than we first
thought," Dr Mitchell said. "It's certainly going to
be debated within the science community but ... if we continue
to deforest and burn the benefits of this resilience won't last.
What we do know is if we push the system in the wrong direction
we could make global climate change worse."
DENVER TO BE SHORT OF WATER BY 2030
ROCKY
MOUNTAIN NEWS - Colorado's South Platte River Basin, including
the foothills and portions of metro Denver, will need an additional
52,000 acre-feet of water by 2030, enough for up to 100,000 families.
But the region could need much more if cities such as Denver,
Thornton and Centennial, as well as unincorporated areas of Jefferson,
Douglas and Adams counties, fail in their attempts to develop
water projects already on their planning books, according to
a groundbreaking report on the state's water supplies.
WESTERN DROUGHT MAY BE MORE THAN A PASSING
THING
NY TIMES
- At five years and counting, the drought that has parched much
of the West is getting much harder to shrug off as a blip. Those
who worry most about the future of the West - politicians, scientists,
business leaders, city planners and environmentalists - are increasingly
realizing that a world of eternally blue skies and meager mountain
snowpacks may not be a passing phenomenon but rather the return
of a harsh climatic norm.
Continuing
research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this
out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across
much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other
words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures
say, the development of the modern urbanized West - one of the
biggest growth spurts in the nation's history - may have been
based on a colossal miscalculation.
That shift
is shaking many assumptions about how the West is run. Arizona,
California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, the
states that depend on the Colorado River, are preparing for the
possibility of water shortages for the first time since the Hoover
Dam was built in the 1930's to control the river's flow. The
top water official of the Bush administration, Bennett W. Raley,
said recently that the federal government might step in if the
states could not decide among themselves how to cope with dwindling
supplies, a threat that riled local officials but underscored
the growing urgency.
APRIL 2004
REUTERS
- Anyone
who doubts the gravity of global warming should ask Alaska's
Eskimo, Indian and Aleut elders about the dramatic changes to
their land and the animals on which they depend. Native leaders
say that salmon are increasingly susceptible to warm-water parasites
and suffer from lesions and strange behavior. Salmon and moose
meat have developed odd tastes and the marrow in moose bones
is weirdly runny, they say. Arctic pack ice is disappearing,
making food scarce for sea animals and causing difficulties for
the Natives who hunt them. It is feared that polar bears, to
name one species, may disappear from the Northern hemisphere
by mid-century. As trees and bushes march north over what was
once tundra, so do beavers, and they are damming new rivers and
lakes to the detriment of water quality and possibly salmon eggs.
Still,
to the frustration of Alaska Natives, many politicians in the
lower 48 U.S. states deny that global warming is occurring or
that a warmer climate could cause problems. "They obviously
don't live in the Arctic," said Patricia Cochran, executive
director of the Alaska Native Science Commission. . .
Climate
and weather changes even affect human safety, said Orville Huntington,
vice chairman of the Alaska Native Science Commission."It
looks like winter out there, but if you've really been around
a long time like me, it's not winter," said Huntington,
an Athabascan Indian from the interior Alaska village of Huslia.
"If you travel that i
HOW TO CUT AIR CONDITIONING COSTS BY 40%
LOW IMPACT LIVING
CALIFORNIA FORCED TO TURN TO PACIFIC OCEAN
FOR WATER
DAN GLAISTER, GUARDIAN
- Some 90% of California's water is piped more than 250 miles
to its consumers, the majority of it from the Colorado River.
But with that supply endangered by declining levels, rising costs
and contamination - and with memories still fresh of the droughts
of the 1970s and 1980s - attention is turning to alternative
sources. Eighteen desalination plants are under consideration
in California, offering a possible way out of the state's seemingly
inexorable water crisis. about the presence of foreign-owned
companies in the sector.
JIM ERICKSON, ROCKY MOUNTAIN NEWS
- Unexpectedly
high levels of mercury have been found in trout pulled from high-altitude
lakes in Rocky Mountain National Park, researchers said Wednesday.
The most severely contaminated trout contained only half the
amount of mercury that the Environmental Protection Agency considers
hazardous for human consumption. Even so, the finding was a bit
of a surprise, said Donald H. Campbell, a research hydrologist
with the U.S. Geological Survey in Denver. "They're not
really high levels, but perhaps higher than one would have expected
at high-mountain Colorado lakes," Campbell said. "The
park is more pristine than a lot of places, but it's not totally
unaffected by the activities of society," he said at the
Rocky Mountain National Park Research Conference.
WASHINGTON POST - The rate of deforestation in
Brazil's Amazon rose 2.1 percent last year as farmers encroached
on the world's largest jungle, the government said yesterday.
MARCH 2004
DEAD ZONES GROWING IN THE OCEANS
MICHAEL MCCARTHY, INDEPENDENT,
UK - Marine "dead zones" - oxygen-starved areas of
the oceans that are devoid of fish - are one of the greatest
environmental problems facing the world, UN scientists warned
yesterday. There are nearly 150 dead zones across the globe,
they are increasing, and they pose as big a threat to fish stocks
as over-fishing, the United Nations Environment Program . . .
These lifeless areas of the sea are caused by an excess of nutrients,
mainly nitrogen, that originate from heavy use of agricultural
fertilizers, from vehicle and factory emissions and from human
wastes. They have doubled in number over the last decade, with
some extending over 70,000 square kilometers (27,000 square miles),
about the size of Ireland, UNEP said. Dead zones have long afflicted
the Gulf of Mexico and Chesapeake Bay off the East Coast of America
but they are now spreading to other bodies of water, such as
the Baltic Sea, the Black Sea, the Adriatic, the Gulf of Thailand
and the Yellow Sea as other regions develop, UNEP said.
CARBON DIOXIDE REPORTED AT RECORD LEVELS
CHARLES
J. HANLEY, AP - Carbon dioxide, the gas largely blamed for global
warming, has reached record-high levels in the atmosphere after
growing at an accelerated pace in the past year, say scientists
monitoring the sky from this 2-mile-high station atop a Hawaiian
volcano. The reason for the faster buildup of the most important
"greenhouse gas" will require further analysis, the
U.S. government experts say. . . Carbon dioxide, mostly from
burning of coal, gasoline and other fossil fuels, traps heat
that otherwise would radiate into space. Global temperatures
increased by about 1 degree Fahrenheit (0.6 degrees Celsius)
during the 20th century, and international panels of scientists
sponsored by world governments have concluded that most of the
warming probably was due to greenhouse gases.
GREENHOUSE GASES CHANGING AMAZON FORESTS
UN WIRE
- The Amazon's most remote regions have changed dramatically
over the past two decades, with slower-growing trees losing out
to other species in what scientists believe is a manifestation
of climate change, the London Independent reports today. Faster-growing
tree varieties are starting to dominate because the Amazon is
being artificially "fertilized" with increased levels
of carbon dioxide, the scientists said in a study published in
Nature.
The resulting
change in composition could harm the rainforest's ability to
absorb excess levels of the harmful greenhouse gas, according
to William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute.
Laurance,
along with the University of Sao Paulo's Alexandre Oliveira and
other researchers, studied the growth of nearly 14,000 trees
in 18 plots of land scattered throughout 120 square miles. They
found that 27 tree types in the Amazon out of a total of 115
had changed significantly, either by increasing or decreasing
in growing density.
Their
findings were particularly startling, according to Laurance,
because the scientists chose remote regions not affected by human
activities such as logging and deforestation.
"It's
a little scary to realize that seemingly pristine forests can
change so quickly and dramatically," he said. "Sadly,
this could be a signal that the forest's ecology is changing
in fundamental ways."
GM VARIETIES SAID TO HAVE CONTAMINATED TWO-THIRDS
OF ALL U.S. CROPS
GEOFFREY
LEAN, INDEPENDENT, UK - More than two-thirds of conventional
crops in the United States are now contaminated with genetically
modified material - dooming organic agriculture and posing a
severe future risk to health - a new report concludes. The report
- which comes as ministers are on the verge of approving the
planting of Britain's first GM crop, maize - concludes that traditional
varieties of seed are "pervasively contaminated" by
genetically engineered DNA. The US biotech industry says it is
"not surprised" by the findings.
Because
of the contamination, the report says, farmers unwittingly plant
billions of GM seeds a year, spreading genetic modification throughout
US agriculture. This would be likely to lead to danger to health
with the next generation of GM crops, bred to produce pharmaceuticals
and industrial chemicals - delivering "drug-laced cornflakes"
to the breakfast table...
The degree
of contamination is thought to be at a relatively low level of
about 0.5 to 1 per cent. The reports says that "contamination
... is endemic to the system". It adds: "Heedlessly
allowing the contamination of traditional plant varieties with
genetically engineered sequences amounts to a huge wager on our
ability to understand a complicated technology that manipulates
life at the most elemental level." There could be "serious
risks to health" if drugs and industrial chemicals from
the next generation of GM crops got into food.
EPA HAS MISLED ON QUALITY OF NATION’S
WATER
DAVID
NAKAMURA WASHINGTON POST - The U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency has overstated the purity of the nation's drinking water
in four recent years, potentially leaving millions of people
at risk, according to a new report. From 1999 through 2002, the
EPA announced that it met its goal that 91 percent of U.S. residents
have access to safe tap water. But the data the EPA used to make
those conclusions were "flawed and incomplete" because
states did not report all violations to the federal agency, stated
a report released this week by Kwai Chan, the EPA's assistant
inspector general.
Despite
that, the EPA trumpeted the inaccurate rates to the media, giving
a false impression to the public, Chan said. The EPA's documents
show that some agency officials believe that in 2002, only about
81 percent of the jurisdictions monitored had safe drinking water,
far lower than the official agency estimate of 94 percent for
that year. The lower number would put roughly 30 million additional
people at potential risk.
SMOKESCREEN AFFECTS GLOBAL WARMING
NEW SCIENTIST
- Smoke is clouding our view of global warming, protecting the
planet from perhaps three-quarters of the greenhouse effect.
That might sound like good news, but experts say that as the
cover diminishes in coming decades, we are in for a dramatic
escalation of warming that could be two or even three times as
great as official best guesses. This was the dramatic conclusion
reached last week at a workshop in Dahlem, Berlin, where top
atmospheric scientists got together, including Nobel laureate
Paul Crutzen and Swedish meteorologist Bert Bolin, former chairman
of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
IPCC scientists
have suspected for a decade that aerosols of smoke and other
particles from burning rainforest, crop waste and fossil fuels
are blocking sunlight and counteracting the warming effect of
carbon dioxide emissions. Until now, they reckoned that aerosols
reduced greenhouse warming by perhaps a quarter, cutting increases
by 0.2 C. So the 0.6 C of warming over the past century would
have been 0.8 C without aerosols.
But the
Berlin workshop concluded that the real figure is even higher
- aerosols may have reduced global warming by as much as three-quarters,
cutting increases by 1.8 C. If so, the good news is that aerosols
have prevented the world getting almost two degrees warmer than
it is now. But the bad news is that the climate system is much
more sensitive to greenhouse gases than previously guessed. As
those gases are expected to continue accumulating in the atmosphere
while aerosols stabilize or fall, that means "dramatic consequences
for estimates of future climate change", the scientists
agreed in a draft report from the workshop.
GEOGRAPHY AFFECTS LEVELS OF POLLUTION
GRAHAM TIBBETTS, TELEGRAPH
UK - A country's geography could have a significant impact on
the amount of carbon dioxide it produces, new research suggests.
Wealth has long been seen as the key factor in determining the
level of carbon dioxide produced, with western nations causing
greater pollution than developing states. But a study published
today in the Royal Geographical Society's respected journal Area
indicates that climate, population and natural resources could
all affect greenhouse gas emissions. Countries with cold average
minimum temperatures or a large number of frosty days produced
more carbon dioxide in meeting heating requirements.
Large nations with scattered
populations suffered high pollution as a result of their reliance
on transport. By contrast, countries blessed with renewable energy
resources, such as high-altitude lakes capable of producing hydro-electric
power, were likely to have lower emissions.
The report, based on data
from 163 countries, challenges the foundations of the 1997 Kyoto
protocol, which based targets for greenhouse gas reductions primarily
on economic analysis.
Its author, Dr Eric Neumayer,
of the London School of Economics' department of geography and
environment, said future discussions on reducing carbon dioxide
emissions should take account of a country's physical characteristics.
WORLD'S SECOND LARGEST INSURER WARNS OF
ECOLOGICAL DISASTER
REUTERS
- The world's second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday
that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming,
threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into
a catastrophe of its own making. In a report revealing how climate
change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic
costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion
(82 billion pounds) a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with
$30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade
Center attack annually.
"There
is a danger that human intervention will accelerate and intensify
natural climate changes to such a point that it will become impossible
to adapt our socio-economic systems in time," Swiss Re said
in the report. "The human race can lead itself into this
climatic catastrophe -- or it can avert it." ...
Scientists
expect global warming to trigger increasingly frequent and violent
storms, heat waves, flooding, tornadoes, and cyclones while other
areas slip into cold or drought. "Sea levels will continue
to rise, glaciers retreat and snow cover decline," the insurer
wrote.
FEBRUARY 2004
FARM WORKERS AFFECTED BY GM CROPS
REUTERS - Filipino farm
workers living by a field of gene-modified maize showed signs
of exposure to the plant's anti-pest toxin three months after
the pollen season, Norwegian scientist Terje Traavik said on
Monday. Blood samples from 39 people in a farm community on the
southern Philippine island of Mindanao carried increased levels
of three different target antibodies, evidence of an immune reaction
to the Bt toxin built in to combat pests, he added. "We
are absolutely sure it's a reaction to being exposed to the Bt
maize," Traavik told Reuters on Monday at the start of international
talks on trade in genetically modified crops... If more tests
were to confirm his findings, they would fuel anti-GM campaigner
arguments that extra caution is needed before wide-scale cultivation
of modified crops such as maize, canola and cotton goes any further.
NEW SCIENTIST - Scientists are warning of a
potentially "serious risk to human health" after the
discovery that traditional varieties of major American food crops
are widely contaminated by DNA sequences from GM crops. Crops
engineered to produce industrial chemicals and drugs - so-called
"pharm" crops - could already be poisoning ostensibly
GM-free crops grown for food, warns the study by the Washington-based
Union for Concerned Scientists, released on Monday. "If
genes find their way from pharm crops to ordinary corn, they
or their products could wind up in drug-laced corn flakes,"
says the report's co-author, UCS microbiologist Margaret Mellon.
EMENDATION
CLIMATE CHANGE CHAOS
A JOURNALIST READER WRITES
I spoke with the co-author of the "secret" Pentagon
report [on climate change] yesterday and he said the Observer
report you ran (and which I was about to do a story on) is almost
entirely fallacious. For one thing, it's not a secret report--
it's on the web. For another, it was already reported in Fortune.
And most important, it's not a "prediction" but a "extremely
unlikely worst-case scenario." What's still interesting
is that Bush's two favorite interests, defense and oil, are now
apparently at odds if the Pentagon is interested enough in global
warming to be commissioning studies about it. They aren't exactly
an alarmist environmental group.
THE OBSERVER CLEARLY hyped
the story and was wrong about it being secret - in fact, the
Review had earlier cited the Fortune article - but this is a
story about what scientists call 'phase transitions' - a sudden
alteration in state as when water turns to ice or steam - and
while we can't predict when or where or how they may occur in
nature they are far less than a "worst case scenario."
In fact, they are quite predictable except for knowing when,
where and how.
Six years ago, I wrote
about this in "Sam Smith's Great American Political Repair
Manual":
"Odds-makers assume
a certain stability in the system for which they are making their
projections. For example, the odds in poker assume no one is
going to stand up with a pistol and peremptorily remove all the
money on the table. The bookie assumes that the fifth at Pimlico
will be run without his favorite horse being doped. And so forth.
Similarly, nature is in many ways a remarkably stable and resilient
system, and predictably capable of adjusting to changing conditions.
It is this characteristic, in fact, that leads some scientists
to suggest that we may be unduly alarmed about our ecological
future. On the other hand, the fact that everyone, to some extent,
is guessing suggests something in itself -- namely we don't have
all the facts upon which to determine the odds. And if we don't
have all the facts, we could be in for some enormous surprises.
"Take the Gulf Stream,
for example. We simply don't know what changes in climate or
water currents and temperatures might cause the Gulf Stream to
shift directions. As Stanford population studies professor Paul
Ehrlich has pointed out, "what scares [experts] is the knowledge
that weather is driven by small differences between large numbers."
Let's imagine, for example that some climatic change causes the
Gulf Stream to cross an invisible threshold and, as a result,
it moves away from Europe. A very small but very wrong alteration
could easily create the world's newest ski resorts in the hills
of Wales, give Ireland the climate of Nova Scotia and make London
( at least until everyone moves out) the largest Arctic city
in the world. Bear in mind that London sits near the latitude
of Winnipeg, Nice and the Riviera are due east of Boston, and
Paris lies north of Quebec.
"We see the dramatic
effect of small change every day as when water turns to ice or
snow or steam. Without a thermometer, we'd be hard pressed to
know just when a tiny change in the temperature of our water
would drastically alter its character. That's the problem we
face in trying to figure what climate is up to. We are always
living close to the edge. "
DAVID STIPP, FORTUNE - Growing evidence suggests the
ocean-atmosphere system that controls the world's climate can
lurch from one state to another in less than a decade-like a
canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly it flips over. Scientists
don't know how close the system is to a critical threshold. But
abrupt climate change may well occur in the not-too-distant future.
. .
Though triggered by warming,
such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere,
leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe.
Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust
bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires
as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing
nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia-it's easy to see why
the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
. .It doesn't pretend to be a forecast. Rather, it sketches a
dramatic but plausible scenario to help planners think about
coping strategies.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY OF REPORT - The purpose of this report
is to imagine the unthinkable – to push the boundaries of
current research on climate change so we may better understand
the potential implications on United States national security.
We have interviewed leading climate change scientists, conducted
additional research, and reviewed several iterations of the scenario
with these experts. The scientists support this project, but
caution that the scenario depicted is extreme in two fundamental
ways. First, they suggest the occurrences we outline would most
likely happen in a few regions, rather than on globally. Second,
they say the magnitude of the event may be considerably smaller.
We have created a climate change scenario that although not the
most likely, is plausible, and would challenge United States
national security in ways that should be considered immediately.
There is substantial evidence
to indicate that significant global warming will occur during
the 21st century. Because changes have been gradual so far, and
are projected to be similarly gradual in the future, the effects
of global warming have the potential to be manageable for most
nations. Recent research, however, suggests that there is a possibility
that this gradual global warming could lead to a relatively abrupt
slowing of the ocean's thermohaline conveyor, which could lead
to harsher winter weather conditions, sharply reduced soil moisture,
and more intense winds in certain regions that currently provide
a significant fraction of the world's food production. With inadequate
preparation, the result could be a significant drop in the human
carrying capacity of the Earth's environment. The research suggests
that once temperature rises above some threshold, adverse weather
conditions could develop relatively abruptly, with persistent
changes in the atmospheric circulation causing drops in some
regions of 5-10 degrees Fahrenheit in a single decade. Paleoclimatic
evidence suggests that altered climatic patterns could last for
as much as a century, as they did when the ocean conveyor collapsed
8,200 years ago, or, at the extreme, could last as long as 1,000
years as they did during the Younger Dryas, which began about
12,700 years ago.
PENTAGON REPORT
SUGGEST POSSIBLE DISASTROUS CLIMATE
CHANGE OVER NEXT 20 YEARS
See emendation in
Feb 24 report
OBSERVER, UK - Climate
change over the next 20 years could result in a global catastrophe
costing millions of lives in wars and natural disasters. A report,
suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer,
warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising
seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020.
Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting
will erupt across the world. The document predicts that abrupt
climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy
as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling
food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability
vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy
to its contents.
KEY FINDINGS
· Future wars will
be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology
or national honour.
· By 2007 violent
storms smash coastal barriers rendering large parts of the Netherlands
inhabitable. Cities like The Hague are abandoned. In California
the delta island levees in the Sacramento river area are breached,
disrupting the aqueduct system transporting water from north
to south.
· Between 2010
and 2020 Europe is hardest hit by climatic change with an average
annual temperature drop of 6F. Climate in Britain becomes colder
and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia.
· Deaths from war
and famine run into the millions until the planet's population
is reduced by such an extent the Earth can cope.
· Riots and internal
conflict tear apart India, South Africa and Indonesia.
· Access to water
becomes a major battleground. The Nile, Danube and Amazon are
all mentioned as being high risk.
· A 'significant
drop' in the planet's ability to sustain its present population
will become apparent over the next 20 years.
· Rich areas like
the US and Europe would become 'virtual fortresses' to prevent
millions of migrants from entering after being forced from land
drowned by sea-level rise or no longer able to grow crops. Waves
of boatpeople pose significant problems.
· Nuclear arms
proliferation is inevitable. Japan, South Korea, and Germany
develop nuclear-weapons capabilities, as do Iran, Egypt and North
Korea. Israel, China, India and Pakistan also are poised to use
the bomb.
· By 2010 the US
and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures
above 90F. Climate becomes an 'economic nuisance' as storms,
droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.
· More than 400m
people in subtropical regions at grave risk.
· Europe will face
huge internal struggles as it copes with massive numbers of migrants
washing up on its shores. Immigrants from Scandinavia seek warmer
climes to the south. Southern Europe is beleaguered by refugees
from hard-hit countries in Africa.
· Mega-droughts
affect the world's major breadbaskets, including America's Midwest,
where strong winds bring soil loss.
NUCLEAR EXPERT SAYS YUCCA MOUNTAIN UNSAFE
SCOTT SONNER, ASSOCIATED
PRESS - The nation's nuclear waste dump proposed for Nevada is
poorly designed and could leak highly radioactive waste, a scientist
who recently resigned from a federal panel of experts on Yucca
Mountain told The Associated Press on Wednesday. Paul Craig,
a physicist and engineering professor at the University of California-Davis,
said he quit the panel last month so he could speak more freely
about the waste dump's dangers.
Yucca Mountain, about
90 miles northwest of Las Vegas, is planned to begin receiving
waste in 2010. Some 77,000 tons of highly radioactive waste at
commercial and military sites in 39 states would be stored in
metal canisters underground in tunnels. "The science is
very clear," Craig told AP in an interview before his first
public speech about the Energy Department's design for the canisters.
"If we get high-temperature liquids, the metal would corrode
and that would eventually lead to leakage of nuclear waste,"
Craig said. "Therefore, it is a bad design. And that is
very, very bad news for the Department of Energy because they
are committed to that design," he said.
Craig, who was appointed
to the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board by President Clinton
in 1997, planned to speak Wednesday night at a forum sponsored
by the Sierra Club. He said he's convinced the Energy Department
will have to postpone the project and change to metal less liable
to corrode. "It would require years of delay and my guess
is that is what is going to happen. The bad science is so clear
they will be unable to ignore it forever," Craig told the
AP.
HEALTH FOODS FOUND CONTAMINATED WITH GM
INGREDIENTS
NEW WALES - Almost 40
per cent of soya food from health food shops in Britain contains
genetically modified ingredients. A study by researchers from
the University of Glamorgan of health food shops in South Wales
and Yorkshire during the summer of 2003 to detect any GM proteins.
The key findings of the report were:
- In a survey of health
food stores and supermarkets, a total of 10 out of 25 samples
of food products containing soya, tested positively for GM ingredients.
- This was surprising
because eight out of the ten GM-positive samples were either
labelled as 'GM free' and/or were labeled as 'organic', both
of which imply absence of GM ingredients.
- In the interest of consumers,
we should reconsider current labeling practices that may be misleading
about the presence of GM ingredients in many organic and vegetarian
foods
ANTARCTIC FACING INFLUX OF BIO-PROSPECTORS
UN WIRE - Antarctica's
pristine environment could be under threat from bio-prospectors
eager to exploit organisms uniquely adapted to thrive in frozen
conditions, according to a U.N. University report. . . Patents
have already gone out for some Antarctic organisms, including
a molecule that allows certain fish to produce their own "antifreeze,"
which could be used commercially to protect frozen food. Some
92 patents related to Antarctic organisms or molecules extracted
from them have been filed in the United States, and another 62
have been filed in Europe. . .
Although the threat to
Antarctica is not likely to erupt soon, researchers fear that
within a decade the situation could change. "It's similar
to the old American gold rush in California. If someone finds
a hint of something down there, everyone else will rush in,"
said Kevin Bowers of the University of Maryland Biotechnology
Institute. "If there are no controls in place, there's nothing
to stop them."
CLIMATE COLLAPSE TAKEN SERIOUSLY
DAVID STIPP, FORTUNE -
Growing evidence suggests the ocean-atmosphere system that controls
the world's climate can lurch from one state to another in less
than a decade-like a canoe that's gradually tilted until suddenly
it flips over. Scientists don't know how close the system is
to a critical threshold. But abrupt climate change may well occur
in the not-too-distant future. . .
Though triggered by warming,
such change would probably cause cooling in the Northern Hemisphere,
leading to longer, harsher winters in much of the U.S. and Europe.
Worse, it would cause massive droughts, turning farmland to dust
bowls and forests to ashes. Picture last fall's California wildfires
as a regular thing. Or imagine similar disasters destabilizing
nuclear powers such as Pakistan or Russia-it's easy to see why
the Pentagon has become interested in abrupt climate change.
. .
The spotlight in climate
research is shifting from gradual to rapid change. In 2002 the
National Academy of Sciences issued a report concluding that
human activities could trigger abrupt change. Last year the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, included a session at which
Robert Gagosian, director of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
in Massachusetts, urged policymakers to consider the implications
of possible abrupt climate change within two decades. . .
Such jeremiads are beginning
to reverberate more widely. Billionaire Gary Comer, founder of
Lands' End, has adopted abrupt climate change as a philanthropic
cause. Hollywood has also discovered the issue-next summer 20th
Century Fox is expected to release The Day After Tomorrow, a
big-budget disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid as a scientist
trying to save the world from an ice age precipitated by global
warming.
THE TOXIC COSTS OF DISCARDED COMPUTERS
SMOG-BUSTING PAINT SOAKS UP NOXIOUS GASES
NEW SCIENTIST - A paint
that soaks up some of the most noxious gases from vehicle exhausts
will goes on sale in Europe in March. Its makers hope it will
give architects and town planners a new weapon in the fight against
pollution. Called Ecopaint, the substance is designed to reduce
levels of the nitrogen oxides, collectively known as the NOx
gases, which cause respiratory problems and trigger smog production.
Patents filed last week
show how the novel coating works. The paint's base is polysiloxane,
a silicon-based polymer. Embedded in it are spherical nanoparticles
of titanium dioxide and calcium carbonate 30 nanometers wide.
Because the particles are so small, the paint is clear, but pigment
can be added. The first paint to go on sale will be white.
GLOBAL WARMING MAY PLUNGE BRITAIN
INTO NEW ICE AGE 'WITHIN DECADES'
GLACIERS AND SEA ICE ENDANGERED BY RISING
TEMPERATURES
JANET LARSEN, EARTH POLICY
- By 2020, the snows of Kilimanjaro may exist only in old photographs.
The glaciers in Montana's Glacier National Park could disappear
by 2030. And by mid-century, the Arctic Sea may be completely
ice-free during summertime. As the earth's temperature has risen
in recent decades, the earth's ice cover has begun to melt. And
that melting is accelerating.
In both 2002 and 2003,
the Northern Hemisphere registered record-low sea ice cover.
New satellite data show the Arctic region warming more during
the 1990s than during the 1980s, with Arctic Sea ice now melting
by up to 15 percent per decade. The long-sought Northwest Passage,
a dream of early explorers, could become our nightmare. The loss
of Arctic Sea ice could alter ocean circulation patterns and
trigger changes in global climate patterns.
On the opposite end of
the globe, Southern Ocean sea ice floating near Antarctica has
shrunk by some 20 percent since 1950. This unprecedented melting
of sea ice corroborates records showing that the regional air
temperature has increased by 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees
Fahrenheit) since 1950.
Antarctic ice shelves
that existed for thousands of years are crumbling. One of the
world's largest icebergs, named B-15, that measured near 10,000
square kilometers (4,000 square miles) or half the size of New
Jersey, calved off the Ross Ice Shelf in March 2000. In May 2002,
the shelf lost another section measuring 31 kilometers (19 miles)
wide and 200 kilometers (124 miles) long.
Elsewhere on Antarctica,
the Larsen Ice Shelf has largely disintegrated within the last
decade, shrinking to 40 percent of its previously stable size.
Following the break-off of the Larsen A section in 1995 and the
collapse of Larsen B in early 2002, melting of the nearby land-based
glaciers that the ice shelves once supported has more than doubled.
Unlike the melting of
sea ice or the floating ice shelves along coasts, the melting
of ice on land raises sea level. Recent studies showing the worldwide
acceleration of glacier melting indicate that the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change's estimate for sea level rise this century--ranging
from 0.1 meters to 0.9 meters--will need to be revised upwards.
(See http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/Update32_data.htm for
selected examples of ice melt from around the world.)
On Greenland, an ice-covered
island three times the size of Texas, once-stable glaciers are
now melting at a quickening rate. The Jakobshavn Glacier on the
island's southwest coast, which is one of the major drainage
outlets from the interior ice sheet, is now thinning four times
faster than during most of the twentieth century. Each year Greenland
loses some 51 cubic kilometers of ice, enough to annually raise
sea level 0.13 millimeters. Were Greenland's entire ice sheet
to melt, global sea level could rise by a startling 7 meters
(23 feet), inundating most of the world's coastal cities.
The Himalayas contain
the world's third largest ice mass after Antarctica and Greenland.
Most Himalayan glaciers have been thinning and retreating over
the past 30 years, with losses accelerating to alarming levels
in the past decade. On Mount Everest, the glacier that ended
at the historic base camp of Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay,
the first humans to reach the summit, has retreated 5 kilometers
(3 miles) since their 1953 ascent. Glaciers in Bhutan are retreating
at an average rate of 30-40 meters a year. A similar situation
is found in Nepal.
As the glaciers melt they
are rapidly filling glacial lakes, creating a flood risk. An
international team of scientists has warned that with current
melt rates, at least 44 glacial lakes in the Himalayas could
burst their banks in as little as five years.
Glaciers themselves store
vast quantities of water. More than half of the world's population
relies on water that originates in mountains, coming from rainfall
runoff or ice melt. In some areas glaciers help sustain a constant
water supply; in others, meltwater from glaciers is a primary
water source during the dry season. In the short term, accelerated
melting means that more water feeds rivers. Yet as glaciers disappear,
dry season river flow declines.
The Himalayan glaciers
feed the seven major rivers of Asia--the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra,
Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Huang He (Yellow)--and thus contribute
to the year-round water supply of a vast population. In India
alone, some 500 million people, including those in New Delhi
and Calcutta, depend on glacier meltwater that feeds into the
Ganges River system. Glaciers in Central Asia's Tien Shan Mountains
have shrunk by nearly 30 percent between 1955 and 1990. In arid
western China, shrinking glaciers account for at least 10 percent
of freshwater supplies. . .
Africa's glaciers are
also disappearing. Across the continent, mountain glaciers have
shrunk to one third their size over the twentieth century. On
Kenya's Kilimanjaro, ice cover has shrunk by more than 33 percent
since 1989. By 2020 it could be completely gone.
In Western Europe, glacial
area has shrunk by up to 40 percent and glacial volume by more
than half since 1850. If temperatures continue to rise at recent
rates, major sections of glaciers covering the Alps and the French
and Spanish Pyrenees could be gone in the next few decades. During
the record-high temperature summer of 2003, some Swiss glaciers
retreated by an unprecedented 150 meters. The United Nations
Environment Program is warning that for this region long associated
with ice and snow, warming temperatures signify the demise of
a popular ski industry, not to mention a cultural identity. .
.
In just the past 30 years,
the average temperature in Alaska climbed more than 3 degrees
Celsius (5 degrees Fahrenheit)-easily four times the global increase.
Glaciers in all of Alaska's 11 glaciated mountain ranges are
shrinking. Since the mid-1990s, Alaskan glaciers have been thinning
by 1.8 meters a year, more than three times as fast as during
the preceding 40 years.
The global average temperature
has climbed by 0.6 degrees Celsius (1 degree Fahrenheit) in the
past 25 years. Over this time period, melting of sea ice and
mountain glaciers has increased dramatically. During this century,
global temperature may rise between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees Celsius,
and melting will accelerate further. Just how much will depend
in part on the energy policy choices made today.
THE ICE AGE COMETH?
AND NOW SOMETHING REALLY TERRIFYING
MARGOT WALLSTRöM,
BERT BOLIN, PAUL CRUTZEN AND WILL STEFFEN, INTERNATIONAL HERALD
TRIBUNE - Our planet is changing fast. In recent decades many
environmental indicators have moved outside the range in which
they have varied for the past half-million years. We are altering
our life support system and potentially pushing the planet into
a far less hospitable state.
~ It is the magnitude
and rate of human-driven change that are most alarming. For example,
the human-driven increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is nearly
100 parts per million and still growing - already equal to the
entire range experienced between an ice age and a warm period
such as the present. And this human-driven increase has occurred
at least 10 times faster than any natural increase in the last
half-million years.
Evidence of our influence
extends far beyond atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and the
well-documented increases in global mean temperature. During
the 1990's, the average area of humid tropical forest cleared
each year was equivalent to nearly half the area of England,
and at current extinction rates we may well be on the way to
the Earth's sixth great extinction event.
~ It is now clear that
the Earth has entered the so-called Anthropocene Era - the geological
era in which humans are a significant and sometimes dominating
environmental force. Records from the geological past indicate
that never before has the Earth experienced the current suite
of simultaneous changes: we are sailing into planetary terra
incognita.
JANUARY 2004
GREAT LEAPS IN SCIENCE
WHY
WE LIKE TO HOP, SKIP AND JUMP
MARC ABRAHAMS, GUARDIAN
- When do young adults skip and hop, and why? These are the questions
that faced Allen W Burton, Luis Garcia and Clersida Garcia. The
answers appear in their published research report "Skipping
and Hopping of Undergraduates: Recollections of When and Why".
Burton, at the University of Minnesota, and Garcia and Garcia,
at Northern Illinois University, write that: "The purpose
of this study was to compare the reasons why young adults skip
and hop and when they last skipped and hopped." The researchers
collected data from 253 female and 411 male undergraduates. .
. Based on the results of that survey, Burton, Garcia and Garcia
conclude that hopping and skipping are not the same thing. Not
to undergraduates. At least, not as far as when and why are concerned.
At least, not completely. Their report explains it all in detail
. . .
Claire Farley, Reinhard
Blickhan, Jacqueline Saito and Richard Taylor at Harvard published
a massive six-page report on their experiments with "hopping
frequency in humans". Two young women and two young men
did the hopping, individually, on a treadmill. The treadmill
ran, so to speak, at various speeds. Each individual turned out
to have a preferred hopping frequency, at which she or he most
strongly resembled (in certain respects) a rock glued atop a
spring.
That's true of hopping
on two feet. Hopping on one foot is an entirely different question.
Or at least it has the potential to be an entirely different
question. That potential was explored in research done by GP
Austin, GE Garrett and D Tiberio at Sacred Heart University,
in Fairfield, Connecticut. In June 2002 they leapt into public
view with a report called "Effect of Added Mass on Human
Unipedal Hopping". Six months later they popped up again,
with "Effect of Frequency on Human Unipedal Hopping".
And just this past October they jumped into sight yet again,
with "Effect of Added Mass on Human Unipedal Hopping at
Three Frequencies". Have they got a leg up on their professional
competitors? How high will their ambitious research program take
them? We shall see.
NEW, ER, LIGHT ON, LIKE YOU KNOW, SOME UH
DISFLUENCES
MICHAEL ERARD, NY TIMES
- Well before the invention of speech recognition, Frieda Goldman-Eisler,
a psychologist in London in the 1950's, inaugurated the modern
study of disfluencies by developing instruments that counted
pauses in speech and measured their duration. Ms. Goldman-Eisler,
who was looking for a way to make psychiatric interviews more
efficient, found that 50 percent of a person's speaking time
is made up of silence. She also hypothesized that a speaker planned
his next words for the length of the uh or um.
Around the same time a
psychiatrist at Yale, George Mahl, counted uhs and nine other
speech disfluencies in order to measure a person's anxiety level,
calculating that during every 4.4 seconds of spontaneous speech,
on average, one disfluency occurs. Eighty-five percent were uh
and um, restarted sentences and repeated words. A slip of the
tongue — upon which Sigmund Freud practically built an intellectual
career — occurred less than 1 percent of the time.
Ms. Goldman-Eisler and
Mr. Mahl treated uh and um as symptoms of nervousness and verbal
struggle. But once cheap, fast computers made digitized speech
easy to study in the 1990's, the approach changed. Researchers
began to study verbal pauses for meaning; they focused on the
words as information.
By far the newest —
and most controversial — idea comes from Herbert Clark,
a psychologist at Stanford, and Jean Fox Tree, a psychologist
at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who determined that
speakers use (and listeners understand) uh and um in distinct
ways. Uh signals a forthcoming pause that will be short, while
um signals a longer pause, she said. Uh and um are not acoustic
accidents, but full-fledged words that signal a delay yet to
come. Of course that is not necessarily a good thing in public
speaking. "It makes you look weak when people have come
to hear you prepared, and you're not prepared," Mr. Clark
said. . .
But it may be Nicholas
Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California,
San Diego, and other researchers who have come up with the most
appealing findings. He counted uhs among professors giving lectures
and found that the humanities professors say you know and uh
4.85 times per minute, social scientists 3.84 and natural science
professors 1.39 times, which, he said, suggests that humanists
have more expressive options from which to choose. And for those
trying to minimize their verbal tics, Mr. Christenfeld also found
that drinking alcohol reduces ums.
ORANGUTANS COULD BE EXTINCT BY 2025
BBC - The orangutan, Asia's
'wild man of the forests', could disappear in just 20 years,
a campaign group believes. WWF, the global environment network,
says in the last century the number of apes fell by 91% in Borneo
and Sumatra. Globally, it says, there were thought to be somewhere
between 45,000 and 60,000 orang-utans as recently as 1987. But
by 2001 that number had fallen by virtually half, to an estimated
25,000- 30,000 of the animals, more than half of them living
outside protected areas.
CLIMATE CRISIS MAY THREATEN 37% OF SPECIES
BY 2050
GUY GUGLIOTTA WASHINGTON
POST - In the first study of its kind, researchers in a range
of habitats including northern Britain, the wet tropics of northeastern
Australia and the Mexican desert said yesterday that global warming
at currently predicted rates will drive 15 to 37 percent of living
species toward extinction by mid-century. Dismayed by their results,
the researchers called for "rapid implementation of technologies"
to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and warned that the scale
of extinctions could climb much higher because of mutually reinforcing
interactions between climate change and habitat destruction caused
by agriculture, invasive species and other factors.
"The midrange estimate
is that 24 percent of plants and animals will be committed to
extinction by 2050," said ecologist Chris Thomas of Britain's
University of Leeds. "We're not talking about the occasional
extinction - we're talking about 1.25 million species. It's a
massive number."
HARVARD
BEHIND MAD COW FUNNY FACTS
PR WATCH - In our book
Trust Us, We're Experts! we describe the "third party technique"
that PR experts use. Reassuring words come from the mouths of
supposed objective scientific experts to convince the public
that a crisis is really no problem at all. A current example
would be the industry front group called the Harvard Center for
Risk Analysis. This organization has an impressive sounding name,
but it is funded by and fronts for industry. Under Clinton's
Secretary of Agriculture Dan Glickman it received $800,000 to
produce an elaborate risk analysis study concluding that mad
cow disease would be no problem in the US. Now that the disease
is here, the US Department of Agriculture is refusing to take
the necessary steps to stop it. Instead, the Harvard Center is
all over the news media assuring the public that mad cow disease
in the US is no big deal. Unfortunately, most news media so far
are falling for this trick, treating the Harvard Center with
a respect that it does not deserve instead of exposing its paid
role in the government and industry PR campaign on mad cow disease.
ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE
AS ART
THE
REMARKABLE PHOTOS OF EDWARD BURTYNSKY
COWLES GALLERY - Edward
Burtynsky's photographs, monumental both in scale and subject,
capture the indomitable spirit of nature in the face of human-imposed
adversity. His first exhibition at Charles Cowles Gallery focuses
on recent expeditions to the ship-breaking beaches of Bangladesh.
In various degrees of dismantlement for scrap metal, the cannibalized
ships are rich subjects. Burtynsky uses a large format viewfinder
camera to capture the compositions.
According to
Senator Inhofe, the concept of global warming "could be
the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."
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