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The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

by Chana6228ztgwm Posted on June 19, 2015

The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

By on 19 Jun 2015commentsShare

Sick of hearing about the pope’s encyclical? How about the “400-year-old collective […] that operates as the pope’s eyes and ears on the natural world,” a.k.a. the “secret science committee” behind that encyclical?

Didn’t think so. Here’s the scoop from Bloomberg:

The Pontifical Academy has about 80 members, all of them appointed for life. Scientists hail from many nations, religions, and disciplines, which today include astronomy, biochemistry, physics, and mathematics. Members pursue the scientific issues they deem most important to society, without Vatican interference. Unlike the National Academy of Sciences, which is financially independent from the U.S., the Pontifical Academy relies on the Vatican to keep the lights on.

The full academy meets every two years and is often granted an audience from the pope. In the stretches between the biannual sessions, scientists hold workshops and produce reports on whichever topics they agree are most important for the pope to understand.

And they’ve been worried about climate change for quite some time:

Academy events have addressed the basics of climate change going back at least to October 1980. That’s when Italian physicist Giampietro Puppi addressed the academy during a weeklong workshop on energy.

“The introduction into the atmosphere of an additional amount of particulates and gas, as a result of fuel burning,” said Puppi, an academy member from 1978 until his death, in 2006, “represents in the medium term, decades to centuries, the most important issue and the one of greatest concern on a global scale.”

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, has been a member of the academy since 2004. He told Bloomberg that the group is completely secular: “Not all of them even believe in a god. They are there for pure scientific excellence, and they are not co-opted by any country. They’re not co-opted by the United Nations.”

In April, the academy invited religious leaders from all over — Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and other Christians — to the Vatican for a symposium on climate change. Here’s more from Bloomberg:

They heard from Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen, who popularized the notion that human industry has shoved the world into a new geological phase — the “anthropocene,” or in plainspeak, “the human age.”

And they heard Jeffrey Sachs, prolific writer and Columbia University economist, say that “we can still, but just barely,” avoid pollution levels that lead to dangerous climate change risk.

But the pope doesn’t necessarily take advice from the committee, Werner Arber, a Nobel-winning molecular biologist and the president of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, told Bloomberg. If he doesn’t “appreciate” their work, he’s free to pretty much ignore it.

In an email to Bloomberg, British astronomer Martin Rees, who has been on the committee since 1990, wrote that “the Vatican is as opaque to me as to you!” But he added that this encyclical is encouraging — it could have an impact in the developing world and “maybe also in your Republican Party.”

Yeesh. That’s embarrassing. And also, unfortunately, pretty wishful thinking.

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Behind the Scenes With the Pope’s Secret Science Committee

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The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

Posted in alo, Amana, Anchor, FF, G & F, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, PUR, Radius, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The “secret science committee” behind the pope’s encyclical

Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

by DomingoPollard Posted on July 7, 2014

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

This story originally appeared in the Guardian and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When American geologist Ulyana Horodyskyj set up a mini weather station at 5,800 meters on Mount Himlung, on the Nepal-Tibet border, she looked east toward Everest and was shocked. The world’s highest glacier, Khumbu, was turning visibly darker as particles of fine dust, blown by fierce winds, settled on the bright, fresh snow. “One-week-old snow was turning black and brown before my eyes,” she said.

The problem was even worse on the nearby Ngozumpa glacier, which snakes down from Cho Oyu—the world’s sixth-highest mountain. There, Horodyskyj found that so much dust had been blown on to the surface that the ability of the ice to reflect sunlight, a process known as albedo, dropped 20 percent in a single month. The dust that was darkening the brilliant whiteness of the snow was heating up in the strong sun and melting the snow and ice, she said.

The phenomenon of “dark snow” is being recorded from the Himalayas to the Arctic as increasing amounts of dust from bare soil, soot from fires, and ultrafine particles of “black carbon” from industry and diesel engines are being whipped up and deposited sometimes thousands of miles away. The result, say scientists, is a significant dimming of the brightness of the world’s snow and icefields, leading to a longer melt season, which in turn creates feedback where more solar heat is absorbed and the melting accelerates.

In a paper in the journal Nature Geoscience, a team of French government meteorologists has reported that the Arctic ice cap, which is thought to have lost an average of 12.9 billion tonnes of ice a year between 1992 and 2010 due to general warming, may be losing an extra 27 billion tonnes a year just because of dust, potentially adding several centimeters of sea-level rise by 2100. Satellite measurements, say the authors, show that in the last 10 years the surface of Greenland’s ice sheet has considerably darkened during the melt season, which in some areas is now between 6 and 11 days longer per decade than it was 40 years ago. As glaciers retreat and the snow cover disappears earlier in the year, so larger areas of bare soil are uncovered, which increases the dust erosion, scientists suggest.

Research indicates that the Arctic’s albedo may be declining much faster than was estimated only a few years ago. Earlier this year a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that declining Arctic albedo between 1979 and 2011 constituted 25 percent of the heating effect from carbon dioxide over the same time.

According to Danish glaciologist Jason Box, who heads the Dark Snow project to measure the effect of dust and other darkening agents on Greenland’s ice sheet, Arctic ice sheet reflectivity has been at a near record low for much of 2014. Even a minor decrease in the brightness of the ice sheet can double the average yearly rate of ice loss, seen from 1992 to 2010.

“Low reflectivity heats the snow more than normal. A dark snow cover will thus melt earlier and more intensely. A positive feedback exists for snow in which, once melting begins, the surface gets yet darker due to increased water content,” says Box on his blog. Both human-created and natural air pollutants are darkening the ice, say other scientists.

Nearly invisible particles of “black carbon” resulting from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels from diesel engines are being swept thousands of miles from industrial centers in the United States, Europe, and Southeast Asia, as is dust from Africa and the Middle East, where dust storms are becoming bigger as the land dries out, with increasingly long and deep droughts. Earlier this year dust from the Sahara was swept north for several thousands miles, smothered Britain and reached Norway.

According to Kaitlin Keegan, a researcher at Dartmouth College, the record melting in 2012 of Greenland’s northeastern ice sheet was largely a result of forest fires in Siberia and the United States.

Any reduction in albedo is a disaster, says Peter Wadhams, head of the Polar Oceans Physics Group at Cambridge University.

“Replacing an ice-covered surface, where the albedo may be 70 percent in summer, by an open-water surface with albedo less than 10 percent, causes more radiation to be absorbed by the Earth, causing an acceleration of warming,” he says. “I have calculated that the albedo change from the disappearance of the last of the summer ice in 2012 was the equivalent to the effect of all the extra carbon dioxide that we have added to the atmosphere in the last 25 years.”

Ulyana Horodyskyj, who is planning to return to the Himalayas to continue monitoring dust pollution at altitude, said she had been surprised by how bad it was.

“This is mostly manmade pollution,” she said. “Governments must act, and people must become more aware of what is happening. It needs to be looked at properly.”

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Dark Snow Is Accelerating Glacier Melting From the Arctic to the Himalayas

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North Dakota’s oil is more flammable than other crudes, feds warn

by JaniStanton Posted on January 3, 2014

North Dakota’s oil is more flammable than other crudes, feds warn

By

Vectomart

The oil that’s being fracked out of North Dakota and Montana may pose a “significant fire risk,” federal regulators warned yesterday.

This news comes after three trains carrying crude oil from Bakken shale formation derailed and exploded last year. The most deadly derailment occurred last summer in Lac-Mégantic, Quebec, killing 47 people. Then, in November, there was a fiery crash of rail cars into an Alabama wetlands area. And finally, this week brought an accident in eastern North Dakota, which lead to the evacuation of the nearby town of Casselton.

“[R]ecent derailments and resulting fires indicate that the type of crude oil being transported from the Bakken region may be more flammable than traditional heavy crude oil,” the U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration wrote in a safety alert released Thursday.

Stock markets took the warning seriously. From Reuters:

Shares of Whiting Petroleum Corp , Continental Resources Inc and other top crude oil producers in the Bakken shale formation plunged on Thursday after the U.S. government said oil produced there may be extra flammable.

Here’s more on the hazards of Bakken crude from the Associated Press:

Light, sweet crude oil generally has higher levels of lighter hydrocarbons, which have a tendency to become gaseous and are more easily flammable, said Ramanan Krishnamoorti, a professor of engineering and chief energy officer at the University of Houston. Analysis of oil from the Bakken Shale shows high levels of light hydrocarbons like propane, butane and pentane, which are highly flammable, Krishnamoorti said.

The composition of the crude is similar to other types of light crude oil, he said. Heavy crude oil, such as that from Canada’s oil sands fields, is much less flammable. …

Companies could reduce the risks involved with moving the oil by putting it through an additional processing step before loading it onto rail cars, he said. That step would separate out some of the lighter hydrocarbons that could become gaseous and more easily flammable in the incident of a crash or derailment, Krishnamoorti said.

“Perhaps just adding an extra separating step might help lower the gas or vapor concentration, or the vapor forming components, and that can automatically lower the flammability of the crude,” he said.

The agency said it would continue to collect samples of Bakken crude and measure their explosiveness and other chemical properties, with an eye to publishing additional information in the future.


Source
Preliminary Guidance from OPERATION CLASSIFICATION, U.S. Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration
Train explosions prompt regulator warning on Bakken oil flammability, AP
Shares of Bakken oil producers plunge after U.S. warning, Reuters

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Another George Bush runs for office in Texas, talks up oil and gas drilling

by rakil23 Posted on March 13, 2013

Another George Bush runs for office in Texas, talks up oil and gas drilling

By Lisa Hymas

Gage Skidmore

George P. Bush — related to all those other Bushes, but Hispanic too!

George Prescott Bush has kicked off a campaign to run for Texas land commissioner next year. Haven’t heard much about this Bush? Just wait — you will. He’s the 36-year-old son of former Florida governor and 2016 presidential aspirant Jeb Bush and his Mexican-born wife Columba.

“A Spanish-speaking attorney and consultant based in Fort Worth, Bush is considered a rising star among conservative Hispanics, and his political pedigree is hard to match,” writes the Associated Press. As the nephew of former President George W. Bush and the grandson of more-former President George H.W. Bush, he’s got quite the dynasty behind him.

In a campaign video set to aggressively swelling music, Bush notes that Texas’ land commissioner is responsible for “energy policy through the leases of our public oil and gas resources,” and declares, “As Texans, we recognize the need for safe and reliable energy produced right here in our Lone Star State.”

Drill, baby Bush, drill!

How is George P. Bush expected to fare in the red, red state of Texas? From CNN:

A Texas conservative activist, who asked to remain anonymous so as to speak candidly, said the land commission post was a “slam dunk” for Bush.

“Remember, he supported [Tea Partier and now conservative U.S. senator] Ted Cruz early and took a risk there. He’s considered to be more conservative than his grandpa and uncle W. I doubt anyone will even pose a real challenge,” the activist said.

More conservative than Dubyah? Watch out.

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Catch shares help corporations more than fish populations

by kastijoo8753 Posted on March 12, 2013

Catch shares help corporations more than fish populations

By Susie Cagle

A new animation out from the Center for Investigative Reporting makes sense of the wonky and wacky world of individualized transferable quotas, or catch shares, which were ostensibly meant as a solution to overfishing. “If a small group of people owned the fish, they might take better care of them,” explains the animated grandpa in the video.

It’s not totally clear whether the catch-share system, implemented across the U.S. in 2011, has helped fish populations rebound. But it has helped large corporate fishing operations at the expense of small fisher-people, according to an investigation by CIR.

Fishing quotas, which are based on past fishing levels, can be sold on the open market, making it easier for fat-cat corporations to scoop up as many as they can afford. The system initially only allowed fishing with trawlers in certain areas — a type of fishing that has caused heavy environmental destruction.

From CIR:

Thousands of jobs have been lost in regions across the United States where catch-share management plans have been implemented, researchers have noted.

There are 15 catch-share systems in the United States, stretching from the North Pacific’s frigid gray waters along the coast of Alaska and the Aleutian Islands down to the Gulf of Mexico.

More than 3,700 vessels are no longer active in the 10 defined fishing areas that have operated under catch shares since before 2010. That could account for as many as 18,000 lost jobs, according to estimates from researchers who track the fishing industry.

In its investigation, CIR turned up fishy claims made by the Environmental Defense Fund about the advanced state of ocean life degradation due to overfishing (since debunked), and a lot of concern about the concentration of deep blue wealth and power.

Most researchers and managers acknowledge that the system will shrink the fishing fleet, hitting independent, small-scale fishermen the hardest, while protecting big corporate fleets.

“No matter what you do, there is a dynamic that is going to unfold in predictable ways, toward the concentration of wealth and away from public participation,” said Bonnie McCay, an anthropologist at Rutgers University who was a member of a National Research Council panel assembled by Congress in the late 1990s to assess catch shares.

And as for catch shares actually replenishing the oceans? The facts don’t appear to back up quota-promoters.

Nearly half of the 128 fish populations that have been subject to overfishing since 2003 now are thriving, having been fully rebuilt over the past decade, according to government records. Five of those populations have been rebuilt under catch-shares management – the St. Matthew Island blue king crab, snow crab, Pacific coast widow rockfish, Gulf of Mexico red snapper and Atlantic windowpane flounder, according to Connie Barclay, a spokeswoman for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Barclay said it would be hard to attribute rebuilding to catch shares in any of those cases.

[Lee] Crockett, director of federal fisheries policy for the Pew Environment Group, agrees and credits the rebuilding to strict catch limits, which the government began to institute in 2006.

The difference between catch limits and catch shares “is a distinction I think that is often deliberately conflated” by the government and groups advocating for the new system, Crockett said.

The full investigation is important, but the video is the best part, especially if you aren’t familiar with the catch-share scene. CIR’s ultimate take on whether catch shares have helped put a damper on overfishing, delivered by cartoon grandpa: “The thing is, we’re not sure.” Grandpa, you’re so diplomatic.

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Solar power set to shine in 2013

by f3x43zg0 Posted on March 12, 2013

Solar power set to shine in 2013

By John Upton

John UptonSolar panels in San Francisco.

This year is shaping up to be a bright one for solar power.

New solar generating capacity expected to be installed around the world in 2013 will be capable of producing almost as much electricity as eight nuclear reactors, according to Bloomberg, which interviewed seven analysts and averaged their forecasts.

That would be a rise of 14 percent over last year for a total of 34.1 gigawatts of new solar capacity, thanks in large part to rising demand in China, the U.S., and Japan. From Bloomberg:

Prices for silicon-based solar panels sank about 20 percent to 79 cents a watt in the past 12 months, after dropping by half in the previous year.

China, the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide, is forecast to unseat Germany as the largest solar market in 2013, according to analysts at [Bloomberg New Energy Finance]. Projects have multiplied as the nation provides financial support to its solar companies in a bid to diversify the coal-dependent energy industry.

The Chinese government expects 10 gigawatts of new solar projects in 2013, more than double its previous target and three times last year’s expansion. The country plans to install 35 gigawatts by 2015, compared with a previous goal of 21 gigawatts, government adviser Shi Dinghuan said Jan. 30.

Let’s just hope the sun’s energy can pierce through through that thick sheath of fossil-fuel-induced Chinese smog.

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Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

by nension Posted on March 12, 2013

Mississippi poised to pass ‘Anti-Bloomberg’ bill banning healthy food regs

By Susie Cagle

Shutterstock

Mississippi is just the kind of place one might expect to find a backlash against the “organic agenda.” Apparently spurred on by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (newly tossed out) pet ban on big sodas, Mississippi is currently on the verge of passing a bill that would bar every local government in the state from requiring that restaurants post calorie counts or cap portion sizes.

A far-reaching, big-government bill to counter other far-reaching, big-government bills? Uh, sure, Mississippi. NPR has the full scary deets:

“The Anti-Bloomberg Bill” garnered wide bipartisan support in both chambers of the legislature in a state where one in three adults is obese, the highest rate in the nation.

The bill is expected to be signed by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican. It was the subject of intense lobbying by groups including the restaurant association, the small business and beverage group, and the chicken farmers’ lobby.

“The chicken farmers’ lobby” could be a caption for an unfunny New Yorker cartoon, but in Mississippi it’s also apparently a powerful business group — though hardly the only one with skin in this game.

Mike Cashion, executive director the Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association, says the bill is a direct reaction to Bloomberg-style government intervention in public health.

“If you look at how menus have changed, whether it be in fast food or family dining, you are seeing more and more healthy options,” Cashion says. “Not because of legislative mandates or regulatory mandates, but because of consumer demand. Our industry has always been one to respond to the marketplace.”

Cashion is on a real free-market trip! But free markets and consumer demands always seem to go hand in hand with business profits, and Cashion’s loyalties are with the restaurants, not with the people who eat at them. The Mississippi Hospitality and Restaurant Association’s website proclaims that the “industry is represented by a team of government affairs experts that is dedicated to protecting you from harmful legislation while promoting legislation that will benefit the industry. We estimate that our Government Affairs victories have saved the average restaurant over $10,000 over the past 4 years.”

This isn’t a story about how Mississippians don’t want to know what they’re eating. It’s yet another example of business buying government — the food business has proven to be pretty good at that over the years. And in that way, it’s hardly news at all.

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Chinese forests now just chopstick factories in waiting

by Unacoomt Posted on March 12, 2013

Chinese forests now just chopstick factories in waiting

By Susie Cagle

China’s been dealing with a lot of pressure lately: dirty air, a river full of dead pigs, new pledges to go green … To cope, there’s apparently been an uptick in stress-eating. The country is now producing 80 billion pairs of disposable wooden chopsticks a year, nearly 60 pairs for each person in the country, according to Bai Guangxin, chair of Jilin Forestry Industry Group. That’s way up from the estimated 57 billion pairs produced annually between 2004 and 2009. At this rate, China is destroying nearly 1.5 percent of its forests each year just in the name of chopsticks.

theeruditefrog

From The Huffington Post:

The consequences of China’s chopstick production — deforestation, for one — have prompted action from some environmental groups. …

Bai pointed out during [a] meeting Friday that the Chinese government has also begun taking action by introducing policies limiting manufacturing of disposable chopsticks.

Government actions range from a 5-percent tax levied in 2006 on disposable chopsticks, to a 2010 warning of potential government regulations for companies that fail to strictly supervise disposable chopstick production. …

“We should change our consumption habits and encourage people to carry their own tableware,” Bai recommended on Friday.

If the country’s still planning on increasing its forest cover by nearly 21 percent by 2020, it should heed Bai’s advice. (You’d think as the head of a timber company he might be able to do something about this himself, but there’s the whole state-run thing to contend with.)

Maybe a little DIY could help. My brother, a sushi fanatic, carries his own steel travel chopsticks in a pouch around his neck. Similar sticks with a travel case cost a few bucks at your local Asian market. Bonus: no figurative or literal splinters in your mouth from unethical eating instruments.

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Could melting glaciers slow down climate change?

by RupertxMcmillan Posted on March 12, 2013

Could melting glaciers slow down climate change?

By John Upton

Shutterstock

/ Anders PeterChockablock with plankton food.

As glaciers and ice sheets melt and flood the world, they are releasing a type of nutrient that’s lapped up by tiny creatures that could help reduce global warming.

Glaciers contain surprisingly high concentrations of iron, according to the results of a study published Sunday in the journal Nature Geoscience. Iron is a nutrient that’s essential for the growth of plankton, which forms the base of ocean food webs.

As plankton blooms feast on iron and grow, they also suck down large quantities of carbon dioxide. Some of that carbon is then passed up the food chain to larger animals. When plankton and animals that feed upon them die, some of the biomass sinks to the bottom of the ocean, taking all that carbon to a deepwater grave and removing it from the atmosphere.

From R&D Magazine:

Iron from wind-blown dust and river runoff fuels annual plankton blooms in the world’s ocean. Ice sheets and glaciers are now also thought to contribute iron from sediments on the bottom of calved icebergs and glacially-derived dust. Until now, meltwater runoff from glaciers and ice sheets was considered too dilute to carry much iron, although previous research has shown a strong correlation between the plankton blooms and the runoff from Greenland ice sheet.

“Glacial runoff has only recently been considered a potentially important source of nutrients that are useable, or bioavailable, to downstream ecosystems,” says [Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution researcher Maya] Bhatia. “We believe our study now adds iron to that list of nutrients, and underscores the potential for a unique but as-yet-undetermined chemical impact from increasing ice sheet meltwater runoff.”

The scientists warn that more research is needed to establish whether the melting glaciers and ice sheets are actually serving the counterintuitive purpose of slowing down the very global warming that is leading to their demise. To grow in large enough volumes to affect global warming, they say, plankton would also need phosphates and nitrates — and it’s unclear at this point whether there are enough of those nutrients to help make a difference.

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

by trasze2aja Posted on March 12, 2013

Bahamas will soon be invaded by oil drills

By John Upton

Shutterstock

The Bahamas, where unspoiled beauty soon will be spoiled.

Catch ya later, unspoiled beaches of Bahamian paradise. It’s been real.

Offshore oil drilling will soon be allowed in the heavenly West Indies archipelago of the Bahamas, which is made up of thousands of islands and cays off the Floridian coast. Initially, the drilling will be exploratory only — an experiment that will punch a bunch of holes in the ocean floor to see what goop lies beneath.

The Bahamas environment minister said the option of allowing large-scale commercial oil drilling would be put to the nation’s voters after results of the exploratory drills are known, perhaps in 2015.

The government had previously said that even exploratory drilling would require the support of the voters before it could begin. With this move to allow exploratory drills, the government is being accused by The Tribune, a Bahamian newspaper, of breaking promises:

According to a statement released by Environment Minister Kenred Dorsett, the government has determined that “we need to find out first, through exploration drilling, whether we do indeed have oil in commercially viable quantities.”

This is in direct contrast to his position less than four months ago, when Mr Dorsett assured this newspaper that no form of drilling would take place ahead of the referendum, planned for sometime before July this year.

The drilling plan is controversial, for obvious reasons. From the Associated Press:

Offshore drilling is sensitive in the Bahamas, where many fear a spill could devastate the fishing and tourism industries. The previous Bahamian government had delayed issuing exploration permits. Prime Minister Perry Christie, who was voted back into office in May, has said he supported exploration.

Dorsett said the government would seek new regulations to protect the environment and cannot ignore the potential economic benefits of oil for a country that now imports fuel. “The discovery of oil in the Bahamas would almost certainly prove to be economically transformative for our nation for many generations to come,” he said in a statement.

Transformative, you say?

John Upton is a science aficionado and green news junkie who

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