Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Brad Pitt, Matt Damon give krill a star turn
There are no small parts, only small actors, or so the old show-biz saying goes. Now there are big stars — Matt Damon and Brad Pitt — playing two of the smallest parts ever. In a far cry from “Ocean’s Eleven” (and 12 and 13) they’re lending their voices to a pair of krill, small shrimp-like creatures that form the base of the Antarctic food web.
Pitt and Damon play Will and Bill, the krill, in “Happy Feet Two,” the sequel to the 2006 dancing-penguins animated feature. Both films have conservation themes. The latest movie opens in mid-November.
These Hollywood names might help shine a spotlight on krill at a time when the species is under pressure, according to the Pew Environment Group. An international meeting under way now in Hobart, Tasmania, is expected to consider more protection for these tiny animals, which penguins, seals and whales depend on to survive.
Increasing demand for krill as feed for industrially farmed fish and for nutritional supplements has pushed the krill fishery beyond a sustainable level, the conservation group said in a statement. Krill fishing in some areas could outpace efforts to protect the well-known animals that rely on it.
“Existing efforts to regulate krill catch must be sustained and enforced, so that animals such as penguins and seals are not competing against industrial fishing vessels just to survive,” said Gerry Leape, a senior officer at the Pew group.
New fishing technologies enable fleets from multiple countries process krill continuously, bringing in much higher catches than a decade ago. An accelerating loss of sea ice that provides essential habitat for krill adds to the problem and threatens to deplete stocks in key feeding areas for penguins, seals and whales.
The Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources is meeting in Tasmania from October 24 through November 4, and the Pew Environment Group is asking delegates to the commission to require observers on all krill-fishing vessels, set up a dedicated fund to monitor krill predators, and maintain smaller divisions of the ocean to manage krill to prevent local depletion that will harm penguins and other animals.
Coke’s new look: polar-bear white
Coca-Cola has one of the most recognizable brands on the planet: the red can with the white letters. World Wildlife Fund has an equally eye-catching logo: a black-and-white panda. This week, the two are joining forces to change the Coke can’s look from red to white. It’s meant to raise awareness and money to find a safe haven for polar bears, listed as a threatened species because their icy Arctic habitat is melting under their paws due to climate change.
In a project called Arctic Home, Coke plans to turn 1.4 billion of its soft-drink cans white for the first time in its history, replacing the familiar red with an image of a mother polar bear and two cubs making their way across the Arctic. There will also be white bottle caps on other drinks the company sells. The new look is to show up on store shelves from November 1 through February 2012.
The whole point is to raise money to protect a far-north area where summer sea ice will probably persist the longest, WWF and Coke said in a statement. The Arctic Home plan is to work with local residents to manage as much as 500,000 square miles of territory to provide a home for polar bears.
Coke and polar bears are something of a classic combination, according to the company’s Katie Bayne, who said in a statement that the big white bears were first introduced in the beverage-maker’s advertising in 1922. But the color change is more than tin-deep. Coca-Cola is making an initial $2 million donation to World Wildlife Fund to support polar bear conservation work. Those who buy the white cans can text the package code to 357357 to make individual donations of $1, or donate online at ArcticHome.com. The company plans to match all donations made with a package code by March 15 up to $1 million.
“Polar bears inspire the imagination,” Carter Roberts, CEO and president of WWF, said in a statement. “They’re massive, powerful, beautiful and they live nowhere else except the Arctic. Their lives are intimately bound up with sea ice, which is now melting at an alarming rate. By working with Coca-Cola, we can raise the profile of polar bears and what they’re facing, and most importantly, engage people to work with us, to help protect their home.”
Photo credits: REUTERS/Geoff York/World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund photograph taken along the western shore of Hudson Bay in November 2010 shows a female polar bear with two cubs near Churchill, Canada, in this image released to Reuters on February 9, 2011.
New Coke cans (World Wildlife Fund/Coca-Cola)
Fools, their money and FREEDOM will soon be parted.
There is no reason to put the polar bear on any list but Dangerous – When you get too close. A study, ongoing since 1964, shows that there has been at least a 20% increase in the polar bear population in Alaska to date. Polar bears don’t need any help. Coke and the WWF are a scam to relieve people of there money, just like Global Warming is. Oh…BTW, polar bears can swim over 100 miles at a time. Look up the facts people!
How in the heck is a carbon credit going to solve the so called “Global Warming Problem?” IT’S NOT! The CO2 will still be here and people like Al Gore are going to become filthy rich from it, while you and me become dirt poor. Isn’t that wonderful?
How did the “Ice Age” end, over 10,000 years ago? The Ice melted!
Blame God. It certainly didn’t melt from SUV’s, Industry, People, Bar-B-Q’s, Farming, Excess CO2(plant food), etc.
Wake Up! The EPA is nothing more that a “USA put to a slow death” organization. AMEN.
Some good news for a thirsty world
Amid the worry about water and food scarcity, some hints of good news: a five-year, 30-nation analysis suggests there might be enough water – and therefore enough food — for Earth’s hungriest and thirstiest as the human population heads toward the 9 billion mark sometime around mid-century.
Anxiety about food and water supplies stems in part from the effects of climate change, with its projected rise in droughts, wildfires, floods and other events that cut down on food production. Another factor is the increase in population, much of it grouped around water sources in the developing world. But water experts said at a conference this week in Brazil that there could be plenty of water over the coming decades if those upstream collaborate with those downstream and use water more efficiently.
The leader of the study, Simon Cook of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, said this is actually possible. And he said it wouldn’t require the repeal of the more selfish impulses of human nature.
Citing an article in Harvard Business Review, Cook said, “It’s not necessarily human to be totally individualistic. There’s substantial evidence that people can collaborate.”
In fact, Cook said, this kind of discussion between upstreamers and downstreamers — the ones most likely to be at odds over how water should be used — is already taking place. There is evidence that China’s involved in a project to enable hydropower development along the Mekong River, one of several huge river basins examined in the water study. “They’re actually engaged in dialog with the people who will be affected by it” in Laos, Cook said, with a bit of wonder in his voice. “So there are some glimmers of hope.”
That would be different from what has often happened in developed countries, including the United States, where those who use water for irrigation may have scant discussion with those who use it for rain-fed farming, hydropower, aquaculture or other purposes.
The key is to communicate across borders and across sectors, Cook said. One problem is that those who have power tend to want to hang onto it.
Floods? Droughts? Wildfires? Hurricanes? Yes, there is a climate change connection
For years, climate scientists were circumspect when asked if a specific bit of violent weather — for example, Hurricane Irene, the late-summer storm that slammed the heavily populated U.S. East Coast — could be blamed in some way on climate change.
“Climate is what you expect,” the scientists would say, “while weather is what you get.” They would often go on to say that while increasingly severe weather and correspondingly serious costs and consequences were forecast in climate change computer simulations, there was no way to directly blame a given storm on human-generated heat-trapping gases in Earth’s atmosphere.
There still is no direct line between a certain amount of warming and a certain storm, wildfire, drought or flood. But there is a “new normal,” detailed by scientists on a new website . Staffed and advised by some of the most well-known climate change experts in the United States and elsewhere, the site says plainly that what the computer models foretold in 2007 is clearly documented to be occurring.
“All weather events are now influenced by climate change because all weather now develops in a different environment than before,” the Climate Communication site noted in an article released days after Irene dumped record amounts of rain on the U.S. Mid-Atlantic and Northeast.
“While natural variability continues to play a key role in extreme weather, climate change has shifted the odds and changed the natural limits, making certain types of extreme weather more frequent and more intense. The kinds of extreme weather events that would be expected to occur more often in a warming world are indeed increasing.”
So what has really changed? For one thing, it’s just plain getting hotter, the Climate Communication scientists say, citing U.S. and global statistics.
Sixty years ago, the number of new record high temperatures in the contiguous United States was about the same as the number of new record lows. Now, the number of new record highs each year is twice the number of new record lows, a sign of a warming climate, these scientists said.
@cayotte – this thread has remained i open since 912. It is probably too late for you to even see this question.
But where did you find any reference to 16 mass extinctions in the planetary record? The only one I ever heard about was the mass extinction of the dinosaurs.
I don’t even think the ice ages – and there weren’t 16 of them caused similar scaled mass extinction of anything but the mammoth. T I thought the mammoth may have been hunted to extinction by early man.
I’m not saying you’re full of it, but I would love to know where you found that info.
Airlines tout “going green” but their lobbyists are on different flight
The way some of the big U.S. airlines tell it, they’re responsible stewards of the environment working hard to shrink their footprints.
American Airlines, in an article in its in-flight magazine American Way, says the company is “committed to identifying and implementing programs to reduce our environmental impact.” Just this week, American announced the purchase of 460 new fuel-efficient aircraft. The newly merged United and Continental recently launched an “Eco-Skies” campaign that, according to a company web site, reflects “a common focus on protecting the environment” and “allow[s] us to integrate our programs and focus on the environmental commitment of our combined company.”
So why are these environmental stewards hiring lobbyists and going to court to fight common-sense rules that will help protect the environment? And why are some members of Congress introducing legislation that would make it illegal for air carriers to obey new European clean air standards?
On January 1, 2012, all civil aviation flights using airports in Europe will become accountable for their global warming pollution. A new European law, designed to reduce global warming emissions from aviation as part of the larger effort to avert climate catastrophe, will apply to all airlines without regard to nation of origin. (The law exempts airlines that operate a small number of flights to/from the EU).
In its first year, the law requires the airlines to make a modest three percent reduction from their 2004-2006 emissions levels, and to cut pollution five percent through 2020. The law gives airlines broad flexibility to determine how to reduce pollution. Innovative carriers that cut emissions below required levels can sell their surplus allowances. This mild law won’t hurt the carriers’ business; in fact, a 2007 study by the industry’s International Air Transport Association found that the regulation’s “net impact is slightly positive for [both] the profitability of airlines operating extra-EU flights and the overall profitability of flights arriving and departing the EU.”
Instead of complying with the EU law, the American carriers United/Continental and American Airlines are doing what companies often do when they don’t like a law or regulation: they’re going to court and hiring lobbyists. On July 5, a Grand Chamber of the European Court of Justice (ECJ) held a day-long hearing on the airlines’ challenge to the EU-ETS Aviation Directive. This week, House Transportation and Infrastructure chairman John Mica (R-FL) introduced the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011, a bill that would actually make it against the law for US airlines to participate in the European system – even just to report their emissions.
The arguments the airlines and their supporters in the House make in opposing the law range from the implausible to the absurd. They claim, for example, that the EU law is a violation of U.S. sovereignty and illegal under international law and the Chicago Convention, the treaty that regulates international air travel.
One word: Extraterritoriality.
All right; it’s a big word. But as the article points out, such laws necessarily impose a national or regional legal framework on others outside their authority. The actions needed to land in the EU actually have to be undertaken outside the EU. When there is a broad consensus world-wide this is not a problem. Problems arise when, as in this case, that consensus is lacking.
Stern, in center of climate pessimism, hopeful about U.S.
Nicholas Stern, the British economist who warned five years ago that global warming could cost the world’s GDP as much as 20 percent a year by 2050, hasn’t given up on the United States taking action on climate even though he’s down on Washington for not passing a bill that would do just that.
“If you look around the world, of all places to sit and wonder where (climate policy is) going, this is probably the most pessimistic place — this city,” he told a small gathering of reporters at the World Bank’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. late this week.
But all one has to do is travel out of the U.S. capital to see enormous potential for taking action, he said. Stern is optimistic about U.S. companies in Silicon Valley and Boston and other places developing low-carbon technologies such as batteries for electric cars, or new biofuels that aren’t made out of food crops.
“There are so many technological ideas on the table that you don’t need all of them to work, just some,” he said.
He also takes heart in state level mandates for renewable energy and the reelection of Jerry Brown, the pro-solar governor of California, who wants to set the bar even higher for renewable energy.
Be that as it may, Stern is even more deeply concerned about the risks of climate change.
He thinks he underestimated the risk in the Stern Review issued five years ago. But now he doesn’t describe the risks in terms of percentage points of lost GDP. He believes hundreds of millions of people could be forced to migrate in coming decades because of global warming, resulting in conflicts, or even wars.
bst23, how do you explain shrinking polar ice caps, vanishing large fresh water lakes, increased desertification and rising sea levels globally? Also how is it that atmospheric oxygen content is diminishing while CO2 is 30% higher right now than at any point during the last 600,000 years? These are facts that our Congress has been well aware of since the early 1960s. Scripps was the first to start collecting such data as early as 1957 and reports their findings every year to Congress.
For those interested in the truth google “Scripps Institute of Oceanography” and open their website. Their work has been duplicated and verified by universities and research institutes around the globe. Everyone can find the answers for themselves.
As if 2007 never happened?
If four years is a lifetime in politics, it’s an eternity in climate change politics. Events in Washington this week might make climate policy watchers wonder if 2007 really happened.
At issue is the decision by American Electric Power to put its plans for carbon capture and storage on hold, due to the weak economy and the lack of a U.S. plan to limit emissions of climate-warming carbon dioxide. Read the Reuters story about it here.
Carbon capture and storage, or CCS for short, has been promoted as a way to make electricity from domestic coal without unduly raising the level of carbon in the atmosphere. Instead of sending the carbon dioxide that results from burning coal up a smokestack and into the air, the plan was to bury it underground. But that costs money and requires regulatory guarantees, and neither are imminent in the United States. Legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions bogged down on Capitol Hill a year ago and has not been re-introduced.
Sarah Forbes of World Resources Institute called AEP’s decision “a surprise, but not a shock.”
“Given that U.S. climate legislation stalled last summer, companies have less incentive to move forward with CCS, which has proven difficult to advance at scale,” Forbes said in a statement.
Compare that to what happened in 2007. Senators Barbara Boxer, John Warner and Joe Lieberman joined forces that year to focus attention on climate change and were able to shepherd a carbon-limiting bill to the Senate floor the next year, the farthest any such measure has gotten in the United States. Al Gore, the former vice president and perennial climate campaigner, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations’ Intergovermental Panel on Climate Change for bringing climate change to public attention.
On Groundhog Day of that year (why did they pick February 2?) the IPCC released its Fourth Assessment report on what was likely to happen in a warming world. The report forecast more severe weather, worse heat waves, dramatic droughts, wildfires and floods, rising seas and melting glaciers. It also famously said, with 90 percent certainty, that climate change was under way and that human activities contribute to it.
Why does no one talk about the fly ash slurry (water and coal ash waste)containment field that failed and flooded the town of Kingston, Tn.? The facts have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act.
Forty-some other coal fired power plants through out the U.S. are at risk for similar failure. Power plant and coal mine operators are concerned about their investments and would like to continue to mine and burn coal. However, to address the problems of excess CO2 and ignore the dangers of waste that is created is myopic at best and more likely a willful omission by government officials who stand to benefit financially from the preservation of these industries.
The nuclear power industry presents the same problem, what to do with the waste. Solutions that only address half of the problem are not solutions at all. They are an attempt to dupe the public into spending a lot of money for infrastructure that would in the short run allow the coal and nuclear industries to proliferate. In the end we will have ecological disasters like Chernobyl and Kingston all around the globe.
The Beer-Water Nexus
Does the path to clean, safe water lead through a brewery?
Andy Wales, head of sustainable development at global brewer SABMiller, maintains it can happen. The maker of Miller beer — and 20 other brands, from Aguila in Colombia to Zolotaya Bochka Klassicheskoye in Russia — likes the environmental angle, but the main impetus is to ensure production of their products in what is a highly variable business from location to location.
“Water is obviously a critical part of high quality beer,” Wales said by telephone from London. One important part of this equation is figuring out how to use less water and still make good beer.
What this means in practice is working with groups like World Wildlife Fund and GIZ, a German organization that coordinates international development and sustainable development efforts. It also means recognizing the potential for water scarcity and the need for conservation. The four countries seen as having the biggest long-term water risk are South Africa, Ukraine, Tanzania and Peru, Wales said.
“The goal is to reduce our water use per liter of beer by 25 percent by 2015 over a 2008 base,” Wales said. “So that’s from 4.6 liters per liter of beer to 3.5 liters by 2015. Water efficiency’s a big part of our operations everywhere.”
What does this have to do with making good beer? In South Africa, beer-making hops grow in the George region of the Eastern Cape — an area where weather patterns are shifting due to climate change. To keep the hops growing and beer flowing, SABMiller worked with a government scientific research organization called CSIR to understand risks to that watershed, and risks to the supply of water for irrigation of hops.
In Tanzania, water is scarce for another reason: infrastructure. The country’s biggest city, Dar es Salaam, is home to 4 million people, with a water supply for only 400,000 drawn from a source 90 kilometers away. Because the infrastructure to carry the water has problems, many local businesses dig for water, draining the water table. Since Dar es Salaam is a coastal city, digging for water near the ocean allows salt water to intrude into the water supply. One response to this is to invest in equipment to protect the main water supply, Wales said. Another is to seek better enforcement and regulation of ground water.
Did human activities cause the Mississippi River flood?
As the Mississippi River crested at near-record levels near Memphis, Tennessee, a nagging question surfaced at a Capitol Hill briefing: are people to blame? According to one expert on water and hydrology, the answer is closer to yes than no.
“I’m not suggesting these (floods) are caused by climate change, but there’s very clear scientific evidence that the risk of flooding on the Mississippi River is increasing because of human influence,” said Peter Gleick, president of the California-based Pacific Institute.
Human influence comes in at least two ways, Gleick told a briefing that drew congressional staff and personnel from U.S. agencies including the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. (You can see the briefing slides here.) First, the carbon dioxide emitted by the burning of fossil fuels — cars, factories, power plants — loads the atmosphere with climate-warming greenhouse gas, pushing global mean temperatures higher.
Climate scientists have projected that this will make wet areas wetter and dry ones dryer, and this appears to be happening in the continental United States. In some parts of the Mississippi River basin, there has been as much as 20 inches (50 cm) of rain in the last 30 days, which is up to 600 percent of the normal amount, Gleick said.
Projections indicate there will be less winter snowpack — which locks water away until the spring melt — and more rain, which drains quickly into rivers like the Mississippi.
People also build levees that channel the river, packing it into a narrower, deeper space when waters rise, and they put houses, farms and factories behind the levees, putting themselves in the path of any potential flood, Gleick said.
Projections can be wrong, of course. Take the projections of flood severity along the Mississippi. When the “Father of Waters” swelled disastrously in 1993, it was called a 500-year flood — a rise in water expected only twice in a millennium. Then came the flood of 2008, the second 500-year flood in two decades. This frequency of severe floods has prompted the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to re-evaluate their statistics on Mississippi River flooding, according to Gleick.
The 1927 flood was man made. It was an attempt by some New Orleans bankers to grab land. There is some anecdotal and documented evidence that suggest the levee was destroyed by work crews. None the less the destruction they caused was far greater than they had expected.
The fertile crescent(Mesopotamia) was the richest farm land the planet has seen in 10,000 years. Yet Sumerian and Babylonian societies set it firmly on the path to desertification over 4000 years ago. The need for firewood and lumber in Africa and South America has expanded the Sahara and created new deserts in Brazil. Looking at the Midwest of the U.S. by Satellite(Google Earth) will show just how much the Dakotas, Nebraska and Kansas are already desert. Water tiles for irrigation drainage has exacerbated flooding as well as inundate the Mississippi river systems with fertilizer that has spawned giant algae blooms in the Gulf of Mexico. These blooms prevent oxygen from entering the waters thus preventing marine life from living under them. Interestingly, the menhaden who feed on algae are a threatened species as most of them have been over fished for industrial fertilizer.
Mountain top removal for extracting coal and failed fly ash containment has devastated the Appalachian mountain region destroying whole towns and fresh water. The introduction by man of alien marine and land species has altered the environment around the world adversely affecting fishing and agriculture. Fresh water is also a resource that is in decline around the world.
No one talks about the ecological disasters caused by decaying WWII nuclear production facilities in Georgia, Tennessee and Washington State. These sites are impossible to clean up and are monitored by the federal government(NRC and EPA). It is simply not credible to believe the Congress is not aware. Still many of our elected representatives claim nuclear fission generated electricity is safe and necessary. Remember the nuclear reactors in Japan were designed by General Electric and these same designs are in use here in the States.
Perhaps if our government wasn’t in the business of lying to the People about such conditions(to protect corporate interests/re-election campaign donors), there would be overwhelming public consensus to move in a different direction regarding power generation. Clearly the activities of man have been changing the face of our planet in epic fashion.
Cows, climate change and the high court
If you took all the cows in the United States and figured out how much greenhouse gas they emit, would you be able to sue all the farmers who own them?
That interesting legal question came from Justice Antonin Scalia during Supreme Court oral arguments about whether an environmental case against five big U.S. power companies can go forward.
At issue is whether six states can sue the country’s biggest coal-fired electric utilities to make them cut down on the climate-warming carbon dioxide they emit. One lower court said they couldn’t, an appeals court said they could and now the high court will consider where the case will go next. A ruling should come by the end of June.
For now, though, the question was cows.
Attorney Barbara Underwood argued that the five power companies were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide in the United States, making up 10 percent of U.S. emissions. No other company comes close, she said.
Scalia then leaped into the fray.
“You’re lumping them all together,” he said of the five big power companies. “Suppose you lump together all the cows in the country. Would that allow you to sue all those farmers? I mean, don’t you have to do it defendant by defendant? … Cow by cow or at least farm by farm?”
The only load is the garbage coming out of Justice Scalia’s mouth. It would be interesting to see our Supreme court Justice’s investment portfolios. Cows and humans are living beings, power plants are not. Burning fossil fuels are not the only way to generate power.
JDoddsGW, you have hit on the truth of the matter. Greenhouse gases absorb and retain light(radiation) from the Sun. The Earth’s atmosphere can only absorb so much light energy(photons)in any given time period. At some point available light energy for photosynthesis diminishes as agriculture and greenhouse gases increase in the biosphere. The result is climate change/ global warming.
An increase in human population means an increase in livestock production and power generation. As most power generation comes from burning fossil fuels it becomes clear that we are producing a double whammy. More livestock generates more methane and CO2. More gas and coal fired electric generators more CO2.
