From the Independent.co.uk/Reuters:
An area of an Antarctic ice shelf almost the size of New York City has broken into icebergs this month after the collapse of an ice bridge widely blamed on global warming, a scientist said today.
"The northern ice front of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has become unstable and the first icebergs have been released," Angelika Humbert, glaciologist at the University of Muenster in Germany, said of European Space Agency satellite images of the shelf.
Humbert told Reuters about 700 sq km of ice - bigger than Singapore or Bahrain and almost the size of New York - has broken off the Wilkins this month and shattered into a mass of icebergs.
She said 370 sq kms of ice had cracked up in recent days from the Shelf, the latest of about 10 shelves on the Antarctic Peninsula to retreat in a trend linked by the UN Climate Panel to global warming.
The new icebergs added to 330 sq kms of ice that broke up earlier this month with the shattering of an ice bridge apparently pinning the Wilkins in place between Charcot island and the Antarctic Peninsula.
Nine other shelves - ice floating on the sea and linked to the coast - have receded or collapsed around the Antarctic peninsula in the past 50 years, often abruptly like the Larsen A in 1995 or the Larsen B in 2002.
The trend is widely blamed on climate change caused by heat-trapping gases from burning fossil fuels, according to David Vaughan, a British Antarctic Survey scientist who landed by plane on the Wilkins ice bridge with two Reuters reporters in January.
Humbert said by telephone her estimates were that the Wilkins could lose a total of 800 to 3,000 sq kms of area after the ice bridge shattered.
The Wilkins shelf has already shrunk by about a third from its original 16,000 sq kms when first spotted decades ago, its ice so thick would take at least hundreds of years to form....
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
"Too Big To Fail"
I like this Greenpeace banner.
As the secretary of state opened the meeting, the Greenpeace US executive director, Phil Radford, was arrested in his first day in the job. He and six other climbers unfurled a banner from a construction crane near the state department with a message for the environment ministers: "Stop Global Warming. Rescue the Planet." Radford called for the industrialised world to commit to deeper cuts in emissions and provide assistance to developing countries.
From the Guardian:
"US admits responsibility for emissions to bring big polluters together"
The Obama administration issued a mea culpa today on America's role in causing climate change, in a move to get the major economies working together on a global warming treaty.
The admission by Hillary Clinton at a two-day meeting of the world's biggest polluters was intended to ease some of the obstacles towards a deal at UN talks in Copenhagen in December. She placed the gathering of officials from 17 countries, the European Union and the United Nations on a par with the G20 meeting on the economic crisis earlier this month.
Clinton addressed the complaints of developing countries such as India and China that America and the EU, by demanding binding emissions cuts, want to saddle them with the burden of climate change; they argue they did not cause the problem and must prioritise growth. She said the US recognised industrialised countries bore a responsibility: "Some countries like mine are responsible for past emissions." She wanted China and India to grow their economies: "We want people to have a higher standard of living."
Obama had broken with eight years of denial under George Bush, Clinton said. "The United States is fully engaged and ready to lead and determined to make up for lost time both at home and abroad … the US is no longer absent without leave."
She saw climate change as the gravest problem facing the international community: "The facts on the ground are outstripping the worst case scenario models." ...
Monday, April 27, 2009
World Views
I've been listening to a book called "The Day the Universe Changed".
It has an abundance of interesting instances when people made discoveries (mostly those) that challenged the world view as described in the Bible and promoted by the Church. Mostly relating to understanding nature - that it works without "God's" hand active in every instance - that there are forces such as gravity - that can explain movement. That the earth is not the center of the universe, etc. Some were instances that changed how workers were viewed - such as after the Black Plague in Europe.
The one thing that struck me as odd - was in the midst of all this - the author inserts the idea that all ways of looking at the world are equally valid or should be considered equitably. While I get his assertion that we all have world views that are skewed because of one thing or another - beliefs that interfere with a truly objective view - I can't agree that all have the same value.
You could consider - in the extreme - those who justify torture - either as individuals against another individual(s) or by people in positions of power who are able to order systematic torture. Even though torture has never been shown to be a useful tool - and in fact creates many problems. One imagines that the only "benefit" is that people are intimidated and frightened into submission. (I don't consider that a benefit - but the practitioners probably do).
Or there is the world-view of business people who don't see a problem with overfishing, or polluting or what-not. They see an increase in their profits and can't see any reason to consider anything else.
And both of these world views are accepted by people who don't benefit from either of them - and are actually harmed by them - but prefer not to notice.
In this society - most people are less aware than we could be of the harm caused by things we take for granted. It's easy to use electricity and not to be constantly thinking of how a mountain somewhere is being destroyed so that I can use this computer, for instance. Or keep the refrigerator going or whatever.... We have to eat - there are consequences - to other animals, to the world from fossil fuel use, etc.
But in general - I see a problem with the European western viewpoint being against nature generally - as if we are at odds to nature. And there is a problem with that world view being exported around the world. We would all be better off adopting the Asian idea of people being an integral part of nature. As in the artwork where people are a small part of things -instead of the dominant and dominating part. The idea that Europeans don't always have the best ideas is something that many are not willing to accept. I think that it is not different in effect than thinking that the earth is the center of the universe and being opposed to any idea that challenged that belief.
So some of these world views are definitely harmful to the planet, to ecosystems and to ourselves individually and collectively. And the more people who have a more positive world view - the better for all of us. It's blind to say that to glorify consumption is just as valuable as to glorify nature. One view leads the world into a downward spiral of destruction - the other looks to solve problems in ways that are not only humane, but which would benefit all life.
Some world views are that the only thing that matters is a "life" after death (that may not even exist). Other world views prefer to consider the matter of this world where we definitely exist. If the consequences to this world are to be considered - than a "world" view that does not seriously consider this world cannot be as valid as one that does. That seems almost too obvious to mention. And yet - many people don't get it. :(
________________________
Addendum:
I was listening to the opening of the book again - and noticed that the author's viewpoint is that nature is "disordered, powerful and chaotic" and that people impose systems because they fear the chaos. The whole premise is goofed up. Sure, when people had little understanding as to what some of the forces of nature are - it made sense that "systems" would be created - ie. superstitions and what now can be seen as pretty delusional religious views.
Nature does not seem nearly so chaotic when it's systems are more understood. And anyway - there is quite a bit of order and systems - like seasons, cycles of life and death, water cycles- evaporation, rain, etc. that people would have had some ideas about, regardless.
It has an abundance of interesting instances when people made discoveries (mostly those) that challenged the world view as described in the Bible and promoted by the Church. Mostly relating to understanding nature - that it works without "God's" hand active in every instance - that there are forces such as gravity - that can explain movement. That the earth is not the center of the universe, etc. Some were instances that changed how workers were viewed - such as after the Black Plague in Europe.
The one thing that struck me as odd - was in the midst of all this - the author inserts the idea that all ways of looking at the world are equally valid or should be considered equitably. While I get his assertion that we all have world views that are skewed because of one thing or another - beliefs that interfere with a truly objective view - I can't agree that all have the same value.
You could consider - in the extreme - those who justify torture - either as individuals against another individual(s) or by people in positions of power who are able to order systematic torture. Even though torture has never been shown to be a useful tool - and in fact creates many problems. One imagines that the only "benefit" is that people are intimidated and frightened into submission. (I don't consider that a benefit - but the practitioners probably do).
Or there is the world-view of business people who don't see a problem with overfishing, or polluting or what-not. They see an increase in their profits and can't see any reason to consider anything else.
And both of these world views are accepted by people who don't benefit from either of them - and are actually harmed by them - but prefer not to notice.
In this society - most people are less aware than we could be of the harm caused by things we take for granted. It's easy to use electricity and not to be constantly thinking of how a mountain somewhere is being destroyed so that I can use this computer, for instance. Or keep the refrigerator going or whatever.... We have to eat - there are consequences - to other animals, to the world from fossil fuel use, etc.
But in general - I see a problem with the European western viewpoint being against nature generally - as if we are at odds to nature. And there is a problem with that world view being exported around the world. We would all be better off adopting the Asian idea of people being an integral part of nature. As in the artwork where people are a small part of things -instead of the dominant and dominating part. The idea that Europeans don't always have the best ideas is something that many are not willing to accept. I think that it is not different in effect than thinking that the earth is the center of the universe and being opposed to any idea that challenged that belief.
So some of these world views are definitely harmful to the planet, to ecosystems and to ourselves individually and collectively. And the more people who have a more positive world view - the better for all of us. It's blind to say that to glorify consumption is just as valuable as to glorify nature. One view leads the world into a downward spiral of destruction - the other looks to solve problems in ways that are not only humane, but which would benefit all life.
Some world views are that the only thing that matters is a "life" after death (that may not even exist). Other world views prefer to consider the matter of this world where we definitely exist. If the consequences to this world are to be considered - than a "world" view that does not seriously consider this world cannot be as valid as one that does. That seems almost too obvious to mention. And yet - many people don't get it. :(
________________________
Addendum:
I was listening to the opening of the book again - and noticed that the author's viewpoint is that nature is "disordered, powerful and chaotic" and that people impose systems because they fear the chaos. The whole premise is goofed up. Sure, when people had little understanding as to what some of the forces of nature are - it made sense that "systems" would be created - ie. superstitions and what now can be seen as pretty delusional religious views.
Nature does not seem nearly so chaotic when it's systems are more understood. And anyway - there is quite a bit of order and systems - like seasons, cycles of life and death, water cycles- evaporation, rain, etc. that people would have had some ideas about, regardless.
The Seafood Industry - Overfishing
From the Guardian.co.uk:
No tuna, no salmon. No oysters, no skate. No cod and chips
Imagine a world without seafood for supper. It's nearer than you think.
As I step off the train at Heysel, in the shadow of the notorious football stadium, the vast art deco structure of the Palais du Centenaire rises like a cathedral. With its four soaring buttresses topped by statues, the Palais forms the centrepiece of the Parc des Expositions in Brussels - a trade-fair complex built in the 1930s to commemorate a century of independence from the Netherlands. This is the temporary home of thousands of fish products from around the world as 23,000 delegates descend from 80 countries for the annual European Seafood Exposition - the world's largest seafood trade show and a grim reminder of man's dominion over the oceans.
"If I wanted people to understand the global fishing crisis, I would bring them here," says Sally Bailey, a marine programme officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the more moderate NGOs combating the exploitation of the seas. Last year, one of the more militant groups - Greenpeace - managed to "close down" five exhibitors trading in critically endangered bluefin tuna, by deploying 80 activists to drape their stands in fishing nets, chain themselves to fixtures and put up banners that read: "Time and tuna are running out".
Their main target was the Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese car manufacturer that is also the world's largest tuna trader, controlling 60% of the market and accounting for 40% of all bluefin tuna imported into Japan from the Mediterranean. The other companies were Dongwon Industries (Korea), Moon Marine (Taiwan/ Singapore), Azzopardi Fisheries (Malta) and Ricardo Fuentes & Sons (Spain).
The day I am there, Greenpeace activists are stalking EU fisheries ministers and waiting for a chance to unfurl their banners - but the security guards thwart them. However, the gargantuan catch on display speaks for itself. At the stand run by the Sea Wealth Frozen Food Company of Thailand, the shelves are groaning with jauntily designed packets of frozen squid, surimi (minced fish) dumplings, spring rolls, samosas and deep-fried cones with shrimp tails poking out of them. In the next aisle, a frenetic chef is wok-frying prawns from Madagascar, dipping them in little square dishes of cumin, coriander, chilli powder, salt, cinnamon and garlic. At the Taiwan Pavilion, the cabinets are full of chilled and frozen tilapia, barramundi, sushi, eel and vacuum packs of tobiko - orange flying-fish roe, salty, crunchy as granola and served by a young woman in national dress who literally has not heard of sustainability. "All the boats are out there catching fish with roe," she tells me. "With so many after the same species, this is a very difficult business for us."
These halls take several hours to negotiate, and the stands seemingly go on forever - 1,650 businesses in all, together peddling most of the 147m tonnes of seafood produced globally every year. Of this, 100m tonnes is caught in the wild while the rest is farmed to satisfy an insatiable demand. Already, 1.2bn people depend on fish in their diet - and in Europe we each consume 20kg per year on average, compared to 5kg per person in India. However, as the emergent middle classes in Asia develop a taste, and a budget, for seafood - considered a luxury item until now - demand will rocket further.
What the organisers must know, but are keeping mum about, is that the oceans are in a parlous state. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 70% of the world's fisheries are now fully exploited (ie, fished to the point where they can only just replenish themselves), overexploited or depleted. The majority of fish populations have been reduced by 70-95%, depending on the species, compared to the level they would be at if there were no fishing at all. In other words, only five per cent of fish are left in some cases. In more practical terms, fishermen are catching one or two fish per 100 hooks, compared to 10 fish per 100 hooks where a stock is healthy and unexploited - a measure of sustainability once used by the Japanese fleet. In England and Wales, we are landing one fish for every 20 that we landed in 1889, when government records began, despite having larger vessels, more sophisticated technology and trawl nets so vast and all-consuming that they are capable of containing 12 Boeing 747 aircraft.
Where have all those other fish gone? In short, we have eaten them. "Tens of thousands of bluefin tuna used to be caught in the North Sea every year," says Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York. "Now, there are none. Once, there were millions of skate - huge common skate, white skate, long-nosed skate - being landed from seas around the UK. The common skate is virtually extinct, the angel shark has gone. We have lost our marine megafauna as a consequence of exploitation."
Then there are the devastating effects of bottom trawling around our coasts, which began with the advent of the steam trawler 130 years ago. "Sweeping backwards and forwards across the seabed, they removed a whole carpet of invertebrates," Professor Roberts says, "such as corals, sponges, sea fans and seaweeds. On one map, dating from 1883, there is a huge area of the North Sea roughly the size of Wales, marked 'Oyster beds'. The last oysters were fished there commercially in the 1930s; the last live oyster was taken in the 1970s. We have altered the marine environment in a spectacular way."
Worse still, after stripping our own seas bare, we have "exported fishing capacity to the waters of developing countries", Professor Roberts warns. Off Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, fleets from the rich industrial north are "fishing in a totally unsustainable way with minimal oversight by European countries". In return for plundering the oceans, which deprives local people of food, and artisanal fishermen of their livelihood, these vessels pay minimal fees that impoverished countries are happy to accept. "It is a mining operation," Professor Roberts says, "a rerun of the exploitation of terrestrial wealth that happened in colonial days. This is colonialism in a new guise, albeit with a respectable cloak in the form of access agreements."
Such is the human feeding frenzy, there may come a time when there are no fish left to catch. In 2006, a study in the US journal Science warned that every single species we exploit would have collapsed by 2048 if populations continued to decline as they had since the 1950s. By 2003, nearly a third of all species had collapsed, the study found - meaning their numbers were down 90% or more on historic maximum catch levels. Extrapolate that on a graph, and the downward curve reaches 100% just before 2050.
That prognosis - now disputed - was based on a four-year study of fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems. "We really see the end of the line now," said the author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the time. "It will be in our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood, if we do not change things." Many imagined a world where there would be no fish protein left to eat apart from jellyfish and marine algae....
_______________
The article goes on to describe that if politicians followed the recommendations of marine scientists instead of fish industry/business interests the situation would improve. Lately that hasn't been happening. There need to be more Marine Protected Areas...
No tuna, no salmon. No oysters, no skate. No cod and chips
Imagine a world without seafood for supper. It's nearer than you think.
As I step off the train at Heysel, in the shadow of the notorious football stadium, the vast art deco structure of the Palais du Centenaire rises like a cathedral. With its four soaring buttresses topped by statues, the Palais forms the centrepiece of the Parc des Expositions in Brussels - a trade-fair complex built in the 1930s to commemorate a century of independence from the Netherlands. This is the temporary home of thousands of fish products from around the world as 23,000 delegates descend from 80 countries for the annual European Seafood Exposition - the world's largest seafood trade show and a grim reminder of man's dominion over the oceans.
"If I wanted people to understand the global fishing crisis, I would bring them here," says Sally Bailey, a marine programme officer with the World Wide Fund for Nature, one of the more moderate NGOs combating the exploitation of the seas. Last year, one of the more militant groups - Greenpeace - managed to "close down" five exhibitors trading in critically endangered bluefin tuna, by deploying 80 activists to drape their stands in fishing nets, chain themselves to fixtures and put up banners that read: "Time and tuna are running out".
Their main target was the Mitsubishi Corporation, the Japanese car manufacturer that is also the world's largest tuna trader, controlling 60% of the market and accounting for 40% of all bluefin tuna imported into Japan from the Mediterranean. The other companies were Dongwon Industries (Korea), Moon Marine (Taiwan/ Singapore), Azzopardi Fisheries (Malta) and Ricardo Fuentes & Sons (Spain).
The day I am there, Greenpeace activists are stalking EU fisheries ministers and waiting for a chance to unfurl their banners - but the security guards thwart them. However, the gargantuan catch on display speaks for itself. At the stand run by the Sea Wealth Frozen Food Company of Thailand, the shelves are groaning with jauntily designed packets of frozen squid, surimi (minced fish) dumplings, spring rolls, samosas and deep-fried cones with shrimp tails poking out of them. In the next aisle, a frenetic chef is wok-frying prawns from Madagascar, dipping them in little square dishes of cumin, coriander, chilli powder, salt, cinnamon and garlic. At the Taiwan Pavilion, the cabinets are full of chilled and frozen tilapia, barramundi, sushi, eel and vacuum packs of tobiko - orange flying-fish roe, salty, crunchy as granola and served by a young woman in national dress who literally has not heard of sustainability. "All the boats are out there catching fish with roe," she tells me. "With so many after the same species, this is a very difficult business for us."
These halls take several hours to negotiate, and the stands seemingly go on forever - 1,650 businesses in all, together peddling most of the 147m tonnes of seafood produced globally every year. Of this, 100m tonnes is caught in the wild while the rest is farmed to satisfy an insatiable demand. Already, 1.2bn people depend on fish in their diet - and in Europe we each consume 20kg per year on average, compared to 5kg per person in India. However, as the emergent middle classes in Asia develop a taste, and a budget, for seafood - considered a luxury item until now - demand will rocket further.
What the organisers must know, but are keeping mum about, is that the oceans are in a parlous state. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation estimates that 70% of the world's fisheries are now fully exploited (ie, fished to the point where they can only just replenish themselves), overexploited or depleted. The majority of fish populations have been reduced by 70-95%, depending on the species, compared to the level they would be at if there were no fishing at all. In other words, only five per cent of fish are left in some cases. In more practical terms, fishermen are catching one or two fish per 100 hooks, compared to 10 fish per 100 hooks where a stock is healthy and unexploited - a measure of sustainability once used by the Japanese fleet. In England and Wales, we are landing one fish for every 20 that we landed in 1889, when government records began, despite having larger vessels, more sophisticated technology and trawl nets so vast and all-consuming that they are capable of containing 12 Boeing 747 aircraft.
Where have all those other fish gone? In short, we have eaten them. "Tens of thousands of bluefin tuna used to be caught in the North Sea every year," says Callum Roberts, professor of marine conservation at the University of York. "Now, there are none. Once, there were millions of skate - huge common skate, white skate, long-nosed skate - being landed from seas around the UK. The common skate is virtually extinct, the angel shark has gone. We have lost our marine megafauna as a consequence of exploitation."
Then there are the devastating effects of bottom trawling around our coasts, which began with the advent of the steam trawler 130 years ago. "Sweeping backwards and forwards across the seabed, they removed a whole carpet of invertebrates," Professor Roberts says, "such as corals, sponges, sea fans and seaweeds. On one map, dating from 1883, there is a huge area of the North Sea roughly the size of Wales, marked 'Oyster beds'. The last oysters were fished there commercially in the 1930s; the last live oyster was taken in the 1970s. We have altered the marine environment in a spectacular way."
Worse still, after stripping our own seas bare, we have "exported fishing capacity to the waters of developing countries", Professor Roberts warns. Off Mauritania, Senegal and other West African countries, fleets from the rich industrial north are "fishing in a totally unsustainable way with minimal oversight by European countries". In return for plundering the oceans, which deprives local people of food, and artisanal fishermen of their livelihood, these vessels pay minimal fees that impoverished countries are happy to accept. "It is a mining operation," Professor Roberts says, "a rerun of the exploitation of terrestrial wealth that happened in colonial days. This is colonialism in a new guise, albeit with a respectable cloak in the form of access agreements."
Such is the human feeding frenzy, there may come a time when there are no fish left to catch. In 2006, a study in the US journal Science warned that every single species we exploit would have collapsed by 2048 if populations continued to decline as they had since the 1950s. By 2003, nearly a third of all species had collapsed, the study found - meaning their numbers were down 90% or more on historic maximum catch levels. Extrapolate that on a graph, and the downward curve reaches 100% just before 2050.
That prognosis - now disputed - was based on a four-year study of fish populations, catch records and ocean ecosystems. "We really see the end of the line now," said the author Boris Worm of Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the time. "It will be in our lifetime. Our children will see a world without seafood, if we do not change things." Many imagined a world where there would be no fish protein left to eat apart from jellyfish and marine algae....
_______________
The article goes on to describe that if politicians followed the recommendations of marine scientists instead of fish industry/business interests the situation would improve. Lately that hasn't been happening. There need to be more Marine Protected Areas...
"Creatures' rush to extinction..." (Australia)
From The Australian:
ONE hot, dark night midway through March, John Woinarski, principal scientist at the Northern Territory's Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, was out doing what he most loves: surveying the wild landscape of the Top End bush. But this task, in recent years, has become a burden. Woinarski, dropped by helicopter on to the high stone-country plateau of West Arnhem Land, already half-knew what he would find at one of his remotest monitoring sites, a stretch of 50sqm - rainforested, lush - beside a waterhole: nothing. Not one native mammal.
During recent decades, scientists have been recording a vast decline in the original mammal fauna of north Australia. In the past five years, for most species, that decline has become a death spiral. The picture is consistent across the north: in parks and in Aboriginal reserves, in pastoral country, in pristine rangelands, in coastal swamps. The pattern has been too plain to miss and many of the likelier causes have been identified, but the dizzying disappearance of animals from the landscape seems like something new. It is Australia's most profound ecological crisis; it is little known in the nation at large and still quite imperfectly understood.
Woinarski, a man of precise words and restrained manner who has spent much of his life studying northern landscapes and received the 2001 Eureka Prize for his work, describes the evidence.
His group's 220 long-term monitoring sites cover the Top End's most untouched regions, places where one would expect the native wildlife to be surviving fairly well. Between 1996 and 2001, he and his colleagues observed the falling away and traced the ongoing pattern, but in the following five years it was as though the native fauna population had plunged from a cliff's edge. The newest findings were "the game-stopper". They recorded an average 70 per cent drop in species numbers and an 82 per cent drop in the total of animals seen at each site. These declines were in all environment types and all family groups. Even in national parks, where protection regimes are in place, the figures were devastating. "The most recent results are extremely alarming; indeed, catastrophic," Woinarski says...
Just more than a year earlier, Woinarski and his core team had published a preliminary report card on the vanishing. Lost From Our Landscape, their 250-page overview, constitutes an unusual field guide, a book of what's not out in the environment any more. It is filled with the details of the NT's most threatened species, including 40-odd small mammals: bilbies, mice, wallabies, quolls, bettongs, rat-kangaroos in obscure and appealing variations. It weaves a familiar narrative.
The last great wave of Australian extinctions was experienced in the Centre, between the 1930s and '60s, when most of the 20 mammal species known to have been lost from this continent disappeared. That pattern is now repeating further north: animals that were once common are critically endangered...
Scientists know very well, from fossil evidence, that animals have been dying out in Australia for the past 60,000 years as a result of large-scale climate shifts, and also as a consequence of man's arrival, and the use of fire to control the landscape. But today's looming round of extinctions is a strong clue to the strain placed on the tropical and sub-tropical region in recent decades by modern development pressures and by the abandonment of traditional land use techniques.
Mines, ports, dams, cattle stations, all these have changed the workings of the landscape. But the remote bush is also being transformed. More subtle, pervasive, insidious long-term shifts are under way. Hence a paradox: it is in the untouched far country that the most startling declines in animal populations are being recorded. As Woinarski observes, central and north Australian mammals are susceptible precisely because they had evolved through millennia to fit the scarcities and slow pace of the continent. They tend not to reproduce fast or in great numbers. When there are changes in an ecosphere, as in the north in the past century, sharp consequences ripple through the natural kingdom...
ONE hot, dark night midway through March, John Woinarski, principal scientist at the Northern Territory's Department of Natural Resources, Environment, the Arts and Sport, was out doing what he most loves: surveying the wild landscape of the Top End bush. But this task, in recent years, has become a burden. Woinarski, dropped by helicopter on to the high stone-country plateau of West Arnhem Land, already half-knew what he would find at one of his remotest monitoring sites, a stretch of 50sqm - rainforested, lush - beside a waterhole: nothing. Not one native mammal.
During recent decades, scientists have been recording a vast decline in the original mammal fauna of north Australia. In the past five years, for most species, that decline has become a death spiral. The picture is consistent across the north: in parks and in Aboriginal reserves, in pastoral country, in pristine rangelands, in coastal swamps. The pattern has been too plain to miss and many of the likelier causes have been identified, but the dizzying disappearance of animals from the landscape seems like something new. It is Australia's most profound ecological crisis; it is little known in the nation at large and still quite imperfectly understood.
Woinarski, a man of precise words and restrained manner who has spent much of his life studying northern landscapes and received the 2001 Eureka Prize for his work, describes the evidence.
His group's 220 long-term monitoring sites cover the Top End's most untouched regions, places where one would expect the native wildlife to be surviving fairly well. Between 1996 and 2001, he and his colleagues observed the falling away and traced the ongoing pattern, but in the following five years it was as though the native fauna population had plunged from a cliff's edge. The newest findings were "the game-stopper". They recorded an average 70 per cent drop in species numbers and an 82 per cent drop in the total of animals seen at each site. These declines were in all environment types and all family groups. Even in national parks, where protection regimes are in place, the figures were devastating. "The most recent results are extremely alarming; indeed, catastrophic," Woinarski says...
Just more than a year earlier, Woinarski and his core team had published a preliminary report card on the vanishing. Lost From Our Landscape, their 250-page overview, constitutes an unusual field guide, a book of what's not out in the environment any more. It is filled with the details of the NT's most threatened species, including 40-odd small mammals: bilbies, mice, wallabies, quolls, bettongs, rat-kangaroos in obscure and appealing variations. It weaves a familiar narrative.
The last great wave of Australian extinctions was experienced in the Centre, between the 1930s and '60s, when most of the 20 mammal species known to have been lost from this continent disappeared. That pattern is now repeating further north: animals that were once common are critically endangered...
Scientists know very well, from fossil evidence, that animals have been dying out in Australia for the past 60,000 years as a result of large-scale climate shifts, and also as a consequence of man's arrival, and the use of fire to control the landscape. But today's looming round of extinctions is a strong clue to the strain placed on the tropical and sub-tropical region in recent decades by modern development pressures and by the abandonment of traditional land use techniques.
Mines, ports, dams, cattle stations, all these have changed the workings of the landscape. But the remote bush is also being transformed. More subtle, pervasive, insidious long-term shifts are under way. Hence a paradox: it is in the untouched far country that the most startling declines in animal populations are being recorded. As Woinarski observes, central and north Australian mammals are susceptible precisely because they had evolved through millennia to fit the scarcities and slow pace of the continent. They tend not to reproduce fast or in great numbers. When there are changes in an ecosphere, as in the north in the past century, sharp consequences ripple through the natural kingdom...
Sunday, April 26, 2009
"Without Superfund Tax, Stimulus Aids Cleanups"
From the New York TImes:
VINELAND, N.J. — The Superfund program to clean up the nation’s most contaminated industrial sites was established nearly 30 years ago on the principle that those responsible for toxic pollution should pay for it.
So why is the government spending $600 million in stimulus money to work on sites like the defunct arsenic-fouled Vineland Chemical Company plant here in South Jersey?
Environmental Protection Agency officials and environmentalists say the Superfund program has been chronically underfinanced since a tax that supported it expired in 1995.
What is more, the old Vineland plant, like hundreds of other toxic dumps, is a so-called orphan site, meaning that either no responsible party has been found or money from the original polluter has been exhausted. So the taxpayer is on the hook for the remedial work.
Vineland’s former owners, now deceased, paid $3 million toward a cleanup that began a decade ago and has already cost more than $120 million. The site will get $10 million to $25 million in stimulus money to speed a continuing project to purge arsenic and other chemicals from soil and water on the site’s 54 acres.
Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the E.P.A., said the use of stimulus money would accelerate progress at 50 Superfund sites in 28 states, including eight abandoned industrial sites in New Jersey and two on Long Island.
“Under the Recovery Act,” Ms. Jackson said, using the formal term for the stimulus package, “we’re getting harmful pollutants and dangerous chemicals out of these communities and putting jobs and investment back in.”
Ronald Naman, the E.P.A. manager for the Vineland site, said the new money would create or save about 20 jobs and allow the current phase of the cleanup to be completed in as little as two years rather than four. As Mr. Naman spoke, three large earth-moving machines were scooping muck out of the Blackwater Branch creek, piling it up to dry so the toxic chemicals could be removed and shipped to landfills.
Mr. Naman said arsenic in soil and water from the company’s pesticide operations still posed a threat to human health and would take years to remedy. The agency, working with private contractors, has processed billions of gallons of tainted water and millions of pounds of polluted soil over the past several years.
Until 1995, cleanups at orphan sites like Vineland were paid in part from a trust fund based on taxes from polluting industries. But that year, the Republican-run Congress, responding to industry complaints, refused to reauthorize the Superfund tax, which once collected hundreds of millions of dollars a year from chemical and oil companies.
President Obama wants to restore the tax and assumes it will provide $1 billion in revenues for his 2011 budget...
VINELAND, N.J. — The Superfund program to clean up the nation’s most contaminated industrial sites was established nearly 30 years ago on the principle that those responsible for toxic pollution should pay for it.
So why is the government spending $600 million in stimulus money to work on sites like the defunct arsenic-fouled Vineland Chemical Company plant here in South Jersey?
Environmental Protection Agency officials and environmentalists say the Superfund program has been chronically underfinanced since a tax that supported it expired in 1995.
What is more, the old Vineland plant, like hundreds of other toxic dumps, is a so-called orphan site, meaning that either no responsible party has been found or money from the original polluter has been exhausted. So the taxpayer is on the hook for the remedial work.
Vineland’s former owners, now deceased, paid $3 million toward a cleanup that began a decade ago and has already cost more than $120 million. The site will get $10 million to $25 million in stimulus money to speed a continuing project to purge arsenic and other chemicals from soil and water on the site’s 54 acres.
Lisa P. Jackson, administrator of the E.P.A., said the use of stimulus money would accelerate progress at 50 Superfund sites in 28 states, including eight abandoned industrial sites in New Jersey and two on Long Island.
“Under the Recovery Act,” Ms. Jackson said, using the formal term for the stimulus package, “we’re getting harmful pollutants and dangerous chemicals out of these communities and putting jobs and investment back in.”
Ronald Naman, the E.P.A. manager for the Vineland site, said the new money would create or save about 20 jobs and allow the current phase of the cleanup to be completed in as little as two years rather than four. As Mr. Naman spoke, three large earth-moving machines were scooping muck out of the Blackwater Branch creek, piling it up to dry so the toxic chemicals could be removed and shipped to landfills.
Mr. Naman said arsenic in soil and water from the company’s pesticide operations still posed a threat to human health and would take years to remedy. The agency, working with private contractors, has processed billions of gallons of tainted water and millions of pounds of polluted soil over the past several years.
Until 1995, cleanups at orphan sites like Vineland were paid in part from a trust fund based on taxes from polluting industries. But that year, the Republican-run Congress, responding to industry complaints, refused to reauthorize the Superfund tax, which once collected hundreds of millions of dollars a year from chemical and oil companies.
President Obama wants to restore the tax and assumes it will provide $1 billion in revenues for his 2011 budget...
"Drowning in plastic..."
...The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is twice the size of France
From the Telegraph.co.uk:
There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.
'It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,' says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. 'Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn't identify. It wasn't a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.'
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn't even close. 'We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,' he says. 'No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.'
So ended Moore's retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world's oceans.
The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in
the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.
The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.
Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.
Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.
During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.
'There's no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,' Charles Moore says. 'The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island [between Hawaii and the Philippines] they have what they call the "shopping beach". If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that's washed up there from thousands of miles away.'
On Midway Island, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.
A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.
Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs – nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter-feeders such as mussels and barnacles; the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists don't know because they are only just beginning to study it.
We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but that's not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors.
Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the world's oceans – their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth's surface – and that they are all accumulating plastic soup...
When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in Yonkers, New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton six-to-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed.
Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, Plexi glass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers...
Single-use plastic bags first appeared in the US in 1957 and in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26 per cent last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled. The total global production of plastic, which was five million tons in the 1950s, is expected to hit 260 million tons this year...
The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society...
The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans.
A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70 per cent of marine plastic debris ends up – water bottles sink fairly quickly – for tens of thousands of years. It may form a layer in the geological record of the planet, or some microbe may evolve that can digest plastic and find itself supplied with a vast food resource...
What we cannot do is clean up the plastic in the oceans. 'It's the biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue,' Moore says. 'They think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere. All we can do is stop putting more of it in, and that means redesigning our relationship with plastic.'
...For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option...
From the Telegraph.co.uk:
There are now 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometre of the world's oceans, killing a million seabirds and 100,000 marine mammals each year. Worse still, there seems to be nothing we can do to clean it up. So how do we turn the tide?
Way out in the Pacific Ocean, in an area once known as the doldrums, an enormous, accidental monument to modern society has formed. Invisible to satellites, poorly understood by scientists and perhaps twice the size of France, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not a solid mass, as is sometimes imagined, but a kind of marine soup whose main ingredient is floating plastic debris.
It was discovered in 1997 by a Californian sailor, surfer, volunteer environmentalist and early-retired furniture restorer named Charles Moore, who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii, at the helm of a 50ft catamaran that he had built himself.
For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take a shortcut across the edge of the North Pacific Subtropical Gyre, a region that seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense slowly spiralling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coasts of Southeast Asia, North America, Canada and Mexico. Fifty years ago nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. These days it is 90 per cent plastic.
'It took us a week to get across and there was always some plastic thing bobbing by,' says Moore, who speaks in a jaded, sardonic drawl that occasionally flares up into heartfelt oratory. 'Bottle caps, toothbrushes, styrofoam cups, detergent bottles, pieces of polystyrene packaging and plastic bags. Half of it was just little chips that we couldn't identify. It wasn't a revelation so much as a gradual sinking feeling that something was terribly wrong here. Two years later I went back with a fine-mesh net, and that was the real mind-boggling discovery.'
Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 metres, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, in many colours, swirling like snowflakes or fish food. An awful thought occurred to Moore and he started measuring the weight of plastic in the water compared to that of plankton. Plastic won, and it wasn't even close. 'We found six times more plastic than plankton, and this was just colossal,' he says. 'No one had any idea this was happening, or what it might mean for marine ecosystems, or even where all this stuff was coming from.'
So ended Moore's retirement. He turned his small volunteer environmental monitoring group into the Algalita Marine Research Foundation, enlisted scientists, launched public awareness campaigns and devoted all his considerable energies to exploring what would become known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and studying the broader problem of marine plastic pollution, which is accumulating in all the world's oceans.
The world's navies and commercial shipping fleets make a significant contribution, he discovered, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day, along with their other litter. But after a few more years of sampling ocean water in
the gyre and near the mouths of Los Angeles streams, and comparing notes with scientists in Japan and Britain, Moore concluded that 80 per cent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land, and the United Nations Environmental Programme agrees.
The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and landfills, and lorries and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Litter dropped by people at the beach is also a major source.
Plastic does not biodegrade; no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by physical friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous plastic soup at the becalmed heart of the Pacific, but Moore also found a fantastic profusion of uniformly shaped pellets about 2mm across.
Nearly all the plastic items in our lives begin as these little manufactured pellets of raw plastic resin, which are known in the industry as nurdles. More than 100 billion kilograms of them are shipped around the world every year, delivered to processing plants and then heated up, treated with other chemicals, stretched and moulded into our familiar products, containers and packaging.
During their loadings and unloadings, however, nurdles have a knack for spilling and escaping. They are light enough to become airborne in a good wind. They float wonderfully and can now be found in every ocean in the world, hence their new nickname: mermaids' tears. You can find nurdles in abundance on almost any seashore in Britain, where litter has increased by 90 per cent in the past 10 years, or on the remotest uninhabited Pacific islands, along with all kinds of other plastic confetti.
'There's no such thing as a pristine sandy beach any more,' Charles Moore says. 'The ones that look pristine are usually groomed, and if you look closely you can always find plastic particles. On Kamilo Beach in Hawaii there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until you dig a foot down. On Pagan Island [between Hawaii and the Philippines] they have what they call the "shopping beach". If the islanders need a cigarette lighter, or some flip-flops, or a toy, or a ball for their kids, they go down to the shopping beach and pick it out of all the plastic trash that's washed up there from thousands of miles away.'
On Midway Island, 2,800 miles west of California and 2,200 miles east of Japan, the British wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking found that many thousands of Laysan albatross chicks are dying every year from eating pieces of plastic that their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.
Worldwide, according to the United Nations Environment Programme, plastic is killing a million seabirds a year, and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles. It kills by entanglement, most commonly in discarded synthetic fishing lines and nets. It kills by choking throats and gullets and clogging up digestive tracts, leading to fatal constipation. Bottle caps, pocket combs, cigarette lighters, tampon applicators, cottonbud shafts, toothbrushes, toys, syringes and plastic shopping bags are routinely found in the stomachs of dead seabirds and turtles.
A study of fulmar carcases that washed up on North Sea coastlines found that 95 per cent had plastic in their stomachs – an average of 45 pieces per bird.
Plastic particles are not thought to be toxic themselves but they attract and accumulate chemical poisons already in the water such as DDT and PCBs – nurdles have a special knack for this. Plastic has been found inside zooplankton and filter-feeders such as mussels and barnacles; the worry is that these plastic pellets and associated toxins are travelling through the marine food chains into the fish on our plates. Scientists don't know because they are only just beginning to study it.
We do know that whales are ingesting plenty of plastic along with their plankton, and that whales have high concentrations of DDT, PCBs and mercury in their flesh, but that's not proof. The whales could be getting their toxins directly from the water or by other vectors.
Research on marine plastic debris is still in its infancy and woefully underfunded, but we know that there are six major subtropical gyres in the world's oceans – their combined area amounts to a quarter of the earth's surface – and that they are all accumulating plastic soup...
When Leo Baekeland, a Belgian chemist, started tinkering around in his garage in Yonkers, New York, working on the first synthetic polymer, who could have foreseen that a hundred years later plastic would outweigh plankton six-to-one in the middle of the Pacific Ocean?
Baekeland was trying to mimic shellac, a natural polymer secreted by the Asian scale beetle and used at the time to coat electrical wires. In 1909 he patented a mouldable hard plastic that he called Bakelite, and which made him very rich indeed.
Chemists were soon experimenting with variations, breaking down the long hydrocarbon chains in crude petroleum into smaller ones and mixing them together, adding chlorine to get PVC, introducing gas to get polystyrene. Nylon was invented in 1935 and found its first application in stockings, and then after the Second World War came acrylics, foam rubber, polythene, polyurethane, Plexi glass and more: an incredible outpouring of new plastic products and the revolution of clear plastic food wraps and containers...
Single-use plastic bags first appeared in the US in 1957 and in British supermarkets in the late 1960s; worldwide there are more than a trillion manufactured every year, although the upward trend is now levelling off and falling in many countries, including Britain. We reduced our plastic bag use by 26 per cent last year, to 9.9 billion. Bottled water entered the mass market in the mid-1980s. Global consumption is now 200 billion litres a year and only one in five of those plastic bottles is recycled. The total global production of plastic, which was five million tons in the 1950s, is expected to hit 260 million tons this year...
The stuff is absolutely ubiquitous, forming the most basic infrastructure of modern consumer society...
The benefits of plastic, most of which relate to convenience, consumer choice and profit, have been phenomenal. But except for the small percentage that has been incinerated, every single molecule of plastic that has ever been manufactured is still somewhere in the environment, and some 100 million tons of it are floating in the oceans.
A dead albatross was found recently with a piece of plastic from the 1940s in its stomach. Even if plastic production halted tomorrow, the planet would be dealing with its environmental consequences for thousands of years, and on the bottom of the oceans, where an estimated 70 per cent of marine plastic debris ends up – water bottles sink fairly quickly – for tens of thousands of years. It may form a layer in the geological record of the planet, or some microbe may evolve that can digest plastic and find itself supplied with a vast food resource...
What we cannot do is clean up the plastic in the oceans. 'It's the biggest misunderstanding people have on this issue,' Moore says. 'They think the ocean is like a lake and we can go out with nets and just clean it up. People find it difficult to grasp the true size of the oceans and the fact that most of this plastic is in tiny pieces and it's everywhere. All we can do is stop putting more of it in, and that means redesigning our relationship with plastic.'
...For consumers, the easiest way to make a difference is to give up plastic shopping bags and plastic water bottles, which contribute more to plastic pollution than any other products. Then comes plastic packaging, which is a little more complicated. It is easy to point out examples of excessive packaging, but plastic does have the virtue of being lighter than paper, cardboard and glass, which gives it a smaller carbon footprint. For food especially, recyclable plastic packaging is probably the best option...
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
"Scientists discover a nearly Earth-sized planet"
(AP) HATFIELD, England – In the search for Earth-like planets, astronomers zeroed in Tuesday on two places that look awfully familiar to home. One is close to the right size. The other is in the right place. European researchers said they not only found the smallest exoplanet ever, called Gliese 581 e, but realized that a neighboring planet discovered earlier, Gliese 581 d, was in the prime habitable zone for potential life.
"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.
An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."
Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.
Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."
Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said...
Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.
"It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said...
Nearly 350 planets have been found outside our solar system, but so far nearly every one of them was found to be extremely unlikely to harbor life.
Most were too close or too far from their sun, making them too hot or too cold for life. Others were too big and likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Those that are too small are highly difficult to detect in the first place.
Both Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 e are located in constellation Libra and orbit around Gliese 581...
"The Holy Grail of current exoplanet research is the detection of a rocky, Earth-like planet in the 'habitable zone,'" said Michel Mayor, an astrophysicist at Geneva University in Switzerland.
An American expert called the discovery of the tiny planet "extraordinary."
Gliese 581 e is only 1.9 times the size of Earth — while previous planets found outside our solar system are closer to the size of massive Jupiter, which NASA says could swallow more than 1,000 Earths.
Gliese 581 e sits close to the nearest star, making it too hot to support life. Still, Mayor said its discovery in a solar system 20 1/2 light years away from Earth is a "good example that we are progressing in the detection of Earth-like planets."
Scientists also discovered that the orbit of planet Gliese 581 d, which was found in 2007, was located within the "habitable zone" — a region around a sun-like star that would allow water to be liquid on the planet's surface, Mayor said...
Gliese 581 d is probably too large to be made only of rocky material, fellow astronomer and team member Stephane Udry said, adding it was possible the planet had a "large and deep" ocean.
"It is the first serious 'water-world' candidate," Udry said...
Nearly 350 planets have been found outside our solar system, but so far nearly every one of them was found to be extremely unlikely to harbor life.
Most were too close or too far from their sun, making them too hot or too cold for life. Others were too big and likely to be uninhabitable gas giants like Jupiter. Those that are too small are highly difficult to detect in the first place.
Both Gliese 581 d and Gliese 581 e are located in constellation Libra and orbit around Gliese 581...
"Global economy is expected to shrink this year"
(AP) The world economy is likely to shrink this year for the first time in six decades.
The International Monetary Fund projected the 1.3 percent drop in a dour forecast released Wednesday. That could leave at least 10 million more people around the world jobless, some private economists said.
"By any measure, this downturn represents by far the deepest global recession since the Great Depression," the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook. "All corners of the globe are being affected."
The new forecast of a decline in global economic activity for 2009 is much weaker than the 0.5 percent growth the IMF had estimated in January.
Big factors in the gloomier outlook: It's expected to take longer than previously thought to stabilize world financial markets and get credit flowing freely again to consumers and businesses. Doing so will be necessary to lift the U.S., and the global economy, out of recession.
The report comes in advance of Friday's meetings between the United States and other major economic powers, and weekend sessions of the IMF and World Bank. The talks will seek to flesh out the commitments made at a G-20 leaders summit in London last month, when President Barack Obama and the others pledged to boost financial support for the IMF and other international lending institutions by $1.1 trillion.
The IMF's outlook for the U.S. is bleaker than for the world as a whole: It predicts the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year. That would mark the biggest such decline since 1946.
Among the major industrialized nations studied, Japan is expected to suffer the sharpest contraction this year: 6.2 percent. Russia's economy would shrink 6 percent, Germany 5.6 percent and Britain 4.1 percent. Mexico's economic activity would contract 3.7 percent and Canada's 2.5 percent.
Global powerhouse China, meanwhile, is expected to see its growth slow to 6.5 percent this year. India's growth is likely to slow to 4.5 percent.
All told, the lost output could be as high as $4 trillion this year alone, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner estimated.
Besides trillions in lost business, a sinking world economy means fewer trade opportunities and higher unemployment. It raises the odds more people will fall into poverty, go hungry or lose their homes. And while keeping a lid on interest rates and consumer prices, the global recession increases the risk of deflation, which would drag down prices and wages, making it harder for people to make payments on their debt.
The jobless rate in the United States is expected to average 8.9 percent this year and climb to 10.1 percent next year, the IMF said.
In Germany, the jobless rate is expected to average 9 percent this year and 10.8 percent next year. Britain's unemployment rate is projected to rise to 7.4 percent this year and to 9.2 percent next year....
The financial crisis erupted in the United States in August 2007 and spread around the globe. The crisis entered a tumultuous new phase last fall, shaking confidence in global financial institutions and markets. Total worldwide losses from the financial crisis from 2007 to 2010 could reach nearly $4.1 trillion, the IMF estimated in a separate report Tuesday.
The crisis has led to bank failures, wiped out Lehman Brothers and forced other big institutions, like insurance giant American International Group, to be bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.
And it's triggered radical government interventions — such as the United States' $700 billion financial bailout program and the Federal Reserve's $1.2 trillion effort to lower interest rates and spur spending.
Actions by the United States and government in other countries have helped ease the crisis in some ways. But markets are still not operating normally.
The 185-nation IMF, headquartered in Washington, is the globe's economic rescue squad, providing emergency loans to countries facing financial troubles. It has urged countries to take bolder actions to bolster banks...
Because the world economy won't be back to normal next year or perhaps even in 2011, Blanchard urged countries to spend money on big public works projects — something the Obama administration is doing — to bolster activity...
The International Monetary Fund projected the 1.3 percent drop in a dour forecast released Wednesday. That could leave at least 10 million more people around the world jobless, some private economists said.
"By any measure, this downturn represents by far the deepest global recession since the Great Depression," the IMF said in its latest World Economic Outlook. "All corners of the globe are being affected."
The new forecast of a decline in global economic activity for 2009 is much weaker than the 0.5 percent growth the IMF had estimated in January.
Big factors in the gloomier outlook: It's expected to take longer than previously thought to stabilize world financial markets and get credit flowing freely again to consumers and businesses. Doing so will be necessary to lift the U.S., and the global economy, out of recession.
The report comes in advance of Friday's meetings between the United States and other major economic powers, and weekend sessions of the IMF and World Bank. The talks will seek to flesh out the commitments made at a G-20 leaders summit in London last month, when President Barack Obama and the others pledged to boost financial support for the IMF and other international lending institutions by $1.1 trillion.
The IMF's outlook for the U.S. is bleaker than for the world as a whole: It predicts the U.S. economy will shrink 2.8 percent this year. That would mark the biggest such decline since 1946.
Among the major industrialized nations studied, Japan is expected to suffer the sharpest contraction this year: 6.2 percent. Russia's economy would shrink 6 percent, Germany 5.6 percent and Britain 4.1 percent. Mexico's economic activity would contract 3.7 percent and Canada's 2.5 percent.
Global powerhouse China, meanwhile, is expected to see its growth slow to 6.5 percent this year. India's growth is likely to slow to 4.5 percent.
All told, the lost output could be as high as $4 trillion this year alone, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner estimated.
Besides trillions in lost business, a sinking world economy means fewer trade opportunities and higher unemployment. It raises the odds more people will fall into poverty, go hungry or lose their homes. And while keeping a lid on interest rates and consumer prices, the global recession increases the risk of deflation, which would drag down prices and wages, making it harder for people to make payments on their debt.
The jobless rate in the United States is expected to average 8.9 percent this year and climb to 10.1 percent next year, the IMF said.
In Germany, the jobless rate is expected to average 9 percent this year and 10.8 percent next year. Britain's unemployment rate is projected to rise to 7.4 percent this year and to 9.2 percent next year....
The financial crisis erupted in the United States in August 2007 and spread around the globe. The crisis entered a tumultuous new phase last fall, shaking confidence in global financial institutions and markets. Total worldwide losses from the financial crisis from 2007 to 2010 could reach nearly $4.1 trillion, the IMF estimated in a separate report Tuesday.
The crisis has led to bank failures, wiped out Lehman Brothers and forced other big institutions, like insurance giant American International Group, to be bailed out by U.S. taxpayers.
And it's triggered radical government interventions — such as the United States' $700 billion financial bailout program and the Federal Reserve's $1.2 trillion effort to lower interest rates and spur spending.
Actions by the United States and government in other countries have helped ease the crisis in some ways. But markets are still not operating normally.
The 185-nation IMF, headquartered in Washington, is the globe's economic rescue squad, providing emergency loans to countries facing financial troubles. It has urged countries to take bolder actions to bolster banks...
Because the world economy won't be back to normal next year or perhaps even in 2011, Blanchard urged countries to spend money on big public works projects — something the Obama administration is doing — to bolster activity...
Monday, April 20, 2009
"Critical turning point can trigger abrupt climate change"
From the Niels Bohr Institute:
...With completely new research results geophysicist Peter Ditlevsen, Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, has found part of the explanation for the mystery of the sudden change of the ice ages. He has made model calculations of the climate of the past and compared it to the concrete data from seabed cores, which tell us about the climatic fluctuations of the past.
From the results he has been able to construct a diagram over the possible climatic conditions resulting from the variation in solar radiation. It appears that the ice ages and interglacial periods are not a gradual fluctuation between cold and warm climates.
What happened 1 million years ago was that the climate system went from a situation where it fluctuated between two states (cold and warm) with a 40.000 year cycle, corresponding to the dominant change in the Sun's radiation. After this period the dynamic changed so that the climate jumped between 3 states, that is to say between a warm interglacial climate like our present climate, a colder climate and a very cold ice age climate. It is still the 40.000 year variation in solar radiation which controls our current fluctuations, but it results in changing climate periods of 80.000 and 120.000 years.
Chaotic dynamic climate
The climate does not become gradually colder or warmer - it jumps from the one state to the other. That which gets the climate to jump is that when the solar radiation changes and reaches a certain threshold - a 'tipping point', the existing climate state, e.g. an ice age, is no longer viable and so the climate jumps over into another state, e.g. a warm interglacial period. In chaos dynamics this phenomenon is called a bifurcation or a 'catastrophe'.
In addition to the change in solar radiation there can be random changes in the Earth's weather variations, that contribute to triggering the bifurcation or the 'catastrophe'. Such variations are called 'noise', and a theory is, that the atmosphere's CO2 level can be an important noise-factor. This means that there is the possibility that the 'noise' is a decisive factor for very large climate changes, which can therefore be unpredictable.
There is still no explanation for the change in the climate system 1 million years ago, but one theory is that the atmosphere's CO2-level fell to the lowest level ever. If so, the manmade increase in CO2 may result in a return to 40.000 year ice age cycles.
"The new results are an important piece of the puzzle for understanding the ice ages and their climate dynamics. In the manmade climate changes, that we are possibly in the middle of now, one worries a lot about the possible so-called 'tipping points'. The bifurcations that are now identified in the natural climate fluctuations are tipping points, so this is of course an important step in our understanding of climate changes", explains Peter Ditlevsen.
"The bifurcation structure and noise assisted transitions in the Pleistocene glacial cycles": http://www.agu.org/journals/pa/papersinpress.shtml#id2008PA001673
...With completely new research results geophysicist Peter Ditlevsen, Centre for Ice and Climate at the Niels Bohr Institute, has found part of the explanation for the mystery of the sudden change of the ice ages. He has made model calculations of the climate of the past and compared it to the concrete data from seabed cores, which tell us about the climatic fluctuations of the past.
From the results he has been able to construct a diagram over the possible climatic conditions resulting from the variation in solar radiation. It appears that the ice ages and interglacial periods are not a gradual fluctuation between cold and warm climates.
What happened 1 million years ago was that the climate system went from a situation where it fluctuated between two states (cold and warm) with a 40.000 year cycle, corresponding to the dominant change in the Sun's radiation. After this period the dynamic changed so that the climate jumped between 3 states, that is to say between a warm interglacial climate like our present climate, a colder climate and a very cold ice age climate. It is still the 40.000 year variation in solar radiation which controls our current fluctuations, but it results in changing climate periods of 80.000 and 120.000 years.
Chaotic dynamic climate
The climate does not become gradually colder or warmer - it jumps from the one state to the other. That which gets the climate to jump is that when the solar radiation changes and reaches a certain threshold - a 'tipping point', the existing climate state, e.g. an ice age, is no longer viable and so the climate jumps over into another state, e.g. a warm interglacial period. In chaos dynamics this phenomenon is called a bifurcation or a 'catastrophe'.
In addition to the change in solar radiation there can be random changes in the Earth's weather variations, that contribute to triggering the bifurcation or the 'catastrophe'. Such variations are called 'noise', and a theory is, that the atmosphere's CO2 level can be an important noise-factor. This means that there is the possibility that the 'noise' is a decisive factor for very large climate changes, which can therefore be unpredictable.
There is still no explanation for the change in the climate system 1 million years ago, but one theory is that the atmosphere's CO2-level fell to the lowest level ever. If so, the manmade increase in CO2 may result in a return to 40.000 year ice age cycles.
"The new results are an important piece of the puzzle for understanding the ice ages and their climate dynamics. In the manmade climate changes, that we are possibly in the middle of now, one worries a lot about the possible so-called 'tipping points'. The bifurcations that are now identified in the natural climate fluctuations are tipping points, so this is of course an important step in our understanding of climate changes", explains Peter Ditlevsen.
"The bifurcation structure and noise assisted transitions in the Pleistocene glacial cycles": http://www.agu.org/journals/pa/papersinpress.shtml#id2008PA001673
"EPA says CO2 emissions endanger human health"
(Reuters) - The Environmental Protection Agency on Friday unveiled a finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare, opening the door to federal regulation of carbon dioxide as a pollutant.
The finding does not "automatically trigger" new carbon rules but could allow the EPA to move forward with limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act.
Rising levels of greenhouse gases "are the unambiguous result of human emissions, and are very likely the cause of the observed increase in average temperatures and other climatic changes," the EPA proposal said.
Environmentalists applauded the decision, while affected industries expressed concern.
* "With this step, Administrator Lisa Jackson and the Obama administration have gone a long way to restore respect for both science and law," David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement.
* Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have warned that the U.S. economy could grind to a halt if the EPA were to begin regulating carbon.
* Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director at the National Wildlife Federation, said "the EPA decision is historic and a game-changer for climate policy that will have political and policy repercussions domestically and abroad."
"This is the single largest step the federal government has taken to fight climate change," he said.
* Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, said "such regulation would have an enormous impact on every facet of the economy, businesses large and small, as well as on the general population."..
* The move to regulate carbon through the EPA will likely place pressure on Congress to pass legislation to limit greenhouse gases. The House Energy and Commerce Committee hopes to clear such a bill by the end of May...
* The White House has said it prefers for Congress to pass a bill that caps carbon emissions and requires companies to acquire permits to release carbon into the atmosphere...
* The EPA will accept public comments on the finding for 60 days. The agency will also hold two hearings on the proposal.
The finding does not "automatically trigger" new carbon rules but could allow the EPA to move forward with limiting greenhouse gas emissions under the federal Clean Air Act.
Rising levels of greenhouse gases "are the unambiguous result of human emissions, and are very likely the cause of the observed increase in average temperatures and other climatic changes," the EPA proposal said.
Environmentalists applauded the decision, while affected industries expressed concern.
* "With this step, Administrator Lisa Jackson and the Obama administration have gone a long way to restore respect for both science and law," David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council said in a statement.
* Business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, have warned that the U.S. economy could grind to a halt if the EPA were to begin regulating carbon.
* Joe Mendelson, global warming policy director at the National Wildlife Federation, said "the EPA decision is historic and a game-changer for climate policy that will have political and policy repercussions domestically and abroad."
"This is the single largest step the federal government has taken to fight climate change," he said.
* Charles Drevna, president of the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association, said "such regulation would have an enormous impact on every facet of the economy, businesses large and small, as well as on the general population."..
* The move to regulate carbon through the EPA will likely place pressure on Congress to pass legislation to limit greenhouse gases. The House Energy and Commerce Committee hopes to clear such a bill by the end of May...
* The White House has said it prefers for Congress to pass a bill that caps carbon emissions and requires companies to acquire permits to release carbon into the atmosphere...
* The EPA will accept public comments on the finding for 60 days. The agency will also hold two hearings on the proposal.
Thursday, April 16, 2009
"Obama unveils high-speed passenger rail plan"
From CNN:
President Obama unveiled his administration's blueprint for a new national network of high-speed passenger rail lines Thursday, saying such an investment is necessary to reduce traffic congestion, cut dependence on foreign oil and improve the environment.
The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.
It also highlights potential improvements in the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor running from Washington to Boston, Massachusetts.
Each of the corridors identified by the president's report are between 100 and 600 miles long. The blueprint envisions some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.
Federal grants would also be directed toward separate individual rail projects that are deemed "ready to go," with preliminary engineering and environmental work already completed.
"My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America. We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come," Obama said at an event near the White House.
The president cited the success of high-speed rail in European countries such as France and Spain as a positive example for the United States.
His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service. Obama has also proposed a separate five-year, $5 billion investment in high-speed rail as part of the administration's suggested fiscal year 2010 budget.
"We're going to make travel in this country leaner and a whole lot cleaner," said Vice President Joe Biden, speaking before Obama...
The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East...
President Obama unveiled his administration's blueprint for a new national network of high-speed passenger rail lines Thursday, saying such an investment is necessary to reduce traffic congestion, cut dependence on foreign oil and improve the environment.
The president's plan identifies 10 potential high-speed intercity corridors for federal funding, including California, the Pacific Northwest, the Midwest, the Southeast, the Gulf Coast, Pennsylvania, Florida, New York and New England.
It also highlights potential improvements in the heavily traveled Northeast Corridor running from Washington to Boston, Massachusetts.
Each of the corridors identified by the president's report are between 100 and 600 miles long. The blueprint envisions some trains traveling at top speeds of over 150 mph.
Federal grants would also be directed toward separate individual rail projects that are deemed "ready to go," with preliminary engineering and environmental work already completed.
"My high-speed rail proposal will lead to innovations that change the way we travel in America. We must start developing clean, energy-efficient transportation that will define our regions for centuries to come," Obama said at an event near the White House.
The president cited the success of high-speed rail in European countries such as France and Spain as a positive example for the United States.
His plan would be funded in part through the recently passed $787 billion stimulus plan, which includes a total of $8 billion for improvements in rail service. Obama has also proposed a separate five-year, $5 billion investment in high-speed rail as part of the administration's suggested fiscal year 2010 budget.
"We're going to make travel in this country leaner and a whole lot cleaner," said Vice President Joe Biden, speaking before Obama...
The city of Chicago, Illinois, would be the hub of the proposed Midwest Regional Rail System, which would stretch to Madison, Wisconsin, in the Northwest; St. Louis, Missouri, in the South; and Detroit, Michigan, in the East...
"1,500 farmers commit mass suicide in India"
From the Independent.co.uk:
Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.
His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.
"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."
"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."
Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."
Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.
"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.
All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.
Over 1,500 farmers in an Indian state committed suicide after being driven to debt by crop failure, it was reported today.
The agricultural state of Chattisgarh was hit by falling water levels.
"The water level has gone down below 250 feet here. It used to be at 40 feet a few years ago," Shatrughan Sahu, a villager in one of the districts, told Down To Earth magazine
"Most of the farmers here are indebted and only God can save the ones who do not have a bore well."
Mr Sahu lives in a district that recorded 206 farmer suicides last year. Police records for the district add that many deaths occur due to debt and economic distress.
In another village nearby, Beturam Sahu, who owned two acres of land was among those who committed suicide. His crop is yet to be harvested, but his son Lakhnu left to take up a job as a manual labourer.
His family must repay a debt of £400 and the crop this year is poor.
"The crop is so bad this year that we will not even be able to save any seeds," said Lakhnu's friend Santosh. "There were no rains at all."
"That's why Lakhnu left even before harvesting the crop. There is nothing left to harvest in his land this time. He is worried how he will repay these loans."
Bharatendu Prakash, from the Organic Farming Association of India, told the Press Association: "Farmers' suicides are increasing due to a vicious circle created by money lenders. They lure farmers to take money but when the crops fail, they are left with no option other than death."
Mr Prakash added that the government ought to take up the cause of the poor farmers just as they fight for a strong economy.
"Development should be for all. The government blames us for being against development. Forest area is depleting and dams are constructed without proper planning.
All this contributes to dipping water levels. Farmers should be taken into consideration when planning policies," he said.
"Consumption Dwarfs Population as Main Environmental Threat"
As far as I'm concerned consumption and population are both problems. We know that the more money people have - the more they consume (generally), but water shortages, environmental degradation, and resource depletion are also worsened and more problematic due to population.
People in the US and "developed" countries should limit their families and their consumption - and it is also reasonable for people in places with inadequate food and safe water to limit theirs. It seems like a no-brainer, really.
--------------------------
by Fred Pearce
A small portion of the world's people use up most of the earth's resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions
It's the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we are afraid to discuss it.
It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly convenient argument - "over-consumers" in rich countries can blame "over-breeders" in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what are the facts?
The world's population quadrupled to six billion people during the 20th century. It is still rising and may reach 9 billion by 2050. Yet for at least the past century, rising per-capita incomes have outstripped the rising head count several times over. And while incomes don't translate precisely into increased resource use and pollution, the correlation is distressingly strong.
Moreover, most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population.
By almost any measure, a small proportion of the world's people take the majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Take carbon dioxide emissions - a measure of our impact on climate but also a surrogate for fossil fuel consumption. Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world's richest half-billion people - that's about 7 percent of the global population - are responsible for 50 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.
Although overconsumption has a profound effect on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of our high standard of living extend beyond turning up the temperature of the planet. For a wider perspective of humanity's effects on the planet's life support systems, the best available measure is the "ecological footprint," which estimates the area of land required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution. This analysis has its methodological problems, but its comparisons between nations are firm enough to be useful.
They show that sustaining the lifestyle of the average American takes 9.5 hectares, while Australians and Canadians require 7.8 and 7.1 hectares respectively; Britons, 5.3 hectares; Germans, 4.2; and the Japanese, 4.9. The world average is 2.7 hectares. China is still below that figure at 2.1, while India and most of Africa (where the majority of future world population growth will take place) are at or below 1.0.
The United States always gets singled out. But for good reason: It is the world's largest consumer. Americans take the greatest share of most of the world's major commodities: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil, and natural gas. For many others, Americans are the largest per-capita consumers. In "super-size-me" land, Americans gobble up more than 120 kilograms of meat a year per person, compared to just 6 kilos in India, for instance.
I do not deny that fast-rising populations can create serious local environmental crises through overgrazing, destructive farming and fishing, and deforestation. My argument here is that viewed at the global scale, it is overconsumption that has been driving humanity's impacts on the planet's vital life-support systems during at least the past century. But what of the future? ...
People in the US and "developed" countries should limit their families and their consumption - and it is also reasonable for people in places with inadequate food and safe water to limit theirs. It seems like a no-brainer, really.
--------------------------
by Fred Pearce
A small portion of the world's people use up most of the earth's resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions
It's the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we are afraid to discuss it.
It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly convenient argument - "over-consumers" in rich countries can blame "over-breeders" in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what are the facts?
The world's population quadrupled to six billion people during the 20th century. It is still rising and may reach 9 billion by 2050. Yet for at least the past century, rising per-capita incomes have outstripped the rising head count several times over. And while incomes don't translate precisely into increased resource use and pollution, the correlation is distressingly strong.
Moreover, most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population.
By almost any measure, a small proportion of the world's people take the majority of the world's resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Take carbon dioxide emissions - a measure of our impact on climate but also a surrogate for fossil fuel consumption. Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world's richest half-billion people - that's about 7 percent of the global population - are responsible for 50 percent of the world's carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.
Although overconsumption has a profound effect on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of our high standard of living extend beyond turning up the temperature of the planet. For a wider perspective of humanity's effects on the planet's life support systems, the best available measure is the "ecological footprint," which estimates the area of land required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution. This analysis has its methodological problems, but its comparisons between nations are firm enough to be useful.
They show that sustaining the lifestyle of the average American takes 9.5 hectares, while Australians and Canadians require 7.8 and 7.1 hectares respectively; Britons, 5.3 hectares; Germans, 4.2; and the Japanese, 4.9. The world average is 2.7 hectares. China is still below that figure at 2.1, while India and most of Africa (where the majority of future world population growth will take place) are at or below 1.0.
The United States always gets singled out. But for good reason: It is the world's largest consumer. Americans take the greatest share of most of the world's major commodities: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil, and natural gas. For many others, Americans are the largest per-capita consumers. In "super-size-me" land, Americans gobble up more than 120 kilograms of meat a year per person, compared to just 6 kilos in India, for instance.
I do not deny that fast-rising populations can create serious local environmental crises through overgrazing, destructive farming and fishing, and deforestation. My argument here is that viewed at the global scale, it is overconsumption that has been driving humanity's impacts on the planet's vital life-support systems during at least the past century. But what of the future? ...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)