tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-319458392024-03-14T03:46:15.996-04:00Universal JellyfishOn the condition of our planet - effects of people - how various systems are coping, or not....Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger1633125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-70646772608976186712016-07-28T19:34:00.001-04:002016-07-28T20:01:14.891-04:00"Scientists Find Out What Killed Millions of Starfish"<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">"<span style="letter-spacing: -0.20000000298023224px; text-align: center;">A new study shows warmer ocean temperatures are likely responsible for the mass die-off, threatening the biodiversity of marine life from Alaska to Mexico."</span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">An epidemic swept across North America’s West Coast three years ago, but most people hardly noticed.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">That’s because the disease targeted starfish—millions of starfish.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">From Alaska to Baja California, starfish populations have been decimated by <a href="http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/11/19/how-disease-making-sea-stars-melt-will-ruin-your-tide-pool-visit-and-ecosystem" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;">sea star wasting syndrome</a>, a disease that turns the darlings of the tide pool world into heaping piles of goo within days of exposure.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Scientists have observed wasting events hitting coastal starfish populations before, but nothing like this epidemic, which researchers are calling the single largest, most geographically widespread marine disease ever recorded.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Sea stars, or starfish, are what’s known as a keystone species, important to maintaining biodiversity in marine environments. But an epidemic that swept across the West Coast killed millions of the multi-limbed animals—wiping out up to 95 percent of populations in some regions. Now, a new <a href="http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/371/1689/20150212" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;" target="_self">study</a> is showing <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/oceans/sea-surface-temp.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;">warming ocean temperatures</a> might make mass die-offs more severe.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Without starfish to keep mussel populations in check, the sharp-shelled bivalves would push out other marine species, damaging the biodiversity of habitats along the West Coast.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The team analyzed water temperature records taken before, during, and after the wasting episode at locations around the San Juan Islands and Puget Sound in Washington state. They found that as water temperatures rose across the region, so did the risk of infection for sea stars. Sites where water temperatures rose the most left sea stars at highest risk of infection.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">Researchers also placed sea stars in aquarium tanks set to temperatures ranging from 54 degrees to 66 degrees Fahrenheit. The hotter the tank, the more quickly starfish succumbed to wasting, Harvell said.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">“That confirmed that water temperature can affect mortality,” she said.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">With ocean temperatures <a href="http://www3.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/oceans/sea-surface-temp.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;">steadily increasing</a> thanks in part to human-induced climate change, the future of sea stars could be threatened.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">The sheer size of this latest wasting event has scientists concerned. Melissa Miner, a marine biologist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, said sea star populations are still decimated across nearly all of the West Coast...</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d5a6bd; font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small;">On a walk amid tide pools in Newport Beach’s Crystal Cove State Park last week, this reporter did not spot a single starfish. In October 2014, <a href="http://www.ocregister.com/articles/sea-612335-stars-star.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; text-decoration: none;">scientists found 191 starfish</a>along the same rocky reef. Now, there appeared to be an abundance of mussels lining the rocks—the ochre starfish’s favorite meal.</span></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-18402612960919738882015-12-11T13:57:00.002-05:002015-12-11T13:58:53.199-05:00COP21 & the USA<br />
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<span style="color: #fce5cd; font-size: large;"><i>Much Of The World Perplexed That Climate Debate Continues In U.S.</i></span></h1>
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<span style="font-family: "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.cop21.gouv.fr/en/">http://www.cop21.gouv.fr/en/</a></span>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-74912162688083432292015-12-11T13:49:00.001-05:002015-12-11T14:45:04.187-05:00Connections of Conflicts<div style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">I see a lot of the conflict that is going on in the world as a reaction to global warming, it’s effects, and people’s (probably mostly unconscious) reactions to perceived future effects. This can be seen in the reaction against population control, against environmentalism, anti-regulation in pro-gun advocacy, and with the demonization of those who are outside of one’s group. Nearly everything that the Republicans stand for is in staunch denial of Global Warming and it’s effects.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The Population Bomb was published in 1968 by Stanford University Professor Paul R. Ehrlich and his wife, Anne Ehrlich. “It warned of the mass starvation of humans in the 1970s and 1980s due to overpopulation, as well as other major societal upheavals, and advocated immediate action to limit population growth.” Birth control was not legalized for all Americans until 1972. Roe v. Wade made abortion legal in 1973. The pro-environmental idea at the time was that it would be best for parents to not have more than 2 children - as a way for people to voluntarily participate in population control. While the drastic effects of overpopulation did not happen within the time line that the Ehrlich’s laid out - the effects have been gradually developing. (Detractors use the time inaccuracies to discredit the whole thing).</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Anti-abortion fanaticism may be a form of radical denial & stem from worry that society’s concern about over-population will reduce their group and therefore their security. The old idea was that there is security in numbers - more possible warriors, more power in being the majority, etc. Which is not altogether untrue. Such an argument could be reasonably made as long as there are not catastrophic Global consequences. Such an argument breaks down with the Global Warming problem - where over-population / over-consumption cannot be sustained, but will result in mass death and destruction. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">If honest, some might say, but our group needs to the be the biggest, and it’s all the others who should reduce their numbers. And they may intend to enforce that idea with a large military. They had better use drones at that rate.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">One or a few small groups could get away with massive consumption. But in the past few decades, American consumption has exploded, and China, India, and many other countries with many more people and groups are trying to catch up. It is not sustainable globally - it would require many more planets and resources. Meanwhile, many corporate executives and stockholders are making fortunes off of the increased consumption of people both within the USA and around the world.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The anti-abortion POV is pushed that ‘we must have more and more babies, we must deny that having more people & more people is a problem.’ I doubt that most anti-abortion people are thinking about societal or group security consciously. But such a POV does explain, what seems inexplicable about anti-abortion arguments, which is the anti-birth control stance. If the desire was to lessen abortions, then of course, people should use more birth control. However, if the desire is actually for women (that is - women within their group) to have more children (for ‘security’, power, or whatever), then, of course, birth control as well as abortion, must be fought against. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The anti-abortion groups are usually Christian, and generally, the sort of Christians who fight against abortion are mostly concerned about those in their group. Pro-choice advocates have said all along, that it is the people who are alive who must receive help and consideration. And weirdly, this does not concern most anti-abortion fighters. We see this in the reduced taxes on the wealthy and reduced services provided by the government for the needy. At the same time, people who are anti-abortion tend to be pro-military and advocate people in the military getting the help and consideration that liberals would want spread around to those in need. The effect of this is that the disabled and elderly poor, as well as marginalized minority groups, and even women, are left out of the security group. Those who are protected are the wealthy, healthy (men, esp.) and those in the military. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Anti-environmentalism is similar - with the same people who are against abortion and who are pro-military - radically denying that people should care about the environment. The suggested idea is that people could only care about themselves and we could ‘never’ make the planet inhospitable to life - no matter how many toxins we add to the water, the land, & the atmosphere - and no matter how many eco-systems we wipe out. The level of animosity is bizarre which is hurled toward those who see the earth as an eco-system that life is dependent on, worthy of concern. Also the scorn and derision levied toward renewable energy makes no sense.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Silent Spring by Rachel Carson was published in 1962. “The book documented the detrimental effects on the environment—particularly on birds—of the indiscriminate use of pesticides. Carson accused the chemical industry of spreading disinformation and public officials of accepting industry claims unquestioningly.” Since then we have more detrimental effects on people and animals - more cancers and various health problems. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The Keeling Curve graph has been illustrating the effects of increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere since 1958. During the 70s, many people were connecting the dots that described the effects of fossil fuel use, over-population and consumption, overfishing & erasing of habitats, and pollution. National Geographic reported recently, “A study of catch data… grimly predicted that if fishing rates continue apace, all the world’s fisheries will have collapsed by the year 2048.” It was not difficult to predict that as weather events such as floods & droughts became more of a problem, as over-fishing and the erasure of habitats became more of a problem, that there would be refugees, there would be strife, there would be wars. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">By the year 2100 or even 2050, the effects of Global Warming and the resulting Climate Changes are expected to be drastic. Coastal areas are already having problems with sea level rise. Those problems are expected to get much worse as time goes on, with Southern Florida expected to be underwater before the century is over. We are seeing droughts as a problem in the farming areas of California. We have 1000 year storms and floods fairly frequently. There are often problems that are supposedly ‘worse than anticipated’. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Many had been anticipating problems for quite awhile. Apparently much of the Carbon Dioxide was absorbed by the oceans over the years - making them more acidic. This will be a great problem for coral and shellfish. It was predicted long age that the haves will want to hold on to their privileges, the have-nots will try to stay alive. It was be a mess. It will be like musical chairs - where chairs are being thrown out by the thousands, and people will fight over getting one before the bell rings. The wealthy hope that by buying many extra chairs, they will be safe.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Society has been anticipating problems - consciously by some, unconsciously by others. The more conscious ones live ‘Off the Grid’, and practice organic gardening, and encourage native habitats and healthy eco-systems whenever possible. Many (but not enough) live simply - avoiding over-consumption of meat, of mass-produced things, and fuel - even travel. Liberals have been trying to encourage mass transit, and renewable energy, which is sorely lacking in the USA.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">The unconscious Republicans and large corporate interests have worked on getting people to be fearful, buy guns, buy Hummers, get pit bulls, think militia-like - and deny that there are any problems with American capitalism and mindless consumption. They also rail against regulations, against birth control & abortion, against environmentalists, and they say Global Warming is a hoax and the International Scientific community is lying. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">It takes regulations to reduce all the problems that need reducing to maintain a healthy planet - whether it’s overfishing, over-polluting, habitat erosion, and the use of fossil fuels. We have too much antibiotics in our meat and our milk. We have poisons in our make-up and in pet food that goes unregulated. The way it is now, you have to be fairly well off to afford food that is safe and not toxic. Without regulations - some groups take so much that habitats are destroyed, animals become extinct, land is worthless for farming and pollution makes (healthy) fishing impossible. Without regulations, some pollute more than the planet can tolerate.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Consumption could also be regulated - so that some don’t monopolize the resources and contribute more than their share to the problems. Here in the USA, most people, and esp. the wealthy, consume much more than necessary. Where once civilization and production grew and grew and grew - it needs to stop growing. Even if corporations can find and dig up the resources, we need to find peaceful ways to shrink, and to do with less. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">We are using so much money, and resources on the Military - emitting massive amounts of fossil fuels, that it is obscene. A strong military becomes all the more necessary by those who want their country to have more than their share of fossil fuels, or metals, & whatever resources they desire - to maintain their lifestyle. The bloated military, USA, makes global warming worse and it makes strife around the world worse. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">One of the things we are seeing in the USA are Republicans who encourage people to be anti-community - if that community includes people ‘who are not like them’. They want to draw a circle around their group as ‘Christians’ and leave everyone else out. The argument is that if someone needs help, they should join a church (and follow the ‘rules’ - not be gay, for women to be submissive). </span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">Conservatives and some Libertarians have made people who sell hate and divisiveness, such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, rich. The latest is that Donald Trump, hate-monger in chief, is the front runner for the Republican primary elections. The hate and derision that is expressed already make violence more likely toward those the that Republicans see as ‘outsiders’ more likely. That includes violence against the LGBTQ community, as well as Muslims, and even women.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #b4a7d6;">In my opinion, it is the creative, liberal people, who have, for the most part, been working on solutions. It has been the Republicans and conservatives who have been blocking, or trying to block) those solutions (though some have gotten through). We need to be more creative. We need to be more inclusive. We all need to live more simply.</span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-76578703677528206902015-08-29T18:14:00.000-04:002015-12-11T13:52:30.956-05:00"Giant jellyfish in 'record numbers'"<div class="date date--v1" data-seconds="1440096516" data-timestamp-inserted="true" style="border: 0px; color: #404040; font-family: Helmet, Freesans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 1.33333; margin-top: 18px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-34006299?SThisFB"><span style="font-size: x-small;">http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-34006299?SThisFB</span></a></span></div>
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<strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="color: #d9d2e9;">From the BBC</span></strong></div>
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<span style="color: #d9d2e9;"><strong style="border: 0px; font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; letter-spacing: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">20 August 2015</strong><span style="line-height: 1.33333;"> </span><span style="line-height: 1.33333;">Last updated at 19:48 BST</span><span style="line-height: 1.33333;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #d9d2e9;">Record numbers of "massive" barrel jellyfish have been reported in UK waters, according to the Marine Conservation Society.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d9d2e9;">The society said the apparent increases "can no longer be ignored", and called for more research to understand what it means.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #d9d2e9;">Underwater cameraman Rich Stevenson took these pictures of barrel jellyfish off the coast of Plymouth.</span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-14530846346826226172015-08-29T18:08:00.000-04:002015-08-29T18:08:34.419-04:00Jellyfish Trends<img alt="" class="mw-mmv-final-image" crossorigin="anonymous" height="359" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Jellyfish_population_trends_by_LME.jpg" width="717" /><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;">Map of population trends of native and invasive species of jellyfish</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> </span><span class="legend-color" style="background-color: #e51a1d; border: 1px solid black; display: inline-block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; height: 1.5em; line-height: 22px; margin: 1px 0px; text-align: center; width: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> Increase (high certainty) </span><span class="legend-color" style="background-color: #f1a341; border: 1px solid black; display: inline-block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; height: 1.5em; line-height: 22px; margin: 1px 0px; text-align: center; width: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> Increase (low certainty) </span><span class="legend-color" style="background-color: #4daf4a; border: 1px solid black; display: inline-block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; height: 1.5em; line-height: 22px; margin: 1px 0px; text-align: center; width: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> Stable/variable </span><span class="legend-color" style="background-color: #377cb5; border: 1px solid black; display: inline-block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; height: 1.5em; line-height: 22px; margin: 1px 0px; text-align: center; width: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> Decrease </span><span class="legend-color" style="background-color: #ccccca; border: 1px solid black; display: inline-block; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; height: 1.5em; line-height: 22px; margin: 1px 0px; text-align: center; width: 1.5em;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> No data</span><br />
<span style="font-size: x-small;">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jellyfish / From April 2012</span>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-86788571479045326492015-02-22T19:47:00.002-05:002015-02-22T19:48:07.509-05:00Sea Lions pups have also been dying off of the California Coast<h3>
From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:</h3>
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<a href="http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/environment-and-nature/20150212/sea-lions-desperate-for-nourishment-dying-off-in-alarming-numbers-on-california-coast" target="_blank">Sea lions desperate for nourishment dying off in alarming numbers on California coast</a></h3>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Each day, dog crates with sick sea lions arrive here and at four other locations from San Luis Obispo to Fort Bragg in what’s alarmingly become a third year of massive sea lion pup dieoffs. And if the trend continues, marine biologists warn, it could deplete an entire generation of California sea lions. One desperate and hungry pup was found Wednesday beside busy Skyline Boulevard in San Francisco, more than 1,000 feet from the ocean.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Scientists say changes in the coastal California Current have pushed fish populations further from the sea lion rookeries in the Channel Islands, where the pups are born around June. And the diminishing number of sardines and anchovies have forced nursing mothers to switch to rockfish and squid. These changes are believed to have contributed to a lower quality of milk and higher number of malnourished pups.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">“These pups should still be nursing. They don’t have the skills to catch food on their own,” said Shawn Johnson, director of the center’s veterinary science department....</span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-51877398275276030982015-02-22T19:30:00.003-05:002015-02-22T19:32:21.709-05:00"New and Ongoing Wildlife Mortality Events Nationwide"<span style="background-color: #006699; color: white; font-family: Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 22px; font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.nwhc.usgs.gov/mortality_events/ongoing.jsp" target="_blank">National Wildlife Health Center</a></span>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-52413359530124920862015-02-22T19:19:00.000-05:002015-02-22T19:21:37.657-05:00"Mass Death of Seabirds in Western U.S. Is 'Unprecedented'"<img alt="Picture of a group of dead Cassin's auklets" src="http://images.nationalgeographic.com/wpf/media-content/photos/000/880/cache/88096_990x742-cb1422042939.jpg" height="240" style="border: none !important; color: #333333; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; margin: 0px; width: 650px;" width="320" /><span style="color: #cccccc;">From <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2015/01/150123-seabirds-mass-die-off-auklet-california-animals-environment/?fb_action_ids=10205110448954762&fb_action_types=og.likes" target="_blank">National Geographic</a>:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">By Craig Welch</span></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">PUBLISHED JANUARY 23, 2015</span></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">In the storm debris littering a Washington State shoreline, Bonnie Wood saw something grisly: the mangled bodies of dozens of scraggly young seabirds.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">Walking half a mile along the beach at <a href="http://www.parks.wa.gov/292/Twin-Harbors" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">Twin Harbors State Park</a> on Wednesday, Wood spotted more than 130 carcasses of juvenile <a href="http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Cassins_Auklet/id" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">Cassin's auklets</a>—the blue-footed, palm-size victims of what is becoming one of the largest mass die-offs of seabirds ever recorded.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">"It was so distressing," recalled Wood, a volunteer who patrols Pacific Northwest beaches looking for dead or stranded birds. "They were just everywhere. Every ten yards we'd find another ten bodies of these sweet little things."</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">Cassin's auklets are tiny diving seabirds that look like puffballs. They feed on animal plankton and build their nests by burrowing in the dirt on offshore islands. Their total population, from the Baja Peninsula to Alaska's Aleutian Islands, is estimated at somewhere between 1 million and 3.5 million.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">Last year, beginning about Halloween, thousands of juvenile auklets started <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/coasst/news/breaking_news/Cassins%20Auklet%20factsheet%206Jan15.pdf" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">washing ashore dead</a> from California's Farallon Islands to Haida Gwaii (also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands) off central British Columbia. Since then the deaths haven't stopped. Researchers are wondering if the die-off might spread to other birds or even fish.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">"This is just massive, massive, unprecedented," said <a href="http://www.biology.washington.edu/users/julia-k-parrish" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">Julia Parrish</a>, a University of Washington seabird ecologist who oversees the <a href="http://depts.washington.edu/coasst/" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">Coastal Observation and Seabird Survey Team</a> (COASST), a program that has tracked West Coast seabird deaths for almost 20 years. "We may be talking about 50,000 to 100,000 deaths. So far."</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">....On some beaches the Cassin's auklet death toll was a hundred times greater than any bird die-off ever tallied there....</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;"><a href="http://www.faralloninstitute.org/team.php" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">Bill Sydeman</a>, a senior scientist at California's Farallon Institute, said he believes the most likely scenario is that the deaths are related to a <a href="http://www.nwfsc.noaa.gov/news/features/food_chain/index.cfm" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">massive blob of warm water</a> that heated the North Pacific last year and contributed to California's drought and to 2014 being the <a href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/01/150116-2014-hottest-year-global-warming-climate-science/" sl-processed="1" style="text-decoration: none;">hottest year on record</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">That water was hotter and stayed warm longer than at any time since record-keeping began. It stretched across the Gulf of Alaska, where a high-pressure system blocked storms, preventing the water from churning to the surface and mixing with air. More warm water eventually moved inward along the coast as far south as California, altering how favorable the environment was for the zooplankton that many fish and birds, including Cassin's auklets, feed on.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc;">That all happened in late summer—about the same time the young auklets began to fledge.</span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-72876810854859770842014-11-04T11:56:00.001-05:002014-11-04T11:56:14.722-05:00"Last Song for Migrating Birds"<span style="background-color: black; font-size: 11px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 18px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Snips from an <a href="http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/songbird-migration/franzen-text" target="_blank">Article</a> By Jonathan Franzen for National Geographic from July 2013</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To a visitor from North America, where bird hunting is well regulated and only naughty farm boys shoot songbirds, the situation in the Mediterranean is appalling: Every year, from one end of it to the other, hundreds of millions of songbirds and larger migrants are killed for food, profit, sport, and general amusement. The killing is substantially indiscriminate, with heavy impact on species already battered by destruction or fragmentation of their breeding habitat. Mediterraneans shoot cranes, storks, and large raptors for which governments to the north have multimillion-euro conservation projects. All across Europe bird populations are in steep decline, and the slaughter in the Mediterranean is one of the causes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Italian hunters and poachers are the most notorious; for much of the year, the woods and wetlands of rural Italy crackle with gunfire and songbird traps. The food-loving French continue to eat ortolan buntings illegally, and France’s singularly long list of huntable birds includes many struggling species of shorebirds. Songbird trapping is still widespread in parts of Spain; Maltese hunters, frustrated by a lack of native quarry, blast migrating raptors out of the sky; Cypriots harvest warblers on an industrial scale and consume them by the plateful, in defiance of the law.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the European Union, however, there are at least theoretical constraints on the killing of migratory birds. Public opinion in the EU tends to favor conservation, and a variety of nature-protection groups are helping governments enforce the law. (In Sicily, formerly a hot spot for raptor killing, poaching has been all but eliminated, and some of the former poachers have even become bird-watchers.) Where the situation for migrants is not improving is in the non-EU Mediterranean. In fact, when I visited Albania and Egypt last year, I found that it’s becoming dramatically worse…</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Under the 40-year Marxist dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, totalitarianism destroyed the fabric of Albanian society and tradition, and yet this was not a bad time for birds. Hoxha reserved the privileges of hunting and private gun ownership for himself and a few trusted cronies. (To this day the national Museum of Natural History displays bird trophies of Hoxha and other members of the politburo.) But a handful of hunters had minimal impact on the millions of migrants passing through, and the country’s command-economy backwardness, along with its repellence to foreign beach tourists, ensured that its wealth of coastal habitat remained intact.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Following Hoxha’s death, in 1985, the country underwent an uneasy transition to a market economy, including a period of near anarchy in which the country’s armories were broken open and the military’s guns were seized by ordinary citizens. Even after the rule of law was restored, Albanians kept their guns, and the country remained understandably averse to regulation of all kinds. The economy began to grow, and one of the ways in which a generation of younger men in Tirana expressed their new freedom and prosperity was to buy expensive shotguns, by the thousands, and use them to do what formerly only the elite could do: kill birds….</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Unfortunately, the old communist joke still applies to forestry officials responsible for the protected areas: The government pretends to pay them, and they pretend to work. As a result, the laws are not enforced—a fact that Italian hunters, limited by EU regulations at home, were quick to recognize and exploit after Hoxha’s death. During my week in Albania I didn’t visit a protected area in which there were not Italian hunters, even though the hunting season had ended, even in unprotected areas. In every case the Italians were using illegal high-quality bird-sound playback equipment and shooting as much as they wanted of whatever they wanted.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Albania was once ruled by Italy, and many Albanians still view Italians as models of sophistication and modernity. Beyond the very considerable immediate damage that Italian tourist hunters do in Albania, they’ve introduced both an ethic of indiscriminate slaughter and new methods of accomplishing it—in particular the use of playback, which is catastrophically effective in attracting birds. Even in provincial villages, Albanian hunters now have MP3s of duck calls on their cell phones and iPods. Their new sophistication, coupled with an estimated 100,000 shotguns (in a country of three million) and a glut of other weapons that can be used opportunistically, has turned Albania into a giant sinkhole for eastern European migratory biomass: Millions of birds fly in and very few get out alive….</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In northeastern Africa, unlike in the Balkans, there is also an ancient, rich, and continuous tradition of harvesting migratory birds of all sizes. (The miraculous provision of meat accompanying the manna from heaven that saved the Israelites in the Sinai is thought to have been migrating quail.) As long as the practice was pursued by traditional methods (handmade nets and lime sticks, small traps made of reeds, camels for transportation), the impact on Eurasian breeding bird populations was perhaps sustainable. The problem now is that new technology has vastly increased the harvest, while the tradition remains in place….</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I visited Al Maghrah late in the season, but the oriole decoys (consisting typically of a dead male on a stick) were still attracting good numbers, and the hunters rarely missed with their shotguns. Given how many hunters there were, it seemed quite possible that 5,000 orioles were being taken annually at this one location. And given that there are scores of other desert hunting sites, and that the bird is a prized quarry along the Egyptian coast as well, the losses in Egypt represent a significant fraction of the species’ European population of two or three million breeding pairs. Enjoyment of a colorful species with a vast summer and winter range is thus being monopolized, every September, by a relatively tiny number of well-fed leisure hunters seeking natural Viagra. And while some of them may be using unlicensed weapons to kill orioles, the rest are breaking no Egyptian laws at all thereby.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">At the oasis I also met a shepherd too poor to own a shotgun. He and his ten-year-old son instead relied on four nets, hung over trees, and they were mostly catching smaller birds like flycatchers, shrikes, and warblers. The son was therefore excited when he managed to corner a male oriole, splendidly gold and black, in a net. He came running back to his father with it—“An oriole!” he shouted proudly—and cut its throat with a knife. Moments later a female oriole flashed close to us, and I wondered if it might be the dead male’s distraught mate. The shepherd boy chased it toward a netted palm tree, but the bird avoided the tree at the last second and headed into the open desert, flying southward.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most of the Bedouin I spoke to told me that they won’t kill resident species, such as hoopoes and laughing doves. Like other Mediterranean hunters, however, they consider all migratory species fair game; as the Albanians like to say, “They’re not our birds.” While every Egyptian hunter I met admitted that the number of migrants has been declining in recent years, only a few allowed that overharvesting might be a factor. Some hunters blame climate change; an especially popular theory is that the increasing number of electric lights at the coast is frightening the birds away. (In fact, lights are more likely to attract them.)…</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The basic message of environmental “education” is, unavoidably, that Egyptians should stop doing what they’ve always done; and the concerns of a bird-smitten nation like England, whose colonization of Egypt is in any case still resented, seem as absurd and meddling as a Royal Society for the Protection of Catfish would seem to rural Mississippians.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Most Egyptian coastal towns have bird markets where a quail can be bought for two dollars, a turtledove for five, an oriole for three, and small birds for pennies. Outside one of these towns, El Daba, I toured the farm of a white-bearded man with a bird-trapping operation so large that, even after the families of his six sons had eaten their fill, he had a surplus to bring to market. Enormous nets were draped over eight tall tamarisk trees and many smaller bushes, encircling a grove of figs and olives; the nets were an inexpensive modern product, available in El Daba for only the past seven years. The sun was very hot, and migrant songbirds were arriving from the nearby coastline, seeking shelter. Repelled by the net on one tree, they simply flew to the next tree, until they found themselves caught. The farmer’s grandsons ran inside the nets and grabbed them, and one of his sons tore off their flight feathers and dropped them in a plastic grain sack. In 20 minutes I saw a red-backed shrike, a collared flycatcher, a spotted flycatcher, a male golden oriole, a chiffchaff, a blackcap, two wood warblers, two cisticolas, and many unidentified birds disappear into the sack. By the time we paused in the shade, amid the discarded heads and feathers of cuckoos and hoopoes and a sparrow hawk, the sack was bulging, the oriole crying out inside it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Based on the farmer’s estimates of his daily take, I calculated that every year between August 25 and September 25, his operation removes 600 orioles, 250 turtledoves, 200 hoopoes, and 4,500 smaller birds from the air. The supplemental income is surely welcome, but the farm would clearly have thrived without it; the furnishings in the family’s spacious guest parlor, where I was treated with great Bedouin hospitality, were brand-new and of high quality.</span></span></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-14416398718697351082014-09-29T19:54:00.000-04:002014-09-29T20:00:35.884-04:00"Heat Islands Cooking U.S. Cities"<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/urban-heat-islands-threaten-u.s.-health-17919" target="_blank">Hot and Getting Hotter: Heat Islands Cooking U.S. Cities</a> From Climate Central:</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a class="box" href="http://www.climatecentral.org/images/sized/images/sized/remote/assets-climatecentral-org-images-uploads-news-8_19_14_CC_LouisvilleUrbanHeatViaSatellite-900x755.jpg" style="border: 0px; font-style: italic; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><img alt="" src="http://www.climatecentral.org/images/sized/images/sized/remote/assets-climatecentral-org-images-uploads-news-8_19_14_CC_LouisvilleUrbanHeatViaSatellite-400x336.jpg" height="336" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" width="400" /></a><span style="font-style: italic; line-height: 17px; text-align: center;">Urban heat measured by satellite in Louisville, Ky. </span><strong style="border: 0px; font-style: italic; line-height: 17px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-align: center; vertical-align: baseline;">Click image to enlarge. </strong></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cities are almost always hotter than the surrounding rural area but global warming takes that heat and makes it worse. In the future, this combination of urbanization and climate change could raise urban temperatures to levels that threaten human health, strain energy resources, and compromise economic productivity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Summers in the U.S. have been warming since 1970. But on average across the country cities are even hotter, and have been getting hotter faster than adjacent rural areas. (<a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/urban-heat-islands-threaten-u.s.-health-17919#more" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_self">report continues</a> below interactive)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With more than 80 percent of Americans living in cities, these urban heat islands — combined with rising temperatures caused by increasing heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions — can have serious health effects for hundreds of millions of people during the hottest months of the year. Heat is the No.1 weather-related killer in the U.S., and the hottest days, particularly days over 90°F, are associated with dangerous ozone pollution levels that can trigger asthma attacks, heart attacks, and other serious health impacts.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Our analysis of summer temperatures in 60 of the largest U.S. cities found that: </span></div>
<ul style="border: 0px; line-height: 1.571428571428571; list-style: none; margin: 0px 0px 20px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">57 cities had measurable urban heat island effects over the past 10 years. Single-day urban temperatures in some metro areas were as much as 27°F higher than the surrounding rural areas, and on average across all 60 cities, the maximum single-day temperature difference was 17.5°F.<br /> </span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cities have many more searing hot days each year. Since 2004, 12 cities averaged at least 20 more days a year above 90°F than nearby rural areas. The 60 cities analyzed averaged at least 8 more days over 90°F each summer compared to adjacent rural areas.<br /> </span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">More heat can increase ozone air pollution. All 51 cities with adequate data showed a statistically significant correlation between higher daily summer temperatures and bad air quality (as measured by ground-level ozone concentrations). Temperatures are being forced higher by increasing urbanization and manmade global warming, which could undermine the hard-won improvements in air quality and public health made over the past few decades.<br /> </span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In two thirds of the cities analyzed (41 of 60), urbanization and climate change appear to be combining to increase summer heat faster than climate change alone is raising regional temperatures. In three quarters (45 of 60) of cities examined, urbanized areas are warming faster than adjacent rural locations.</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The top 10 cities with the most intense summer urban heat islands (average daily urban-rural temperature differences) over the past 10 years are:<br /> </span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Las Vegas (7.3°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Albuquerque (5.9°F</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Denver (4.9°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Portland (4.8°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Louisville (4.8°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Washington, D.C. (4.7°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Kansas City (4.6°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Columbus (4.4°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Minneapolis (4.3°F)</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px 0px 0px 60px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Seattle (4.1°F)<br /> </span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On average across all 60 cities, urban summer temperatures were 2.4°F hotter than rural temperatures.</span></li>
<li style="background-image: url(http://www.climatecentral.org/-/img/bg-square.png); background-position: 0px 8px; border: 0px; font-size: 0.875em; list-style-position: inside; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 18px; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/urban-heat-islands-threaten-u.s.-health-17919" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><more></more></span></a></li>
</ul>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-50849036204904001042014-09-29T19:43:00.000-04:002014-09-29T20:01:03.761-04:00"Science Shows How Climate Change is Baking Australia"<span style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/studies-show-how-climate-change-is-baking-australia-18102" target="_blank">Science Shows How Climate Change is Baking Australia</a> from Climate Central</span><img alt="" src="http://www.climatecentral.org/images/sized/images/sized/remote/assets-climatecentral-org-images-uploads-news-9_19_14_upton_australia_angry_summergraphic-720x508.jpg" height="281" width="400" /><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23a-327a-3c0e-ea429c21c095" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">As smoke billows from unnervingly early-season wildfires charring the Australian state of Tasmania, yet more dust is settling on the </span><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/global-warming-australia-record-heat-17521" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">scientific discussion</a> over how climate change contributed to <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/what-is-causing-australians-heat-wave-15489" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">last year’s deadly Australian heat</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23a-327a-3c0e-ea429c21c095" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last year was Australia’s </span><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/australias-2013-was-a-scorcher-for-the-record-books-16920" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">hottest on record</a>. And each of a set of five research papers <a href="http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/explaining-extreme-events-2013" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">published Monday</a> in a special edition of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reached the same conclusion regarding the year of <a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/australias-2013-was-a-scorcher-for-the-record-books-16920" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">unprecedented heat</a>. The research teams independently concluded — in two cases writing that they could do so with “essentially” 100 percent certainty — that climate-changing greenhouse gas pollution played a substantial role in fueling it.</span></div>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23b-f915-4b12-31daab6e888b" style="background-color: black; border: 0px; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Australia has left behind its climate of generations past and moved into an era where extreme heat waves and warm winter months, such as those of 2013, are more likely to occur, researchers concluded.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23b-f915-4b12-31daab6e888b" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“They’ve left behind the climate that they used to have,” said NOAA research meteorologist </span><a href="http://www.gfdl.noaa.gov/tom-knutson-homepage" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Thomas Knutson</a>.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23b-f915-4b12-31daab6e888b" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Last year’s intense heat was perhaps most noticeable during summer, when temperatures of </span><a href="http://www.climatecentral.org/news/australian-heatwave-nears-122f-inland-severe-fire-threat-declared-15446" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">120 degrees were recorded</a> in some places. But the differences between recorded and average temperatures were greatest during the Austral winter and fall. Never in more than a century of record-keeping has the average Australian temperature reached last year’s level.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23b-f915-4b12-31daab6e888b" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">The high temperatures and frequent heat waves were the combined result of natural variation and human influence on the climate. Low rainfall that contributed to the hot conditions does not appear to have been caused by climate change, one of the research teams concluded. That natural phenomenon combined with unnatural climate change-juiced heat, however, leading to extraordinary temperatures. Heat waves killed </span><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-23/heatwave-death-toll-expected-to-top-almost-400/5214496" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">hundreds of people</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2014/jan/16/australia-tennis-open-climate-change-extreme-heat" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">delayed play and injured players</a> at Melbourne’s Australian Open, and caused <a href="http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-01-08/hundred-thousand-dead-bats-after-qld-heatwave-rspca-says/5190644" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">100,000 bats</a> to spectacularly tumble from their perches, dead.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span id="docs-internal-guid-69472e0c-c23b-f915-4b12-31daab6e888b" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">“We now have some very solid, quantitative work that says, ‘Hey, wait a minute, climate change is implicated in these things,’” said Australian National University professor </span><a href="http://cci.anu.edu.au/researchers/view/will_steffen/" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Will Steffen</a>, who was a climate commissioner until the new federal government terminated the nation’s climate advisory group. The former government agency has since <a href="http://www.crikey.com.au/2013/09/25/why-sacking-the-climate-commission-might-help-it/" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">reconstituted itself</a> as an <a href="https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">independent nonprofit</a>....</span><span style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, Palatino, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 0.875em;"><more></more></span></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-28497978822915728792014-09-24T21:50:00.001-04:002014-09-24T21:52:44.319-04:00"Lyme disease surges north, and Canada moves out of denial"<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><a href="http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2014/09/canada-lyme-disease-spreads" target="_blank">Article in the 'Daily Climate'</a></span><br />
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: small;">Scientists long expected climate change to harm human health. </span><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: small;">But one of the clearest signs of health risks in a warming world has emerged in one of the world’s most advanced economies, as Canada belatedly struggles to cope with Lyme disease's migration in North America. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Canada should have seen this coming. In the United States, reported cases of Lyme disease have increased from fewer than 10,000 reported cases in 1991 to more than 27,000 cases by 2013. Canada was well-positioned to be affected by the spread of the </span><img alt="Canada lyme map" class="image-right" src="http://www.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2014/09/09fotos/Canada-Lyme-map-630.jpg" height="243" width="320" /><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">disease. As early as 2005, </span><a class="external-link" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16229849" style="background-color: black; border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.25em; text-decoration: none;">modeling published</a><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"> </span><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">by researcher Nicholas Ogden, then at the University of Montreal, indicated that the geographic range of the Lyme-carrying tick could expand northward significantly due to climate change in this century. </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Scientists long have anticipated that global warming would harm human health, and the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report highlights the risk for poor populations that don't have access to quality health care or other public services. For example, the risk of heat stroke is greatest in areas without access to power for air conditioning, and water-borne illnesses like cholera and intestinal viruses flourish in areas without safe drinking water.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">But one of the clearest signs of the changing health risks in a warming world has emerged in two of the world's most advanced economies, the United States and Canada, as Lyme disease spreads in North America.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency this year added Lyme disease to its list of <a class="external-link" href="http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/science/indicators/health-society/lyme.html" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.25em; text-decoration: none;">climate change indicators</a>, a report meant to aid in public understanding of the effects of warming that scientists have been able to document....</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">'An emerging clinical problem'<br />The doctors presented their <a class="external-link" href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/art.38498/" style="border-bottom-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-width: 0px; font-weight: bold; line-height: 1.25em; text-decoration: none;">findings</a> in April at an American College of Rheumatology symposium but declined to talk to The Daily Climate about their research until it is published in a medical journal. They are still working on finalizing their paper, an IWK Health Centre spokeswoman said. But in the abstract presented at that meeting, they called Lyme arthritis "an emerging clinical problem in Nova Scotia," with cases expected to continue to rise.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Untreated, Lyme disease can spread to joints, the nervous system, and even the heart. Heart block due to Lyme carditis can develop in minutes or hours, and is a rare but fatal complication. A more common problem that causes even greater concern in the health community: Lyme patients with symptoms persisting long after antibiotic treatment. There's great controversy over how long antibiotic treatment should be continued in such cases and who should bear the costs. The issue underscores the importance of early detection. "Almost always the persistent cases are in patients who were not treated early," said the CDC's Beard.</span> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Robert Strang, Nova Scotia's chief public health officer, says one problem with diagnosis has been that Lyme involves "a lot of non-specific symptoms." Of the cluster of pediatric arthritis cases at IWK, he said, "that case series reminded us that there are joint and neurologic and cardiac ways that Lyme disease can present itself."...<br /> </span></blockquote>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-87723468298953969982014-09-23T11:32:00.000-04:002014-09-23T11:37:20.518-04:00Jon Stewart "Burn Notice"<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">On why people have to 'March' anyway (Republicans in the House of Representatives - Science, etc. Committee):</span><br />
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<a href="http://thedailyshow.cc.com/videos/8q3nmm/burn-noticed" target="_blank">The Daily Show - Burn Notice</a><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Excerpt from the 'hearing':</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bucshon:</strong> Is it true that this rule has no effect on the global temperature change?</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Holdren:</strong> Can I take that? I’d like to respond to that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bucshon:</strong> There’s public comment out there that that question has been asked and answered saying no.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Holdren:</strong> You should look at the scientific literature [interrupted] rather than the public comments …</span></div>
<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><span id="trigger-slidedown" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.440000534057617px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"></span><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 22.440000534057617px;"></span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Bucshon:</strong> <strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Of all the climatologists whose careers depends on the climate changing to keep themselves publishing articles? Yes, I could read that, but I don’t believe it.</strong></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><strong style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">from </strong></span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/17/3568923/bucshon-climate-scientists-money/">http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/09/17/3568923/bucshon-climate-scientists-money/</a></div>
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<span style="color: #cccccc;"><span style="background-color: black;">(Bucshon is the Representative from Indiana - from my district)</span></span></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-48599499301880431492014-09-23T09:31:00.000-04:002014-09-23T09:34:47.010-04:00UN Climate Summit 2014<a href="http://webtv.un.org/" target="_blank"><span style="background-color: black; color: #c27ba0;">UN Climate Summit 2014 - live broadcast</span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Climate Summit 2014 - 1) Opening Ceremony 2) National action and ambition announcements, Plenary 3 (National Announcements and Heads of State and Government) 3) Joint conclusion of the morning National Action and Ambition Announcements</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has invited world leaders, from government, finance, business, and civil society to Climate Summit 2014 this 23 September to galvanize and catalyze climate action. He has asked these leaders to bring bold announcements and actions to the Summit that will reduce emissions, strengthen climate resilience, and mobilize political will for a meaningful legal agreement in 2015. Climate Summit 2014 provides a unique opportunity for leaders to champion an ambitious vision, anchored in action that will enable a meaningful global agreement in 2015.</span></blockquote>
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<i><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This is what inspired the NYC march and other marches / demonstrations around the world. There is hope that the various government </span><span style="line-height: 24px;">representatives</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> will work together to make changes to business as usual. It is a world-wide problem that takes world-wide solutions. </span></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; line-height: 1.5em;">I think we need rationing - at the individual and country levels. Plus industries need more controls - enforced regulations on emissions. There needs to be more requirements for large corporations to be efficient. Green energy needs to be promoted, of course - with an end to oil and gas subsidies and a limit on how much is extracted per year.</span></span></i></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-15373056791305080912014-09-23T09:19:00.001-04:002014-09-23T09:20:39.893-04:00The Biggest Climate March Ever! - September 21, 2014 - New York City<br />
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<img height="350" src="https://avaazimages.s3.amazonaws.com/NYC%20march1.jpg" width="400" /></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-45464430364341665122014-09-23T09:14:00.002-04:002014-09-23T09:16:09.850-04:00"Environment Climate change Carbon map"<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2014/sep/23/carbon-map-which-countries-are-responsible-for-climate-change" target="_blank">Environment Climate change Carbon map – which countries are responsible for climate change?</a>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-82357304363662679592014-07-19T20:51:00.000-04:002014-07-19T20:57:42.922-04:00More Jellyfish Off the Coast of Maine<blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999;"><img alt="A frame grab taken from a video by USM student Amy Santiago shows a large group, or smack, of moon jellies. Santiago took the video about a month ago while kayaking off the Wolfe’s Neck area in Freeport." src="http://www.pressherald.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/469920_427533-jelly-e1405506926201.jpg" height="223" style="border: 0px; font-family: 'Open sans', sans-serif; height: auto; margin-bottom: 6px; max-width: none; width: 225px;" width="320" /></span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999;"><br /><br /><br /><a href="http://www.pressherald.com/2014/07/16/as-jellyfish-appear-in-waves-off-maine-coast-questions-follow/">From the Portland Press Herald:</a><br /><br /><br /> As jellyfish come in waves off Maine coast, questions follow - The early summer invasion appears to be heavier than normal this year, surprising some and distressing others. <br /><br />Or, the June bloom could be a random explosion of a species that goes as fast as it comes. <br /><br />Although they move without intent, drifting on currents, jellies – the term scientists tend to use for the gelatinous zooplankton these days, rather than jellyfish – are opportunists. They take advantage of holes in the system, competing with fish for the same tiny nutrients. <br /><br />The waters off Maine have three types – moon jellies, comb jellies and lion’s mane jellies. Only the lion’s mane has a sting harmful to humans.<br /><br />“It is frustrating to not be able to say anything other than speculative things about why,” she said. <br /><br />That’s because no one in Maine has made a study of them. Trying to get a jelly expert on the phone is like playing a game of hot potato where you’re the potato, but all roads seem to lead to Andrew Pershing, chief scientific officer and ecosystem modeler at the Gulf of Maine Research Institute in Portland. Even he demurs. <br /><br />But at least one researcher, Nick Record of the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in East Boothbay, has decided after two seasons of a noted increase in jellies that it is high time to start tracking the species in Maine. This summer he began building a library of the species spotted here and hopes to create predictive models that might tell us when to expect jelly blooms like the one that began this June. <br /><br />“Then hopefully, a field program,” Record said. That’s all contingent on getting funding, because as he points out, although the public is more aware than ever about what is happening on the Maine coast – and ready to send an email or make a phone call to report it – there is less funding for such studies because of federal cutbacks in research. <br /><br />“We have had jellyfish before,” he said. “But we haven’t had jellyfish where you look off the dock and all you see is jellyfish.” <br /><br />“This year it was scary,” said Anne Murphy, whose family has owned a summer place in Brigham’s Cove since the late 1970s. She opted not to swim in the jelly-thickened water. <br /><br />“I looked down in the water and I was like, ‘What is that?’ I have never seen so many,” Murphy said.<br /><br /> For weeks, Maine’s marine research centers have been flooded with questions about a seeming jellyfish invasion in local waters, primarily Casco Bay. They’ve ranged from the urgent – should I let my kids go in the water, or are they going to get stung? – to expressions of longer-term fears, namely, is this the result of global warming? Ocean acidification in the warming Gulf of Maine? Proof of a hypothesis that we’re headed for an ocean ecosystem clogged by jellies, creatures that cause many beachgoers to shudder in revulsion? <br /><br />Researchers across the board say they just don’t know what the cause is. It could be climate change, including warmer waters. It could be a depletion of oxygen in coastal waters because of runoff from the land, or some response to overfishing.<br /><br />Cathy Ramsdell, executive director of the Friends of Casco Bay, said her group has been getting questions about the creatures “everywhere we go this summer.” <br /><br />“I am the person willing to talk about jellyfish, but it is an interesting state of affairs where I am what passes for an expert on jellyfish,” Pershing said. “I can’t think of anyone who studies them (in Maine) and we don’t really have good data on the distribution of jellyfish.”<br /><br /> “It’s hard talking to scientists because none of them want to commit and none of them want to be wrong,” said Dan Devereaux, marine warden for the town of Brunswick. He believes it’s all about elevated ocean temperatures....</span></blockquote>
<a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/" style="background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 20px; left: 66px; min-height: 20px; min-width: 40px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 81px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/" style="background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 20px; left: 66px; line-height: 0; min-height: 20px; min-width: 40px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; top: 81px; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/" style="background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; line-height: 0; min-height: 20px; min-width: 40px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a><a href="http://www.pinterest.com/pin/create/extension/" style="background-image: url(data:image/png; border: none; cursor: pointer; display: none; height: 20px; line-height: 0; min-height: 20px; min-width: 40px; opacity: 0.85; position: absolute; width: 40px; z-index: 8675309;"></a>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-65914698954276088202014-04-30T13:27:00.000-04:002014-04-30T13:33:30.574-04:00California's Drought <h1 style="border-top-color: rgb(16, 119, 56); border-top-style: solid; border-width: 4px 0px 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-weight: normal; line-height: 1.15em; margin: 0px; padding: 0.5em 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #b6d7a8; font-family: inherit; font-size: small; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;"><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/07/3370481/california-drought/" style="background-color: #cccccc; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">Climatologist Who Predicted California Drought 10 Years Ago Says It May Soon Be ‘Even More Dire’</a></span></h1>
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<img alt="U.S. Drought Monitor forWest" src="http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/data/pngs/20140422/20140422_west_none.png" height="400" style="line-height: 1.4;" usemap="#map_west" width="400" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;">BY <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/person/joe/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: bold; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">JOE ROMM</a></span><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px; text-transform: uppercase;"> </span><span class="posted-on" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 21px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-transform: uppercase; vertical-align: baseline;"><time class="published" datetime="March 7, 2014 at 12:26 pm" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">MARCH 7, 2014 FOR <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/">THINKPROGRESS.ORG</a></time></span></span></h1>
<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;">First, though, </span><a href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/01/31/3223791/climate-change-california-drought/" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">as I’ve reported</a><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;">, scientists a decade ago not only predicted the loss of Arctic ice would dry out California, they also precisely predicted the specific, unprecedented change in the jet stream that has in fact caused the unprecedented nature of the California drought. Study co-author, Prof. Lisa Sloan, told me last week that, “I think the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire that our study suggested.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">“Where the sea ice is reduced, heat transfer from the ocean warms the atmosphere, resulting in a rising column of relatively warm air,” Sewall said. “The shift in storm tracks over North America was linked to the formation of these columns of warmer air over areas of reduced sea ice.” In January, Sewall wrote me that “both the pattern and even the magnitude of the anomaly looks very similar to what the models predicted in the 2005 study (see Fig. 3a [below]).”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Here is what Sewall’s model predicted in his <a href="http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/EI171.1" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">2005 paper</a>:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Figure 3a: Differences in DJF [winter] averaged atmospheric quantities due to an imposed reduction in Arctic sea ice cover. The 500-millibar geopotential height (meters) increases by up to 70 m off the west coast of North America. Increased geopotential height deflects storms away from the dry locus and north into the wet locus</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">“Geopotential height” is the height above mean sea level for a given pressure level. The “<a href="http://weather.unisys.com/upper_air/ua_cont.php?plot=500&inv=0&t=cur" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">500 mb level</a> is often referred to as the steering level as most weather systems and precipitation follow the winds at this level,” which is around 18,000 feet.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Now here is what the 500 mb geopotential height anomaly looked like over the last year, via<a href="http://www.weatherwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/2013.gif" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">NOAA</a>:</span></div>
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<img alt="2013 anomaly" class="aligncenter" src="http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/2013-anomaly.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; clear: both; display: block; float: none; font-family: inherit; font-size: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0.5em auto; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">That is either a highly accurate prediction or one heck of a coincidence.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;">The San Jose Mercury News </span><a href="http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_24904396/california-drought-whats-causing-it" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">explained</a><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;"> that “meteorologists have fixed their attention on the scientific phenomenon they say is to blame for the emerging drought: a vast zone of high pressure in the atmosphere off the West Coast, nearly four miles high and 2,000 miles long, so stubborn that one researcher has dubbed it the </span><em style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">Ridiculously Resilient Ridge</em><span style="font-family: 'Open Sans', Calibri, 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Sans', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 23px;">.” This high pressure ridge has been acting “like a brick wall” and forcing the jet stream along a much more northerly track, “blocking Pacific winter storms from coming ashore in California, deflecting them up into Alaska and British Columbia, even delivering rain and cold weather to the East Coast.</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Last year, I contacted Sloan to ask her if she thought there was a connection between the staggering loss of Arctic sea ice in recent years and the brutal drought gripping the West, as her research predicted. She wrote, “Yes, sadly, I think we were correct in our findings, and it will only be worse with Arctic sea ice diminishing quickly.” Last week, Sloan wrote me:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Yes, in this case I hate that we (Sewall & Sloan) might be correct. And in fact, I think the actual situation in the next few decades could be even more dire that our study suggested. Why do I say that? (1) we did not include changes in greenhouse gases other than CO2; (2) maybe we should have melted more sea ice and see what happens; (3) these atmospheric and precipitation estimates do not include changes in land use, in the US and elsewhere. Changing crops, or urban sprawl increases, or melting Greenland and Northern Hemisphere glaciers will surely have an impact on precipitation patterns.</span></div>
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<a href="http://www.weatherwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/multigraph.png" style="-webkit-transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out; outline: none; text-decoration: none; transition: all 0.3s ease-in-out;"><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><img alt="2013-2014 was California’s warmest winter on record. (NOAA/NCDC)" class="size-medium wp-image-1355" src="http://www.weatherwest.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/multigraph-300x222.png" height="222" scale="0" style="border: 0px none; height: auto; margin: 0px; max-width: 100%; padding: 0px;" width="300" /></span></a><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">2013-2014 was California’s warmest winter on record. (NOAA/NCDC)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 16px; line-height: 22px;"> </span>The increasing trend in annual temperature in California over the past 118 years. (Source: NOAA). This trend mirrors the global increase.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">From UJ:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">This same phenomena that is causing the California drought is causing Alaska to get more warm air, which would warm the arctic more (presumably). It also is what pushed cold air down to the Midwest / Great Lakes region this past winter - referred to as the <a href="http://ozonewatch.gsfc.nasa.gov/facts/vortex_NH.html" target="_blank">Polar Vortex</a>. We had near record snowfalls, and were colder than usual. It also took longer than normal (by 3-4 weeks) for Spring to get here this year.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">It is interesting to see the world as whole - departures from normal - below:</span></div>
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<img src="http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/chrisburt/wotemp314.jpg" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #1e2023; display: inline-block; font-family: verb, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-style: normal; height: auto; line-height: 21px; max-width: 100%; vertical-align: middle;" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;"><i style="box-sizing: border-box; font-family: verb, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 21px;">March 2014 land and sea surface temperature anomalies in degrees Celsius.</i><span style="font-family: verb, 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-style: normal; line-height: 21px;"> NOAA</span></span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-80009744964065875332014-04-30T12:27:00.002-04:002014-04-30T12:42:34.704-04:00Earth & ReverieI wanted to add the blog, <a href="http://earthandreverie.wordpress.com/" target="_blank">Earth & Reverie </a> to my blogroll, but Blogger is not co-operating.<br />
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So I am posting it here. It is a new group blog that I started on the subject of Global Warming.<br />
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I am reposting <a href="http://earthandreverie.wordpress.com/2014/04/30/numbers-rising/" target="_blank">my most recent post below</a>. The numbers are what brings it all home, gives me pause.<br />
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<span style="color: #cccccc; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><b style="background-color: black;">Numbers Rising</b></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">I recently discovered Bill McKibbens article from July of 2012, “<a data-mce-href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719" href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/global-warmings-terrifying-new-math-20120719" target="_blank">Global Warming's Terrifying New Math</a>”. If I had noticed it before, I did not fully digest it. Some highlights from it include:</span></div>
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<strong><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The First Number: 2° Celsius</span></strong> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">Some context: So far, we've raised the average temperature of the planet just under 0.8 degrees Celsius, and that has caused far more damage than most scientists expected. (A third of summer sea ice in the Arctic is gone, the oceans are 30 percent more acidic, and since warm air holds more water vapor than cold, the atmosphere over the oceans is a shocking five percent wetter, loading the dice for devastating floods.)</span> </blockquote>
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<strong><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The Second Number: 565 Gigatons</span></strong> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">Scientists estimate that humans can pour roughly 565 more gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere by midcentury and still have some reasonable hope of staying below two degrees. ….Computer models calculate that even if we stopped increasing CO<span style="height: 0px; line-height: 1; position: relative; top: 0.5ex; vertical-align: baseline;">2</span> now, the temperature would likely still rise another 0.8 degrees, as previously released carbon continues to overheat the atmosphere. That means we're already three-quarters of the way to the two-degree target.</span><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">CO<span style="height: 0px; line-height: 1; position: relative; top: 0.5ex; vertical-align: baseline;">2</span> emissions last year (2011) rose to 31.6 gigatons, up 3.2 percent from the year before….In fact, study after study predicts that carbon emissions will keep growing by roughly three percent a year – and at that rate, we'll blow through our 565-gigaton allowance in 16 years (2028). "When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of about six degrees." [Fatih Birol, the IEA's chief economist] That's almost 11 degrees Fahrenheit, which would create a planet straight out of science fiction.</span><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">…[The tar sands of Alberta] contain as much as 240 gigatons of carbon (or almost half of the available space if we take the 565 limit seriously)… The Orinoco deposits (in Venezuela are larger than Alberta's .</span> </blockquote>
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<strong><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The Third Number: 2,795 Gigatons</span></strong> </blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The number describes the amount of carbon already contained in the proven coal and oil and gas reserves of the fossil-fuel companies, and the countries (think Venezuela or Kuwait) that act like fossil-fuel companies. In short, it's the fossil fuel we're currently planning to burn. And the key point is that this new number – 2,795 – is higher than 565. Five times higher. …John Fullerton, a former managing director at JP Morgan who now runs the Capital Institute, calculates that at today's market value, those 2,795 gigatons of carbon emissions are worth about $27 trillion.</span><span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc; font-size: x-small;">The numbers are simply staggering – this [fossil fuel] industry, and this industry alone, holds the power to change the physics and chemistry of our planet, and they're planning to use it. …Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson told Wall Street analysts that the company plans to spend $37 billion a year through 2016 (about $100 million a day) searching for yet more oil and gas. The five biggest oil companies have made more than $1 trillion in profits since the millennium…</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Bill McKibben thinks one answer is to make the fossil fuel industry pay the cost of it’s ‘externalities’ - the cost of the pollution / CO2. “The higher the price on carbon, the more of those reserves would be worthless.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">I don’t know that that is the best way. The fossil fuel company and the heavy users could probably never repay the world for the cost of the warmed planet (and costs of droughts, all the storms, etc.) and the cost of acidified ocean and loss of sea life (i.e. our food). And when the price of things get higher, the poor suffer the most, the wealthy would be fine for a long time.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">The news came out about the same time as this McKibben article that the the <a data-mce-href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/07/22/super-rich-offshore-havens_n_1692608.html" target="_blank">Super-Rich have up to $32 Trillion in stored in ‘offshore’ tax havens</a> (probably more now). So money - wise, there is little that could be done to prevent the very wealthy from using fossil fuels until they were gone. That is why rationing is the only practical solution.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">I expect rationing would be difficult to enforce on the wealthy, who are used to getting whatever they want. But theoretically, it would give them an incentive to be more creative in how they use energy. If they were going to have large homes, for instance, they would need to incorporate smart designs and use renewable energy sources. (There could be limits on home size, too, for that matter). If they were going to travel, thought would have to be put into how to do so without using fossil fuels (sailing?). Efforts would have to be made to travel less. Perhaps the super-rich could buy other’s rations, but at least the other people would get some benefit and the overall use would be less.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">The enforced slow-down of consumption, along with the re-planting of trees / forests, would be a good start. The other thing that should happen is a world-wide limit of one child per family (to make it per woman would be the practical way to do it). Part of the problem is clearly that too many people consuming too much energy is more than the planet can contain. We know that wars and famines have been predicted (and are happening). Some agriculture will be able to be shifted north - to Canada and Siberia, perhaps eventually to Greenland. But still, we know that more and more people want to live the ‘American’ dream life, no matter where on the earth they live. And since it is not reasonable to say that we can live it and other’s cannot, the only reasonable thing is to reduce the population equally, world wide. From looking at the charts, it looks like it should be reduced until the world population is at least down to one billion people. If people are going to ‘live the good life’, it may need to be less than that.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Unfortunately, if no rationing takes place, if deforestation continues, and population increases, nature will take care of things herself. But we should not consider her to be ‘cruel’ (as many people will surely die & <a data-mce-href="http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/" href="http://www.biologicaldiversity.org/programs/population_and_sustainability/extinction/" target="_blank">extinctions are already happening at a rate of 3 species per hour</a>), humanity has beaten nature down for quite some time. At some point, there is only so much nature can take before humans will no longer be able to continue life as we have come to think is usual.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #cccccc;">Zach Klonoski wrote a good piece, "<a data-mce-href="http://www.registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31473533-78/fossil-fuel-climate-carbon-oil.html.csp" href="http://www.registerguard.com/rg/opinion/31473533-78/fossil-fuel-climate-carbon-oil.html.csp" target="_blank">Wash hands of oil?</a>" based on McKibbens book on the same subject as the above reference article, “<a data-mce-href="http://www.billmckibben.com/oilandhoney.html" href="http://www.billmckibben.com/oilandhoney.html" target="_blank">Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely Activist</a>.”</span></div>
Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-700211037391219402014-03-02T16:35:00.001-05:002014-03-02T16:35:16.663-05:00"Global riot epidemic due to demise of cheap fossil fuels"<div class="tr_bq">
<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">First a synopsis of the Ukrainian riots from the KyivPost:</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">A new wave of protests and clashes between protesters and police in Kyiv started after the Verkhovna Rada failed to register a resolution on reinstating the 2004 version of the Ukrainian constitution on Feb. 18, upon which the opposition had insisted. Over 80 people died in the clashes. This ultimately led to the change of government in the country: President Viktor Yanukovych has gone into hiding, and the Ukrainian parliament elected Oleksandr Turchynov as the new speaker and interim president on Feb. 22. The Verkhovna Rada also reinstated the 2004 constitution and scheduled early presidential elections for May 25. Yanukovych was declared internationally wanted on Feb. 24 on suspicion of responsibility for mass killings of peaceful protesters.</span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 13px;">....</span><span style="font-size: 13px;">Most Russians are following the events in Ukraine, and nearly half of them are sure that the recent protests in Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities have been influenced by the West, as is seen from a public opinion poll of 1,603 people the Levada Center sociological service conducted in 130 populated areas of 45 regions of Russia on Feb. 21-25.</span> </span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In the view of 45 percent of those polled, the Ukrainians are protesting under the influence of the West seeking to draw Ukraine into the orbit of its political interests, 32 percent explain the riots by nationalistic sentiments in society, and 17 percent are sure that the protests were fueled chiefly by hatred toward Yanukovych's corrupt regime.</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">That riots would break out as shortages increased was to be expected to happen sometime. This author says it is now. From the </span></span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/feb/28/global-riots-protests-end-cheap-fossil-fuels-ukraine-venezuela" style="background-color: black; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;" target="_blank">Guardian.UK by Nafeez Ahmed:</a></div>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">If anyone had hoped that the Arab Spring and Occupy protests a few years back were one-off episodes that would soon give way to more stability, they have another thing coming. The hope was that ongoing economic recovery would return to pre-crash levels of growth, alleviating the grievances fueling the fires of civil unrest, stoked by years of recession. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But this hasn't happened. And <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/19/economy-end-growth-resource-scarcity-costs" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">it won't</a>. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Instead the post-2008 crash era, including 2013 and early 2014, has seen a persistence and proliferation of civil unrest on a scale that has never been seen before in human history. This month alone has seen riots kick-off in <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/top-stories/venezuela-third-night-of-riots-over-dead-students-1-3307673" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Venezuela</a>, <a href="http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2014/02/who-behind-bosnia-riots-201429132930915905.html" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Bosnia</a>, <a href="http://edition.cnn.com/2014/02/26/world/europe/ukraine-politics/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Ukraine</a>, <a href="http://guardianlv.com/2014/02/iceland-protests-started-as-global-epidemic-of-riots-continues/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Iceland</a>, and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/17/thailand-protesters-besiege-temporary-government-hq" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Thailand</a>. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is not a coincidence. The riots are of course rooted in <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/27/recipe-revolution-ukraine-thailand-venezuela-turkey" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">common, regressive economic forces</a> playing out across every continent of the planet - but those forces themselves are symptomatic of a deeper, protracted process of global system failure as we transition from the old industrial era of dirty fossil fuels, towards something else. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Even before the Arab Spring erupted in Tunisia in December 2010, analysts at the New England Complex Systems Institute warned of the<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2013/mar/06/food-riots-new-normal" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">danger of civil unrest</a> due to escalating <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/food" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="More from the Guardian on Food">food</a> prices. If the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO) food price index rises above 210, they warned, it could trigger riots across large areas of the world.</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The pattern is clear. Food price spikes in 2008 coincided with the eruption of social unrest in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Somalia, Cameroon, Mozambique, Sudan, Haiti, and India, among others. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">In 2011, the price spikes preceded social unrest across the Middle East and North Africa - Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Libya, Uganda, Mauritania, Algeria, and so on. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Last year saw food prices reach <a href="http://www.fao.org/news/story/en/item/212018/icode/" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">their third highest year on record</a>, corresponding to the latest outbreaks of street violence and protests in Argentina, Brazil, Bangladesh, China, Kyrgyzstan, Turkey and elsewhere. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Since about a decade ago, the FAO food price index has more than doubled from 91.1 in 2000 to an average of 209.8 in 2013. As Prof Yaneer Bar-Yam, founding president of the Complex Systems Institute, told <a href="http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/a-complex-systems-model-predicted-the-revolutions-sweeping-the-globe-right" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">Vice magazine</a> last week: </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"Our analysis says that 210 on the FAO index is the boiling point and we have been hovering there for the past 18 months... In some of the cases the link is more explicit, in others, given that we are at the boiling point, anything will trigger unrest." </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">But Bar-Yam's analysis of the causes of the global food crisis don't go deep enough - he focuses on the impact of farmland being used for biofuels, and excessive financial speculation on food commodities. But these factors barely scratch the surface.</span> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">The recent cases illustrate not just an explicit link between civil unrest and an increasingly volatile global food system, but also the root of this problem in the increasing unsustainability of our chronic civilisational addiction to fossil fuels.</span> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...<span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Ukraine is a net energy importer, having </span><a href="http://blogg.nhh.no/reconhub/?p=2059" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">peaked</a><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> in oil and gas production way back in 1976. Despite excitement about domestic shale potential, Ukraine's oil production has declined by over 60% over the last twenty years driven by both geological challenges and dearth of investment.</span> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">...Currently, about 80% of Ukraine's oil, and 80% of its gas, is imported from Russia.</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </span> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">...<span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">Of course, the elephant in the room is</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><a href="http://www.euractiv.com/cap/climate-change-food-security-wor-analysis-533530" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">climate change</a><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">. According to Japanese media, a</span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><a href="http://zeenews.india.com/news/eco-news/un-report-sees-usd-1-45-tn-global-warming-cost-media_914918.html" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">leaked draft</a><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;"> </span><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on</span><a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-change" style="border-collapse: collapse; font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;" title="More from the Guardian on Climate change">Climate Change</a><span style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 18px;">'s (IPCC) second major report warned that while demand for food will rise by 14%, global crop production will drop by 2% per decade due to current levels of global warming, and wreak $1.45 trillion of economic damage by the end of the century. The scenario is based on a projected rise of 2.5 degrees Celsius.</span> </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">This is likely to be a very <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/sep/18/climate-change-double-impact-study" style="background-repeat: no-repeat no-repeat; border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">conservative estimate</a>. </span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: black;"><span style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> ....Unfortunately, simply taking to the streets isn't the answer. What is needed is <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/sep/24/crisis-civilisation-unprecedented-opportunity-transition" style="border-collapse: collapse; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none;">a meaningful vision for civilisational transition</a> - backed up with people power and ethical consistence....</span></span></blockquote>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-55680503733595181482014-01-18T19:47:00.001-05:002014-01-18T20:00:42.266-05:00The State of the Oceans<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">I figured I would Google "The State of the Oceans" to see what came up. What I got was links to a newish website, http://www.stateoftheocean.org/ that outlines many of the problems along with suggested solutions.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">Professor Rogers: "Human impacts on the oceans are damaging vital food resources and functions that feedback to climate change and move us further towards unpredictable and potentially catastrophic changes to the environment, biodiversity and human society. This is of deep concern to me and the majority of scientists who study the ocean and should be treated as a global emergency of utmost urgency".</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;"><br /></span>
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">Big Threats: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">Climate Change, Over-fishing, Habitat Destruction, (Oil, etc.) Extraction, Pollution & Alien Species Introduction.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: helvetica, Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">"In Brief: Most, if not all, of the five global mass extinctions in Earth's history carry the fingerprints of the main symptoms of global carbon perturbations (global warming, ocean acidification and anoxia or lack of oxygen; e.g. Veron, 2008).</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">It is these three factors — the 'deadly trio' — which are present in the ocean today. In fact, the current carbon perturbation is unprecedented in the Earth's history because of the high rate and speed of change. Acidification is occurring faster than in the past 55 million years, and with the added man-made stressors of overfishing and pollution, undermining ocean resilience.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">.... Continued releases and slow breakdown rates mean that legacy chemical pollution ( such as from DDT) remains a major concern. However, concerns have been raised recently over a wide range of novel chemicals now being found in marine ecosystems or suspected to be harmful to marine life. High-profile examples include brominated flame retardants, fluorinated compounds, pharmaceuticals and synthetic musks used in detergents and personal care products.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">Some of these chemicals have been located recently in the Canadian Arctic seas, and some are known to be endocrine disrupters or can damage immune systems. Marine litter and plastics are also of major concern, and there is evidence that certain plastics can transport other harmful chemicals in the marine environment.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">…..Scientists at the IPSO meeting agreed that overfishing is exerting an intolerable pressure on ecosystems already under attack by the effects of acidification and warming, and other largely man-made ocean problems. A recent study showed that 63% of the assessed fish stocks worldwide are over-exploited or depleted and over half of them require further reduction of fishing, in order to recover.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">The near extinction of a fish called Chinese bahaba (Bahaba taipingensis) is one of the many examples that highlight how overfishing threatens marine biodiversity. It has taken less than seventy years for this giant fish to become critically endangered after it was first described by scientists in the 1930s."</span></div>
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Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-42450369876148955942014-01-18T18:46:00.000-05:002014-01-18T19:53:11.075-05:00Beijing Air Pollution<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #393939; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #66757f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; line-height: 0px;"><img alt="View image on Twitter" class="autosized-media" data-height="332" data-src-2x="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeE0s5eIIAA1Pej.jpg:large" data-width="500" height="311" src="https://pbs.twimg.com/media/BeE0s5eIIAA1Pej.jpg" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/16px 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; text-transform: none; vertical-align: baseline;" title="View image on Twitter" width="468" /></span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #66757f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">From a video of the Sunrise - in Beijing - because it is too smoggy to see.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #393939; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">http://youtu.be/co0QxKRLpqY</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #66757f; font-family: 'Helvetica Neue', Arial, sans-serif;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 16px;">From the <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/news/beijing-china-dangerous-smog-20140116" target="_blank">Weather Underground</a>:</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">BEIJING -- A dense fog shrouded Beijing's skyscrapers as China's capital saw its first wave of dangerous pollution in 2014, with the concentration of toxins registering more than 24 times the level considered safe.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The air took on an acrid odor, and many of the city's commuters wore industrial strength face masks as they hurried to work.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">"I couldn't see the tall buildings across the street this morning," said a traffic coordinator at a busy Beijing intersection who gave only his surname, Zhang. "The smog has gotten worse in the last two to three years. I often cough, and my nose is always irritated. But what can you do? I drink more water to help my body discharge the toxins."</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;">The city's air quality is often poor, especially in winter when stagnant weather patterns combine with an increase in coal-burning to exacerbate other forms of pollution and create periods of heavy smog for days at a time. But the readings early Thursday for particles of PM2.5 pollution marked the first ones of the season above 500 micrograms per cubic meter.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The density of PM2.5 was about 350 to 500 micrograms Thursday midmorning, though the air started to clear in the afternoon. It had reached as high as 671 at 4 a.m. at a monitoring post at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing. That is about 26 times as high as the 25 micrograms considered safe by the World Health Organization, and was the highest reading since January 2013.</span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 14px; line-height: 22px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Serious air pollution plagues most major Chinese cities, where environmental protection has been long sacrificed for the sake of economic development. Coal burning and car emissions are major sources of pollution. In recent years, China has beefed up regulations and pledged financial resources to fight pollution.</span></span><br />
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</span>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-75336404223141228022014-01-18T18:39:00.001-05:002014-01-18T19:56:51.738-05:00"December 2013 Global Weather Extremes Summary"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999;">From the <a href="http://www.wunderground.com/blog/weatherhistorian/comment.html?entrynum=234#commenttop" target="_blank">Weather Underground</a>:</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: #999999; font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>ASIA</b><br /><br />In mid-December a pool of very cold air and a low pressure in the eastern Mediterranean brought exceptionally heavy snow to the higher elevations of Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. Amman, Jordan reported up to 20 cm (8”) of snow and neighborhoods in Jerusalem saw up to 50 cm (20”). At lower elevations torrential rains of up to 150 mm (6”) caused flooding. Especially hard hit was the Gaza Strip where 40,000 people were displaced and damage was estimated at US$64 million.<br /><br /><img src="http://icons.wxug.com/hurricane/chrisburt/jordonsnow.jpg" height="205" style="border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; max-width: 640px;" width="320" /><br /><br /><i>Residents of Amman, Jordan enjoy the rare heavy snowfall that deposited 20 cm (8”)on the city on December 13th.</i>Photo from REUTERS.<br /><br />Temperature anomalies for warmth were near record territory for almost the entire month in Central Asia, especially in Kazakhstan.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>AUSTRALIA</b><br /><br />It was yet another warmer than normal month for Australia and also a bit drier than average. In fact, Queensland experienced its 3rd driest December on record with a statewide average of just 26.2 mm (1.03”)—the driest was that of 1938 when the average was 19.6 mm (0.77”).</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>EUROPE</b><br /><br />Western Europe was slammed with what seemed like a never-ending series of powerful extra-tropical cyclones. The worst of these hit the U.K. around Christmastime and resulted in near-record low barometric pressure readings for the U.K. Stronoway, Scotland saw the pressure drop to 936.8 mb (27.66”) on December 24th. Fortunately, the tightest pressure gradients (and thus strongest winds) were to the north of Scotland and thus over sea, so given the powerful nature of the storm surprisingly little damage occurred in the U.K. or Ireland. It was the warmest December since 1988 for the U.K. as whole and precipitation was much above average (154% of such) as a result of the many cyclones. Scotland had its wettest December on record (since 1910). </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>SOUTH AMERICA and CENTRAL AMERICA</b><br /><br />December 2013 was one of Argentina’s hottest months on record. Buenos Aires tied its all-time hottest month (any month) on record (since 1856) with a sweltering 26.6°C (79.9°F) average. The prolonged heat wave caused power outages and water shortages resulting in many large street demonstrations in the city. In the northwest of the country temperatures peaked at 45.5°C (113.9°F) at Chamical on December 26th.<br /><br />Torrential rainfalls caused flooding in Minas Gerais and Espirito Santo States of Brazil resulting in flooding that took at least 44 lives. All-time monthly precipitation records were set at several sites including 921 mm (36.26”) at Capelinha, 851.6 mm (33.53”) at Aimores, 837.4 mm (32.97”) at Santa Teesa, and 714 mm (28.11”) at Vitoria (Esperito Santo).</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;"><b>NORTH AMERICA</b><br /><br />It was a relatively ‘normal’ December in the contiguous U.S. with the most significant events being ice and snowstorms affecting the central and northeastern portions of the country and drought conditions worsening in California.</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">In the southeast, some all-time monthly heat records were set including 83°F (28.3°C) at Augusta, Georgia on December 21st and 81°F (27.2°C) at Norfolk, Virginia on December 22nd (Savannah, Georgia 83°F/28.3°C) and Jacksonville, Florida 84°F/28.9°C tied their monthly records).</span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">A tremendous plume of sub-tropical moisture invaded the Midwest and East December 20-22. An amazing 10.24” (260 mm) of rain in 24 hours was reported at a site near Williams, Indiana, just short of the Indiana state record for such (for any month) of 10.50” (267 mm) at Princeton on August 6, 1905. </span></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12px;">The massive storm of December 20-23 caused significant ice accumulations from Texas to Canada. Worst hit was the Toronto, Canada where ice accumulated up to 30 mm (1.2”) thick.<br /><br />Alaska saw some wild swings of temperature that included an all-time ‘heat’ record for any Arctic Ocean-based site in the state for December when the temperature reached 39°F (3.9°C) at Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) on December 7th. Interestingly a similar event occurred in Sweden’s Lapland on December 11th </span></span>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-50811446199548584372013-11-24T13:47:00.000-05:002013-11-24T13:48:56.645-05:00Midway. The State of the World<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<br />Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31945839.post-2884533224719604612013-11-20T20:18:00.000-05:002013-11-20T20:21:56.415-05:00"Antibiotic resistance will mean the end of just about everything as we know it"<span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 20px;"><a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/11/20/antibiotic_resistance_will_mean_the_end_of_just_about_everything_as_we_know_it/" target="_blank">From Salon.com</a></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="line-height: 18px;"></span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: transparent;">I</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">n the United States, <a href="http://www.salon.com/2013/09/16/cdc_superbugs_kill_at_least_23000_each_year/" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">2 million people</a> are infected with drug-resistant “superbugs” every year, and at least 23,000 die as a result. Such numbers, journalist Maryn McKenna suggests, will seem trivial if we reach the point when all antibiotics are no longer effective — something that’s on track to become a reality.</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">Considering the full implications of a post-antibiotic era, McKenna <a href="https://medium.com/p/892b57499e77" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-color: initial; border-left-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-top-width: 0px; list-style-image: initial; list-style-position: initial; list-style-type: none; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; outline-color: initial; outline-style: initial; outline-width: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-top: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;">concludes</a> that it wouldn’t be so different from the apocalypse. And to know what we’re facing, we need only look at where we’ve come from:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">Before antibiotics, five women died out of every 1,000 who gave birth. One out of nine people who got a skin infection died, even from something as simple as a scrape or an insect bite. Three out of ten people who contracted pneumonia died from it. Ear infections caused deafness; sore throats were followed by heart failure. In a post-antibiotic era, would you mess around with power tools? Let your kid climb a tree? Have another child?</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">To start with, McKenna writes, the loss of antibiotics will mean the end of modern medicine as we know it, impeding everything from surgery to chemotherapy to the far more prosaic:</span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="background-color: black; color: white;">At UCLA, [Dr. Brad] Spellberg treated a woman with what appeared to be an everyday urinary-tract infection — except that it was not quelled by the first round of antibiotics, or the second. By the time he saw her, she was in septic shock, and the infection had destroyed the bones in her spine. A last-ditch course of the only remaining antibiotic saved her life, but she lost the use of her legs. “This is what we’re in danger of,” he says. “People who are living normal lives who develop almost untreatable infections.” ....</span></div>
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<i>Note: As terrible as it is to have people dying from simple infections, our current medical advantages are not sustainable. Antibiotics are partly responsible for our over-population problem. Various diseases are part of the normal processes that keep people in check. Of course, very few would choose to do without those advantages, if given a choice. Nature taking it's course, is not such a bad thing, however, for life on the planet as a whole.</i>Margarethttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16963369208423440990noreply@blogger.com0