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Astra has cut down 14,000 hectares of forests since 2007 to make way for palm oil plantations, environmentalists say. Wikimedia Commons In the last two years, a series of companies have made bold commitments to halt deforestation in their supply chains (see this story for the context). But producing products like palm oil without clearing ecologically important rainforest isn’t easy: It’s much easier to get rich quick by exploiting natural resources. Though most companies have agreed to rein in their operations, forests are still being razed. To keep reading, click here. Source article: This Palm Oil Company Just Bulldozed a Rainforest ; ; ;
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Taking the 100,000-foot view
By Amelia Urryon 7 May 2015commentsShare
One more thing space is really good for, besides wow factor: Giving us a place to keep an eye on things happening on Earth — or in some cases, even things happening under the earth — with satellites.
Specifically, these satellites can help us keep an eye on our hidden water supplies. At the moment, California’s surface water is so scarce that the state has been sucking it from underground at an incredible rate. Groundwater reserves (like aquifers) are built up over decades or centuries, but they can be emptied in just a couple of years of industrious pumping. As water is vacuumed out of these huge underground lakes, the land above them starts sinking — and it turns out satellites can track the changing elevation better and more cheaply than eyes on the ground.
Here’s the story from Wired:
Earlier this week Tom Farr, a geologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, completed the first of many maps for the California Department of Water Resources with data collected by the European Sentinel-1 satellite. That map, of the state’s agriculture hub in the Central Valley, is part of a larger project to use NASA expertise to study—and try to help combat—California’s drought.
There are non-space-based ways to assess groundwater levels, but those are expensive and (face it) way less cool:
The state can monitor groundwater directly by measuring water levels within wells—but digging new wells is expensive, and existing wells may be on private land. …
Traditional land surveying techniques can also track water—but that method is labor-intensive. After days of painstaking measurements taken with tripods and levels, a surveyor will be left with one small area of measurement. Surveyors can also use GPS data, Farr says, but there are very few GPS stations in the Central Valley.
A better way, Farr says, is to use interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR. This technique, first developed about a decade ago, monitors changes in ground formation.
The satellite method — involving radar beams! sine waves! snazzy acronyms! — still needs some refining to be able to accurately assess groundwater, but the technique remains promising.
Jessica Reeves and Rosemary Knight, geophysicists at the Stanford School of Earth Sciences, were among the first people to apply this technique in this way, and Knight’s team continues to refine the calibrations linking ground level to groundwater levels.
The sinking that they’re tracking—as much as a foot a year in some places—threatens to become an enormous problem. That’s not just because the water will eventually run out, which (if pumping continues unabated) it will. It’s a more immediate threat to surface-level infrastructure: aqueducts, bridges, roads and train tracks. Damages due to sinking land in Santa Clara Valley is estimated at more than $756 million.
So to the list of benefits satellites offer us — rural HBO, prank calls from Antarctica, galactic posters — we can now add “monitoring California’s drinking problem.” Thanks, satellites.
Source:
How Satellites Can Monitor California’s Underground Water
, Wired.
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These satellites are keeping an eye on California’s underground water
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Science doesn’t care about Wyoming’s laws. In 2014, I wrote about the Wyoming state Legislature actively moving to suppress real science education when it came to global warming. As I said, Science itself has many laws, but it doesn’t give a damn about ours. Those words still echo loudly when it comes to Wyoming. A new research paper has come out showing that snow melt in the northwest region of that state is occurring earlier all the time, exactly as you’d expect with warmer winters and spring. The scientists used satellite data to measure snow extent over time and found that snow is melting 16 ± 10 days earlier in the 2000s compared with 1972–1999. Percent snow cover for a given day for the area in Wyoming studied. Note that in more recent years, snow melted earlier. NASA Earth Observatory Read the rest at Slate. View post: For Wyoming, Climate Change Is Now ; ; ;
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Senator Jim Inhofe, who opposes climate change regulation, has received $10,000 from PAC funded by donations from US staff at oil group. Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/AP One of America’s most powerful and outspoken opponents of climate change regulation received election campaign contributions that can be traced back to senior BP staff, including chief executive Bob Dudley. Jim Inhofe, a Republican senator from Oklahoma who has tirelessly campaigned against calls for a carbon tax and challenges the overwhelming consensus on climate change, received $10,000 (£6,700) from BP’s Political Action Committee (PAC). Following his re-election, Inhofe became chair of the Senate’s environment and public works committee in January, and then a month later featured in news bulletins throwing a snowball across the Senate floor. Read the rest at the Guardian. More: Climate-Skeptic US Senator Given Funds By BP Political Action Committee ; ; ;
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Climate-Skeptic US Senator Given Funds By BP Political Action Committee
The fight over petcoke on Chicago’s southeast side. Charles Rex Arbogast/AP It’s not easy to take on a wealthy, multi-national corporation and win. Especially for residents of Chicago’s struggling southeast side. But that’s exactly what’s happening on the banks of the Calumet River, where the steel plants that used to give residents of a mostly Hispanic neighborhood access to a middle-class lifestyle were replaced, nearly two years ago, with black dust called petroleum coke (“petcoke”) piled five or six stories tall. The piles of petcoke—a byproduct of the oil refining process—belong to KCBX Terminals, owned by the conservative billionaire Koch Brothers. The piles have been roiling area residents ever since the black dust of mostly carbon and sulfur began blowing into the backyards, playgrounds and neighborhood parks. It blackens skies and leaves behind a sticky residue, raising concerns about aggravated asthma and other health issues. Read the rest at The Huffington Post. Link: How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood
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How One Community Is Kicking The Koch Brothers’ Harmful Black Dust Out Of Their Neighborhood
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