Tag Archives: blue marble

Greece’s Latest Fiscal Solution: Create an Ecological Crisis!

by ghd12australia Posted on January 14, 2013

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The green crowd used to feel pretty rosy about Greece. After former Prime Minister George Papandreou was elected in 2009, he set up a government ministry to study the environment, energy, and climate change, and he talked up initiatives on eco-tourism and renewable energy. But now, after six years of recession, the country has begun buying into several new environmentally damaging development schemes to generate liquidity, the New York Times reports.

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Greece’s Latest Fiscal Solution: Create an Ecological Crisis!

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New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 11, 2013

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Say what you want about the Obama administration’s relative ignoring of climate issues: Many of his top scientists are paying rapt attention, and they think we’re about to get our butts kicked—although dumping the news at 4pm on a Friday gives some indication of where it sits in federal priorities.

The National Climate Assessment is produced by the US Global Change Research Program, which is tasked with collating climate research from a wide variety of federal agencies and, every few years, distilling it into one major report. The latest, a first draft, is the third such report (the last was in 2009), product of a 1990 law that requires the White House to produce semi-regular updates on climate science to Congress. Today’s report echoes the themes of earlier editions, and paints a picture that is all the more grim for being an unsurprising confirmation of the dangers we’ve come to know all too well. Here’s the top six things for you to worry about this weekend, according to the report:

  1. Climate change is definitely caused by human activities. Always nice to hear government officials acknowledge this essential fact. And the report concedes that our only hope of curbing warming is to kick our addiction to greenhouse-gas spewing fossil fuels.
  2. Extreme weather is increasing, and that’s our fault, too. In particular, searing temperatures, heavy rain, and prolonged drought.
  3. Weather isn’t the only threat we have to worry about. The list sounds like the side-effect warnings at the end of a prescription drug commercial: decreased air quality, insect-borne diseases, and “threats to mental health” are all on the docket for the coming decades.
  4. Our infrastructure is getting hammered, and we’re not spending enough to save it. Floods are destroying farmland; extreme heat is damaging roads, rail lines, and airports; and military installations are at risk.
  5. Food and water security will be up in the air. Especially in water-scarce regions like the Southwest, decreasing snowpack and shrinking groundwater supplies will spark competition for water between “agricultural, municipal, and environmental” uses. At the same time, heavy floods could put water quality at risk with sediment and chemical contaminates. And by mid-century, efforts to artificially protect agriculture (like expanded irrigation) could be over-ridden by temperature and precipitation extremes.
  6. Climate change is hitting plants and animals just as hard as us. Beaches, forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems could shrink or disappear, especially a problem when they play a role in mitigating the impact from extreme weather. And warming, acidifying seas could slam sea life.

The report is sure to get thoroughly dissected by reporters in the coming week; keep an eye out for more details to come.

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New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

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Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 11, 2013

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Smoke near Cooma, Australia, Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2013 New South Wales Rural Fire Service

Australia’s top government-appointed climate commissioner says this week’s heatwave is occurring amid record-breaking weather around the world. “This has been a landmark event for me,” Professor Tim Flannery told Climate Desk from his home in Melbourne. “When you start breaking records, and you do it consistently, and you see it over and over again, that is a good indication there’s a shift underway—this is not just within the normal variation of things.”

Flannery is perhaps best known in the US for his 2005 book, The Weather Makers: The History and Future Impact of Climate Change; Downunder, he was named Australian of the Year in 2007, and appointed chief climate commissioner in 2011 by the current Labor government, which tasked him with communicating climate science to the Australian public (a government-funded job that may well sound unimaginable to American readers).

Flannery says the harsh weather is a sign of things to come: “What we’ve seen is the bell curve shift to the hot end. The number of very hot days is increasing quite dramatically. But we’re also encroaching on entirely new territory.”

That new territory involves record-breaking temperatures. The number of consecutive days where the national average maximum temperature topped 102.2°F (39°C) was broken in the last week, almost doubling the previous record set in 1973. There are now new first- and third-place winners for highest temperatures on Australia’s books, too. The number of record high temperatures have outstripped the number of record low temperatures at a ratio 3-to-1 over the last decade, according to the Bureau of Meterology.

Tim Flannery Mark Coulson, 5th World Conference of Science Journalists.

Several fires are still burning in Tasmania, Australia’s lush island state, where the crisis began last week. The cost of the destruction of 200 buildings there is pegged at $A50 million ($US52.7m), according to the Australian newspaper. Luckily—perhaps shockingly given the extent of damage—lives were spared.

Statewide total fire bans remain in force across the weekend in Australia’s most populous state, New South Wales (NSW), where at last count more than 95 fires are still burning, with 18 out of control. NSW Rural Fire Service Deputy Commissioner Rob Rogers told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that new fires on Saturday might be “beyond the ability for fire services to suppress.”

And don’t think there’s any rest from wild weather. Not content which just record-breaking heat, the skies are now hurling Narelle—a category 4 severe tropical storm comparable to a strong Category 3 hurricane—at the North West of the vast continent. Communities living along a coastline roughly as long as the stretch from New York to North Carolina are bracing for gale force winds and heavy rains.

Tropical Cyclone Narelle off the West Australian coast Australian Bureau of Meterology

“There is no doubt,” Flannery said, “that climate change is playing a significant roll in this. If this was just one record-breaking event you might write it off as a statistical anomaly. But that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing records falling around the world.”

Flannery told Climate Desk the Australian government has confirmed he will hold his seat for the next two years, but it might not play out that way. The conservative opposition party is likely to erode the Climate Commission if elected, something that will be decided by a deepy divided electorate towards the end of this year. The election promises to be fought over the government’s carbon tax. Opposition leader Tony Abbott famously made a “blood pledge” to repeal the tax which will lead to a carbon trading scheme.

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Australia’s Climate Inferno "Encroaching on Entirely New Territory"

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MAP: 2012 Was the Hottest Year on Record in the US

by RubinkJoseph Posted on January 9, 2013

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Just saying.

This NOAA map shows a sampling of places where weather records were broken last year. You probably guessed that red indicates heat. Yellow represents dryness; orange is a double whammy record for heat and dryness.

Image courtesy of NOAA

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MAP: 2012 Was the Hottest Year on Record in the US

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BP’s Oil and Especially Dispersant Toxic to Baby Corals

by LeannqOsborn Posted on January 9, 2013

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Mountainous star coral (Montastraea faveolata) spawns, releasing sperm and eggs that will combine to produce larvae: National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association

Results are in from the first controlled laboratory tests on how Deepwater Horizon oil and the dispersant Corexit® 9500 affect coral larvae. Conclusion: Baby corals of at least some species are likely to be killed when exposed to oil and are especially likely to die when exposed to dispersants. The results have just been published in the science journal PLOS ONE.

Coral larvae are delicate little beings that drift away from their parents (see video below) to settle on near or distant reefs. The study from Mote Marine Laboratory scientists focused on two coral species—mustard hill coral (Porites astreoides) and mountainous star coral (Montastraea faveolata)—from the Florida Keys, an area not directly impacted by the spill. Both species are common reef builders in the Gulf and the Caribbean.

The researchers tested larvae in water containing 1) the dissolved components of Deepwater Horizon oil from the source; 2) weathered oil; 3) the dispersant Corexit® 9500; and 4) the combined oil and dispersant. They monitored the coral larvae for 72 hours at different concentrations of each solution, and tested how the mountainous star coral larvae fared in solutions that were slowly diluted over 96 hours.

Highlights from the paper:

Larvae exposed to oil components died sooner and settled less than control larvae given only seawater.

Mustard hill coral larvae were significantly less likely to survive and settle amid high concentrations of oil components (0.62 parts per million).

Mountainous star coral had significantly lower survival rates even at the lowest oil concentration (0.49 ppm diluted over time).

Larvae exposed to weathered crude oil had significantly lowered survival rates and stopped settling after 72 hours, while the control larvae continued to settle through 96 hours.

Settlement by larvae exposed to crude oil. Mean percent (% 6 SE) new settlement by P. astreoides larvae exposed to Louisiana weathered crude oil (solid bars) and a seawater control (open bars) observed at each time point (24, 48, 72 and 96-hr). Mean percent (% 6 SE) cumulative settlement by P. astreoides larvae after 24, 48, 72 and 96-hr exposure to Louisiana weathered crude oil (dashed line) and a seawater control (solid line)” doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045574.g001

Both species were highly vulnerable to Corexit® 9500:

No mountainous star coral larvae settled or survived at the medium and high concentrations (50 and 100 ppm).

No mustard hill coral larvae settled or survived at the high concentration (100 ppm).

Both species of coral larvae were significantly less likely to survive and settle amid medium concentrations (4.28 ppm for mustard hill coral and 18.56 ppm for mountainous star coral) or high concentrations (30.99 for mustard hill and 35.76 ppm for mountainous star) of oil mixed with dispersant.

Even at a low concentration (0.86 ppm) of oil-dispersant mixture diluted over 96 hours, most of the mountainous star coral did not survive.

“To understand how oil and dispersant could affect wild corals, more research is needed on their complex natural life cycles,” said Kim Ritchie, principal investigator on the emergency Protect Our Reefs grant supporting this study and manager of the Marine Microbiology Program at Mote. “Coral larvae seem to settle with help from landing pads called ‘biofilms’ that are formed by microbes like marine bacteria. This delicate natural process might be interrupted by dispersant and its mixture with oil, so it’s important to know how it works in detail.”

Aerial view of the oil leaked from Deepwater Horizon, May 6 2010: Reuters/Daniel Beltra via Flickr

The Deepwater Horizon rig spewed more than 200 million gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico and responders used nearly 2 million gallons of dispersant to try and keep the slicks from reaching shore—a mitigation that likely exacerbated the threats from oil toxins underwater.

The open access paper:

Gretchen Goodbody-Gringley, Dana L. Wetzel, Daniel Gillon, Erin Pulster, Allison Miller, Kim B. Ritchie. Toxicity of Deepwater Horizon Source Oil and the Chemical Dispersant, Corexit® 9500, to Coral Larvae. PLOS ONE. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0045574.g001

*The coral larvae in this study were collected under the government research permit FKNMS-2010-080-A2 issued by the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. Coral reefs within the Sanctuary are protected by federal law.

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BP’s Oil and Especially Dispersant Toxic to Baby Corals

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Will Thorium Nuclear Energy Save Us All?

by iscciaglewstrone123 Posted on January 8, 2013

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Even in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which half-drowned our biggest metropolis, Congress is still ostriching on climate change and thinking about chopping clean-energy programs as part of fiscal cliff, part II. Meanwhile, China, which has been leading the way on futuristic ideas from offshore wind energy to high-speed rail, is spearheading the development of nuclear energy derived from thorium, a naturally occurring radioactive element.

The Telegraph reports that the politically connected industrialist Jiang Mianheng is bankrolling a $350 million project at China’s National Academy of Sciences to develop thorium power, which would be used to fuel molten-salt reactors, as opposed to old school uranium-fueled water reactors, and which would be much cleaner and meltdown-safe.

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Will Thorium Nuclear Energy Save Us All?

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On Sea Level Rise, More Experts Lean Toward High End

by anjunonstennyao Posted on January 7, 2013

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If you want to imagine what the future, climate-changed world will look like, one of the biggest questions is by how much, exactly, the sea levels will increase. Rising tides have already become one of the most prominent climate change impacts, threatening coastal communities from Virginia to Palau and amplifying the damage of storms like Sandy. Estimates vary: 2007’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report pegged the figure at somewhere around a foot by 2100, while a December study from NOAA went as high as 6.6 feet. But a swath of recent studies put the estimate at around three feet, including a report out Sunday in Nature Climate Change. From NBC:

Melting glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland may push up global sea levels more than 3 feet by the end of this century, according to a scientific poll of experts that brings a degree of clarity to a murky and controversial slice of climate science.

Such a rise in the seas would displace millions of people from low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, swamp atolls in the Pacific Ocean, cause dikes in Holland to fail, and cost coastal mega-cities from New York to Tokyo billions of dollars for construction of sea walls and other infrastructure to combat the tides.

“The consequences are horrible,” Jonathan Bamber, a glaciologist at the University of Bristol and a co-author of the study, said.

While efforts to stem the rising sea, like reducing greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, are always worth pursuing, in light of the mounting evidence for large-scale changes it seems prudent for more coastal cities to take a lead from places like New York and start preparing for a closer coastline.

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On Sea Level Rise, More Experts Lean Toward High End

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A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

by HarralGeidl697 Posted on January 4, 2013

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In the midst of this week’s fiscal cliff hullabaloo, with tax hikes for many Americans, tax breaks for Big Oil, and a superstorm of righteous outrage over withheld storm aid, you’d be forgiven for not noticing the climate win that slipped in at the eleventh hour: a long-awaited extension of the wind energy Production Tax Credit, a federal incentive that has for many years been the bread and butter of the wind industry, providing $1 billion each year to keep wind competitive against heavily-subsidized fossil fuels.

Despite being a record-setting year for wind installations, 2012 was a nail-biter for many in the industry, who feared Congress would axe the credit and send the industry from boom to bust, as has happened several times in the past when the credit has not been extended. The industry’s trade group was a clearinghouse for grim prognostications: Some 35,000 jobs lost and up to a ninety-percent drop in wind projects, should the credit not be passed. Even with the extension, the industry’s financial backers were so spooked by last year’s uncertainty that investments are almost sure to fall in 2013.

“We’ve effectively killed 2013 by waiting this long to extend the PTC,” Jacob Susman, CEO of wind installer OwnEnergy, told me a few months ago.

And while the extension was an excuse for wind folks from Colorado to Iowa to Boston to pop an extra bottle of champagne, the industry ain’t out of the woods yet: The recent extension is only for one year, which means the battle to wring money from Congress will need to be fought all over again in just a few months. Indeed, the complaint one hears most often from industry leaders is that the constant political kowtowing necessary to secure this essential tax credit makes it nearly impossible for the industry to secure long-term growth. That’s very different from fossil fuels, whose benefits, as my colleague Andy Kroll points out, are “baked into the tax code.”

But this extension comes with at least one big improvement: In the past, to secure the credit, wind projects had to be delivering power to the grid before the credit’s expiration date at year’s end. That led to a huge push to get projects up and running in the final months of 2012, but also threw up a barrier to any projects that got started too late. This version sets a lower bar: The credit is now available to any projects that break ground in 2013, giving everyone from turbine manufactorers to installers to investors much more breathing room on a realistic timescale, which David Roberts at Grist says is equivalent to extending the old version for two or three years.

The challenge for Big Wind this year will be to work with Congress to find ways to keep the industry competitive in the long term, while unleashing it from year-to-year political turmoil.

“The extension is a very important piece of legislation,” industry researcher Matt Kaplan told the Financial Times. “The big question, though, is what comes next.”

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A Hidden Climate Win in the Fiscal Deal

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Farewell Becky Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network’s Visionary Director

by Myrna Posted on December 29, 2012

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Right around the time that Madeleine Buckingham and I were taking on new roles here at Mother Jones back in 2010, Becky Tarbotton was doing the same as the new executive director for Rainforest Action Network, one of the mainstays of in-your-face but really smart environmental organizing.

Maybe that’s why Becky and I hit it off so well: Figuring out these new jobs was definitely something we had in common.

Right from the start, though, it was really clear that Becky—one of a new generation of dynamic, inspiring, and field-tested visionaries coming into leadership roles in the environmental and social justice movement—was more than ready. She’d been program director at RAN for many years, knew the science, knew the policy world, and knew the importance of a kick-ass media operation and ground game.

No surprise, then, that during one of our first lunchtime conversations around the corner from RAN’s downtown San Francisco office, we talked about how best to pivot our organizations to best deal with the great, new, complicated challenges of the day—challenges that the inherited patterns of thought and practice just weren’t up to meeting.

I had no doubt that Becky would take RAN in the right direction. And she did. Take a look at the RAN website, and you’ll see what I mean.

But now Rainforest Action Network and all of us who care about the earth and justice and democracy will have to do it without her. Becky died in an accident while on vacation a few days ago. She was 39.

Becky was carved from passionate, steely, joyful stuff. She was a young force to be reckoned with. Her death is an especially hard one, when what we assume to be a natural order in succession is upended.

Our love and deepest condolences go out to Becky’s husband, Mateo, her brothers Jesse and Cameron, her mother, Mary, and the entire Rainforest Action community.

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Farewell Becky Tarbotton, Rainforest Action Network’s Visionary Director

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Lisa Jackson Leaves the EPA

by RubinkJoseph Posted on December 27, 2012

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EPA chief Lisa Jackson has stepped down after four years on the job. The NY Times puts her resignation in the context of what many perceive as a lack of climate-change action on the part of the Obama administration:

Ms. Jackson’s departure comes as many in the environmental movement are questioning Mr. Obama’s commitment to dealing with climate change and other environmental problems. After his re-election, and a campaign in which global warming was barely mentioned by either candidate, Mr. Obama said that his first priority would be jobs and the economy and that he intended only to foster a “conversation” on climate change in the coming months.

Here’s Jackson’s statement:

I want to thank President Obama for the honor he bestowed on me and the confidence he placed in me four years ago this month when he announced my nomination as Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. At the time I spoke about the need to address climate change, but also said: “There is much more on the agenda: air pollution, toxic chemicals and children’s health issues, redevelopment and waste-site cleanup issues, and justice for the communities who bear disproportionate risk.” As the President said earlier this year when he addressed EPA’s employees, “You help make sure the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat are safe. You help protect the environment not just for our children but their children. And you keep us moving toward energy independence…We have made historic progress on all these fronts.” So, I will leave the EPA confident the ship is sailing in the right direction, and ready in my own life for new challenges, time with my family and new opportunities to make a difference.

More at NY Times.

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Lisa Jackson Leaves the EPA

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