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Locals gather in Morocco and clean 4 tons of garbage from a beach. Read this article: Thousands engage in Morocco, the beach is not a garbage can ; ;Related ArticlesSurfrider’s Beach ManifestoSurfrider Argentina picks up momentumNearly half the rice sold in Guangzhou (pop. 12+ million) is contaminated by cadmium ;
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ShutterstockGlaciers, such as this one in Argentina, are melting and releasing their reserves of water.
Farewell, great lakes of ice and frozen rivers.
Scientists used satellite images and gravity measurements to peer more closely than ever before at the torturous drip-drip-drip from the world’s glaciers. What they discovered is not really much of a surprise: Ice Age glaciers have been methodically chiseled away by the warming effects of fossil fuel burning.
Global warming and black carbon are working fast: Glaciers outside of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are collectively losing an estimated 571 trillion pounds worth of ice annually, the researchers reported in a paper published Thursday in the journal Science.
Glaciers? Icesheets? Potatoes, potatoes, you say. Here’s the difference: The world’s ice sheets cover vast swaths in Greenland and Antarctica. Meanwhile, glaciers are rivers and lakes of slow-moving ice. You can find them at high altitudes in alpine regions around the world, and you’ll find them in lower elevations (including on and around ice sheets) as you approach the poles.
Although these glaciers contain just 1 percent of land ice reserves, they contribute about as much to the rising seas as the major stores of ice. The individual contributions of glaciers to the rising seas may be relatively small, but the cumulative impacts of their melts are substantial.
The researchers concluded that melting glaciers are causing the oceans to surge by 0.03 inches yearly, which works out to 30 percent of the total annual rise in recorded sea levels.
From a press release by NASA, which provided the data to the researchers from its Ice, Cloud, and Land Elevation Satellite (ICESat) and Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE):
Current estimates predict all the glaciers in the world contain enough water to raise sea level by as much as 24 inches (about 60 centimeters). In comparison, the entire Greenland ice sheet has the potential to contribute about 20 feet (about 6 meters) to sea level rise and the Antarctic ice sheet just less than 200 feet (about 60 meters).
“Because the global glacier ice mass is relatively small in comparison with the huge ice sheets covering Greenland and Antarctica, people tend to not worry about it,” said study co-author Tad Pfeffer, a glaciologist at the University of Colorado in Boulder. “But it’s like a little bucket with a huge hole in the bottom: it may not last for very long, just a century or two, but while there’s ice in those glaciers, it’s a major contributor to sea level rise.”
The largest glacial losses during the study period from 2003 to 2009 were recorded from Arctic Canada, Alaska, coastal Greenland, the southern Andes, and high-mountain Asia. That’s pretty much all the major glacial regions, the exception being in Antarctica, where loss was minor.
So, there’s some good news for Antarcticans: Glacial melt is not as bad there as everywhere else.
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As glaciers melt, they are revealing old tunics and bodies and stuff.
As glaciers melt and recede, they are revealing archaeological treasures from the civilizations that came before ours.
A humble tunic found at a site normally covered over with ice in south Norway is among the discoveries that wouldn’t have been possible without the assistance of global warming.
“It’s worrying that glaciers are melting but it’s exciting for us archaeologists,” Lars Piloe, a Danish archaeologist who works on Norway’s glaciers, said at the first public showing of the tunic, which has been studied since it was found in 2011. …
The 1991 discovery of Otzi, a prehistoric man who roamed the Alps 5,300 years ago between Austria and Italy, is the best known glacier find. In recent years, other finds have been made from Alaska to the Andes, many because glaciers are receding.
The shrinkage is blamed on climate change, stoked by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.
The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway’s Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300 AD. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks.
Well, old tunics are cool. Nobody is saying they’re not. But it’s too bad we can’t dig up some of the wisdom of past societies that treasured nature and valued lives lived in harmony with it. Alongside the smelly old clothes, of course.
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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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After an epic string of screw-ups, Shell is pulling way back on its plan to conquer the far north frontier and drill the ever-loving hell out of it. Pause, baby, pause!
Shell’s Kulluk drilling rig, which the company
in December.
Shell has spent more than $4.5 billion in its quest for oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas off the north coast of Alaska and so far has nothing to show for it but a series of embarrassing mishaps.
“Our decision to pause in 2013 will give us time to ensure the readiness of all our equipment and people following the drilling season in 2012,” Marvin Odum, director of Shell’s “Upstream Americas” operations, said in a statement.
The company pledges that it isn’t giving up on its quest for Arctic oil: “Alaska remains an area with high potential for Shell over the long term, and the company is committed to drill there again in the future. If exploration proves successful, resources there would take years to develop.”
But at least for now: Congratulations, Alaska!
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The coal industry, for as much as it whines and frets and fake-cries about how oppressive the government is, gets a pretty sweet deal. We’ve noted before than companies pay 25 cents a ton for coal from public lands and then can turn around and sell it for $35 a ton. (We’ve also mentioned that they often sell that coal to China, meaning we’re subsidizing the world’s largest consumer of coal, but that’s a whole other issue.)
This was reported as eight pounds of coal, probably.
What makes this so much more galling is that the weepy coal companies might not even be paying for all of the coal they’re extracting. From The Hill:
Interior is looking into whether mining firms lowball the value of coal excavated from federal lands to minimize the fees they pay the government. …
Reuters said mining companies are underreporting the price of coal at mine sites — where royalties are assessed — then selling it to marketers that they often times own. Reuters said those intermediaries then ship the coal abroad, where they fetch higher prices.
[Sen. Ron Wyden (R-Ore.)] and Energy Committee ranking member Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) had asked [Interior Secretary Ken] Salazar to examine those charges in a January letter. They said the government could ill afford to lose out on any revenues, noting coal royalties amounted to $898 million in 2011.
The National Mining Association suggests that the Reuters report was inaccurate. Of course, the NMA also went out of its way to propagate the “war on coal” nonsense, so it can be ignored.
As part of its investigation, Interior will review a decade of coal sales, largely from the Powder River Basin region in Wyoming and Montana that provides much of the coal exported to Asia. The department is also considering a new system that would assess a royalty on coal companies’ proceeds rather than tons of coal mined.
Or, to crib from bad parents from the 1950s: Coal companies, we’ll give you something to cry about.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Have coal companies been ripping Americans off even more than we already knew?
One of the primary concerns about expanded oil drilling in the Arctic is that the Arctic is far away from everything. Until very, very recently, no one lived anywhere near the Arctic; even today, it’s pretty sparsely populated. As we’ve noted before, an oil spill a few hundred miles from New Orleans in 2010 took months to stop. How long will it take to cap a broken well in icy water thousands of miles from any resources?
To that end, governments interested in exploring resource extraction in the Arctic came together to develop a plan for just such a contingency. And as Greenpeace notes, the plan sucks. From the BBC:
In 2011 The Arctic Council members [Ed. – Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, U.S.] signed the Nuuk Declaration that committed them to develop an international agreement on how to respond to oil pollution in the northern seas. …
The plan says that “each party shall maintain a national system for responding promptly and effectively to oil pollution incidents” without requiring any clear details on the number of ships or personnel that would be needed to cope with a spillage.
Seriously. Greenpeace has a copy of the full draft document [PDF]. It can be summed up in three bullet points:
Think I’m oversimplifying? Go look. This took them two years.
Sweden’s ambassador to the Council thinks the agreement is great, saying, “The agreement is a great step forward for the protection of the Arctic from an oil spill because it sets up a system for the states to co-operate in practice.” Because if this weren’t in place — what? If Shell fucked up and caused a spill, Russia and Canada would just tell the U.S. “tough shit”? No, if there were a spill that threatened the shoreline of any country, it would get involved with or without this document. And I suspect everyone already has the right phone numbers.
There will be a spill in the Arctic. That’s not me saying it. That’s Shell Alaska Vice President Pete Slaiby saying it. When that happens, it would be nice to know that there’s some sort of well-funded, well-staffed, resource-heavy international entity standing by to spring into action. That there’s something there in the empty Arctic that can be on-scene in short order to deal with the problem.
But, you know. Lip service is good too.
Hat-tip: Brian Merchant.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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International plan for a spill in the Arctic: If anything happens, pick up the phone
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) today unveiled a new energy plan, a document that she’d been hyping for weeks. In January, she called it “very comprehensive,” which is, I guess, an improvement over other people’s moderately comprehensive proposals.
Murkowski is the one who doesn’t appear to be only a head floating in space.
Murkowski very savvily linked the release to the Super Bowl power outage, noting that the darkened Superdome “helps to perhaps kick-start the debate” over exactly how much offshore drilling we should do. Oh, that was a spoiler: Murkowski thinks we should do a lot of offshore drilling. And if we had, the Superdome wouldn’t have gone dark last night, because the game could have been played by the light of burning barrels of crude.
So. The plan. Here’s how the Anchorage Daily News describes it. (We’ve gone ahead and removed the filler.)
Murkowski wants oil leasing off the coasts of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. She wants an increase in drilling on federal lands, saying that will hasten independence from imported oil.
Her proposals include drilling in the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and overturning the Interior Department’s plan to set aside half the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska for wildlife, wilderness and recreation. Murkowski also wants to speed approval for resource production on Alaska Native lands.
Murkowski is resistant to federal regulation of fracking, the controversial process in which high-pressure water and chemicals are injected underground to free up the natural gas inside shale rock. Murkowski said the states already do a good job of regulating it. [Ed. – Ha ha ha ha ha]
She is pushing for immediate approval of the Keystone XL Pipeline, which is opposed by environmental groups because it would tap Canadian oil sands that are higher in carbon emissions than other sources of oil.
What about climate change, you ask? Well: “Her proposal opposes ‘any policy that would increase the price of energy or limit consumer choice.’” She disavows her 2007 push for a cap on carbon emissions, arguing that the economy is worse now. Besides, cheap energy should be embraced! And then she said, presumably not ironically, that access to cheap energy means America is great.
“We like to be comfortable in our temperatures. We like to be able to move around. This is the mark of a successful and an economically healthy world. Where you have energy these are the prosperous areas,” she said.
Well, Sen. Murkowski, you’re going to love Alaska in 2100 when it’s 15 degrees warmer. All that cheap energy, making Alaska comfortable in its temperatures (if at the expense of the rest of America and the world).
There is literally nothing in Murkowski’s proposal which in any way “kick-starts” any debate. It’s only “very comprehensive” in the sense that it comprehensively includes all of the same policies as the GOP’s awesomely named “DEJA” proposal last year, which itself was such a retread that we basically only bothered to make fun of the name when reporting on it.
Murkowski loves oil, loves oil companies, and can thank the industry, in part, for her remarkable 2010 write-in Senate victory. This isn’t an energy plan; it’s a fundraising email for 2016 sent to Shell and ExxonMobil.
But nice Super Bowl hook. Maybe that got a few more eyeballs on this same, tired nonsense.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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Alaska senator offers a fresh, new energy policy calling for more drilling in Alaska
Libros
