We’re
Losing the Race Against Antibiotic Resistance, but There’s Also Reason for
Hope -- A
century ago, the
top three causes of death were infectious diseases. More than half of all people
dying in the United States died because of germs. Today, they account for a
few percent of
deaths at most. We owe much of that, of course, to antibiotics. It is hard
to overstate how much less of a threat infectious diseases pose to us today. But
we take antibiotics for granted. We use them inappropriately and
indiscriminately. This has led many to worry that our days of receiving benefits
from them are numbered. When I was a medical student, doctors around me were
panicking about methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Before then,
infection with that bacteria had been almost exclusively contained to health
care facilities. . Today, community-acquired MRSA is so common that we pretty
much just assume the presence of MRSA for any infections we believe are caused
by staph. Concern about the rise of resistance often focuses on overuse of
antibiotics. There’s plenty of evidence that we, the users, are the problem. In
a recent
multicountry
study conducted by the World Health Organization, almost two-thirds of
people believed that antibiotics could be used to treat colds and the flu, which
are, of course, caused by viruses. Antibiotics kill bacteria, not viruses. The
same people also knew that antibiotic resistance was a real problem that could
affect them, but this knowledge did not seem to prevent them from misusing the
drugs. Bacteria are very good at the evolution game, and killing off more
susceptible strains leaves the more resistant ones to fill the gap. Bacteria
have also become good at transmitting resistance abilities through
plasmids,
small, circular DNA molecules that can be transferred from bacteria to
bacteria. The widespread use of antibiotics in the raising of animals has clearly
contributed to the development of resistance as well. The
Food and Drug
Administration estimates that more kilograms of antibiotics are sold in the
United States for food-producing animals than for people.
Flesh-eating
bacteria: Vibro Vulnificus in Florida ocean hospitalizes 32, kills 10 -
New warnings issued Monday surrounding a bacteria found in the ocean that has
already killed several people in Florida. It is called
Vibrio vulnificus, a
cousin of the bacterium that causes Cholera and it thrives in warm saltwater.
"Since it is naturally found in warm marine waters, people with open wounds can
be exposed to
Vibrio vulnificus through direct contact with seawater," the
Florida Department of Health said in a statement. The Florida Department of
Health reports 13 people have contracted the bacteria and 3 have died from the
strain. Last year, 41 people were infected and 11 died. Florida isn't the only
state to report
Vibrio vulnificus infections. Alabama, Louisiana, Texas and
Mississippi have also recorded cases. "It's quite discouraging because the beach
is one of the more popular hobbies in Florida," said Tracy Brown of West Palm
Beach. Brown, who was enjoying a day at the beach with her daughter, had not
really heard about the
Vibrio bacterium. She was stunned to hear someone could
become sick by simply entering the water. "The last thing you want to think
about is going to the beach and leaving with something you least expect," said
Brown. Florida Department of Health experts said anyone with a compromised
immune system or anyone with an open cut should not go into the water. Those who
do jump into the ocean should wash off before heading home . "It's definitely
something to take serious, but there are a number of other bacteria, that you
could run into," said Tim O'Connor, a spokesperson for the Florida Department of
Health.
I
shower once a week. Here’s why you should too - When I was a kid, bathtime
was a once-a-week affair. We weren’t an unhygienic family – this is just how
most of us lived in the 1960s, and I do not remember any horrific body odors
resulting from it. By the time I was an adult, I was showering every day. With
hindsight, I should have stuck to the old ways. The average 10-minute shower
uses 60 litres of water. A power shower uses three times that and a bath about
80 litres. So a family of four each having a daily 10-minute power shower (I
know that is a very conservative estimate for some teenagers) will consume a
staggering 0.25m litres of water every year.
The annual average cost
for electricity for four 10-minute showers per day would be up to about £400, or
£1,200 if a power shower is involved. Even worse, the power-shower family would
be emitting a staggering 3.5 tonnes of CO2. As we can afford only one tonne of
carbon emissions per person – for everything from food to transport – if we are
to keep global temperatures below the
critical
2C threshold, this would consume nearly all of the family’s carbon budget.
The daily bath or shower, then, is terrible for the environment and our bank
balances. That’s one reason I have reverted to a weekly shower, with a daily
sink-wash that includes my underarms and privates. But there are health
consequences too. I first became aware of these when I was a touring ballet
dancer and met a friend whose skin had been severely damaged by excessive use of
soap products. He was condemned to treat himself with medical creams for the
rest of his life.
According
to dermatologist Joshua Zeichner, parents should stop bathing babies and
toddlers daily because early exposure to dirt and bacteria may help make skin
less sensitive, even preventing conditions like eczema in the long run. The
American Academy of Pediatrics recommends three times a week or less as
toddlers’ skin is more sensitive; and as the elderly have drier skin, they
should not be frequently washing all of their bodies with soap.
Teen
Girls See Big Drop in Chemical Exposure With Switch in Cosmetics --A new
study led by researchers at UC Berkeley and Clinica de Salud del Valle de
Salinas demonstrates how even a short break from certain kinds of makeup,
shampoos and lotions can lead to a significant drop in levels of
hormone-disrupting chemicals in the body. The results, published yesterday in
the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, came from a study of 100 Latina
teenagers participating in the Health and Environmental Research on Makeup of
Salinas Adolescents (
HERMOSA) study.
Researchers provided teen study participants with personal care products labeled
free of chemicals such as phthalates, parabens, triclosan and oxybenzone. Such
chemicals are widely used in
personal care
products, including
cosmetics,
fragrance,
hair products, soaps and
sunscreens and
have been shown in animal studies to interfere with the body’s
endocrine system. “Because women are
the primary consumers of many personal care products, they may be
disproportionately exposed to these chemicals,” . “Teen girls may be at
particular risk since it’s a time of rapid reproductive development and research
has suggested that they use more personal care products per day than the average
adult woman.”
Meet
the ‘rented white coats’ who defend toxic chemicals | Center for Public
Integrity: The National Institutes of Health’s budget for research grants
has fallen 14 percent since its peak in 2004, according to the American
Association for the Advancement of Science. With scarce resources, there’s
little money for academics to study chemicals that most already deem to be
toxic. Yet regulatory officials and attorneys say companies have a strong
financial interest in continuing to publish research favorable to industry.
Gradient belongs to a breed of scientific consulting firms that defends the
products of its corporate clients beyond credulity, even exhaustively studied
substances whose dangers are not in doubt, such as asbestos, lead and arsenic.
Gradient’s scientists rarely acknowledge that a chemical poses a serious public
health risk. The Center for Public Integrity analyzed 149 scientific articles
and letters published by the firm’s most prolific principal scientists.
Ninety-eight percent of the time, they found that the substance in question was
harmless at levels to which people are typically exposed. “They truly are the
epitome of rented white coats,” said Bruce Lanphear, a Simon Fraser University
professor whose own research showing that even tiny amounts of lead could harm
children has been
called into
question by Gradient scientists. A panel of experts convened by the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention
concluded
in 2012 that there is no reliable evidence for a safe level of lead.
'Don't
Drink The Water' In Newark Public Schools, Officials Say: Elevated levels of
lead and discoloration caused officials to shut off the water taps at 30 schools
in Newark, New Jersey, on Wednesday. The state Department of Environmental
Protection and the city's school district are currently using alternate water
sources, according to a joint release from both parties. City officials have
emphasized that this is a problem with lead piping in the various schools and
that overall Newark's water is unaffected. "The problem is localized in the
finite number of schools, and those are the schools that are the oldest and
still have lead piping," Frank Baraff, the city's communications director, told
The Huffington Post Wednesday. The city's water supply is "perfectly safe," he
said. Baraff, who said the school district and state officials are committed to
total transparency as they work to alleviate the issue, also stressed that the
situation is not as severe as the ongoing water crisis in Flint, Michigan.
Still, there was no mistaking the seriousness of the issue. The affected
buildings range from high schools to elementary schools citywide. Baraff said
he's been communicating with local hospitals in the area, and that families have
already started bringing in their children for blood tests. "At this point, the
main recommendation is... don't drink the water in any of the schools,"
Newark
School Officials Knew of Lead Risks, 2014 Memo Shows - In August 2014, as
35,000 students prepared to return to Newark’s public schools, Keith Barton, the
managing director of operations for the district, sent a memo with an urgent
message to all principals, custodians and building managers: Before anyone drank
from the water fountains, they should run the water for at least 30 seconds.Mr.
Barton directed custodians to run and flush every water fountain for two minutes
before school started each day, and to tell cafeteria workers to run and flush
cold water faucets in kitchens for two minutes before preparing food.The memo,
he wrote, was part of an effort “to reduce the risk of possible lead
contamination.”That effort failed. On Wednesday, water at 30 of Newark’s 67
schools
was
shut off after being found to contain
high
levels of lead. The move left state and school officials trying to reassure
nervous parents that they had the situation under control, even as questions
swirled about how the problem had been handled in the first place. The potential
danger of lead exposure was something school officials in Newark had been aware
of for years, and the district had installed lead-reduction filters on water
fountains and kitchen prep sinks, particularly in schools built before 2006,
according to Mr. Barton’s memo. But it took a crisis in Flint, Mich., to
focus attention on the issue of lead contamination in Newark, New Jersey’s
largest city.
Flint’s
Water Crisis: A Chronicle of Disenfranchisement, Denial, and Buck-Passing -
Yves Smith - The ACLU of Michigan just released a must-see short documentary on
the Flint water crisis. It’s important that this not be forgotten even as the
scandal has died down and eyes are moving off Michigan now that the Democratic
debate and state primary have passed. This piece is powerful because it’s told
by the local citizens who were abused (and this is not an overstatement) by
emergency managers who were instructed to prioritize making bond payments. Even
though readers may know many of the elements of this story from the extensive
media coverage, it has a completely different impact not simply seeing it put
together in one place, chronologically as it unfolded, but witnessing the
appalling record of official efforts to deny that there was a problem (including
deliberately constructing completely unrepresentative tests) and repeatedly
telling flat out lies. It’s also not hard to discern that the emergency
managers, their allies, and the state government held the Flint citizens in
utter contempt. The class/race bias and condescension are palpable. The
documentary is also a testament to the persistence of the efforts of Flint
citizens in mustering allies (such as the ACLU as well as the environmental
engineers at Virginia Tech) to develop rock-solid evidence of the contamination
of the water and publicize the developing public health crisis. The fact that
the city’s overlords and state officials thought they could get away with what
amounts to poisoning of a population this large is another symptom of elite
insularity. Again, this is a relatively short video given the ground that it
covers. I hope you’ll view it and circulate widely.
Senator
Mike Lee defends delay of Flint aid bill, says Michigan has ‘large rainy-day
fund’ — Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee issued his first statement Friday
explaining why he has a “hold” on a $250 million bill to provide federal funds
to Flint, Michigan, and other communities facing problems with their drinking
water. Lee, a tea party favorite, says the problems in Flint are “man-made” and
the state has “a large rainy-day fund totaling hundreds of millions of dollars”
that should be used before federal resources are utilized. “The people and
policymakers of Michigan right now have all the government resources they need
to fix the problem,” Lee said. “The only thing Congress is contributing to the
Flint recovery is political grandstanding.” The bill, agreed to by bipartisan
negotiators two weeks ago, would finance water projects in affected communities
around the country like Flint where the drinking water supply was poisoned by
lead pipes causing serious health hazards for its residents. The bill also has
provisions to deal with the health problems caused by the lead.
$1.2
million for Gov. Rick Snyder's attorneys a 'kick in the teeth to taxpayers'
— Gov. Rick Snyder plans to pay attorneys $1.2 million for Flint water work,
while Attorney General Bill Schuette requested $1.5 million to pay a law firm
investigating the crisis. Gov. Rick Snyder expanded contracts for attorneys in
connection with the Flint water crisis, according to a March 8 agenda of the
State Administrative Board. "It's beyond outrageous that Snyder wants to take
$1.2 million from Michigan taxpayers to pay for defense attorneys over his
involvement in the poisoning of Flint's water," Michigan Democratic Party Chair
Brandon Dillon said in a March 8 statement. The agenda states Snyder "authorized
an agreement with Barris, Sott, Denn & Driker, for the provision of legal
services related to civil litigation about municipal drinking water in the City
of Flint, Michigan, in an amount not to exceed $400,000." Snyder "authorized an
agreement with Warner Norcross & Judd LLP, for the provision of legal
services related to records management issues and investigations regarding
municipal drinking water in the City of Flint, Michigan, in an amount not to
exceed $800,000."
Exclusive:
Navy Secretly Conducting Electromagnetic Warfare Training on Washington
Roads: Without public notification of any kind, the US Navy has secretly
been conducting electromagnetic warfare testing and training on public roads in
western Washington State for more than five years. An email thread between the
Navy and the US Forest Service between 2010 and 2012, recently obtained via a
Freedom of
Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Oregon-based author and activist
Carol Van Strum in November 2014, revealed that the Navy has likely been driving
mobile electromagnetic warfare emitters and conducting electromagnetic warfare
training in the Olympic National Forest and on public roads on Washington's
Olympic Peninsula since 2010. In one of the
2012
emails, Navy contractor Gerald Sodano explained that the Navy "utilized EW
[electronic warfare] ranges outside the local vicinity." But he went on to say
that the aim of establishing an electromagnetic warfare range on the Olympic
Peninsula would be to conduct all training locally on the Olympic Peninsula,
rather than further afield. This means that rather than using expansive training
areas the Navy already has access to in Yakima in eastern Washington State, the
Navy aims to use the Olympic National Forest and areas adjacent to Olympic
National Park instead.
Mystery
cancers are cropping up in children in aftermath of Fukushima - Months after
the disaster, Fukushima Prefecture set about examining the thyroids of hundreds
of thousands of children and teens for signs of radiation-related cancers. The
screening effort was unprecedented, and no one knew what to expect. So when the
first round of exams started turning up thyroid abnormalities in nearly half of
the kids, of whom more than 100 were later diagnosed with thyroid cancer, a
firestorm erupted. One result, says Kenji Shibuya, a public health specialist at
University of Tokyo, was “overdiagnosis and overtreatment,” leading dozens of
children to have their thyroids removed, perhaps unnecessarily. Activists
trumpeted the findings as evidence of the dangers of nuclear power. The large
number of abnormalities appearing so soon after the accident “would indicate
that these children almost certainly received a very high dose of thyroid
radiation from inhaled and ingested radioactive iodine,” antinuclear crusader
Helen Caldicott wrote in a post on her homepage. Scientists emphatically
disagree. “The evidence suggests that the great majority and perhaps all of the
cases so far discovered are not due to radiation,” says Dillwyn Williams, a
thyroid cancer specialist at University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom. In
journal papers and in a series of letters published last month in Epidemiology,
scientists have attacked the alarmist interpretations. Many acknowledge that
baseline data from noncontaminated areas were needed from the outset and that
the public should have been better educated to understand results and, perhaps,
to accept watchful waiting as an alternative to immediate surgery. But most also
say the findings hint at a medical puzzle: Why are thyroid abnormalities so
common in children? The “surprising” results of the screening, Williams says,
show that “many more thyroid carcinomas than were previously realized must
originate in early life.”
California
Widow Sues Monsanto Alleging Roundup Caused Her Husband’s Cancer - A
wrongful death lawsuit has been filed against
Monsanto Co. by the widow of a
prominent Cambria, California farmer alleging that Monsanto had known for years
that exposure to
glyphosate—the
main ingredient in the agribusiness giant’s flagship weedkiller Roundup—
could
cause cancer and other serious illnesses or injuries. The lawsuit, which
seeks wrongful death and punitive damages, was filedtoday in Los Angeles federal
court by attorneys Michael Baum, Cynthia Garber and Brent Wisner of
Baum, Hedlund, Aristei & Goldman,
and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., of
Kennedy &
Madonna on behalf of Teri McCall. Teri McCall claims Roundup caused her
husband of 43-years, Anthony Jackson “Jack” McCall, to develop terminal cancer
after he used the herbicide on his 20-acre fruit and vegetable farm for nearly
30 years. According to a press release from the law firms, Jack McCall was
admitted to a hospital in September 2015 to treat swollen lymph nodes in his
neck. He found out that same day that the swelling was caused by anaplastic
large cell lymphoma (ALCL), a rare and aggressive version of non-Hodgkin
lymphoma. Glyphosate, which is the most widely applied pesticide
worldwide,
was
declared
as “probably carcinogenic to humans” last March by the World Health
Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC). The
organization also observed that non-Hodgkin lymphoma and other haematopoietic
cancers are the cancers most associated with glyphosate exposure.
Why
Is Glyphosate Sprayed on Crops Right Before Harvest? --
Glyphosate, the main ingredient in
Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is
recognized as the world’s most widely used weed killer. What is not so well
known is that farmers also use glyphosate on crops such as wheat, oats, edible
beans and other crops right before harvest, raising concerns that the herbicide
could get into food products. Glyphosate has come under increased scrutiny in
the past year. Last year the World Health Organization’s cancer group, the
International Agency for Research on Cancer,
classified
it as a probably carcinogen. The state of California has also moved to
classify
the herbicide as a probable carcinogen. A growing body of research is
documenting health concerns of glyphosate as an endocrine disruptor and that it
kills beneficial gut bacteria, damages the DNA in human embryonic, placental and
umbilical cord cells and is linked to birth defects and reproductive problems in
laboratory animals. A recently
published
paper describes the escalating use of glyphosate:
18.9
billion pounds have been used globally since its introduction in 1974,
making it the most widely and heavily applied weed-killer in the history of
chemical agriculture. Significantly, 74 percent of all glyphosate sprayed on
crops since the mid-1970s was applied in just the last 10 years, as cultivation
of
GMO
corn and soybeans expanded in the U.S. and globally. Farmers often had trouble
getting wheat and barley to dry evenly so they can start harvesting. So they
came up with the idea to kill the crop (with glyphosate) one to two weeks before
harvest to accelerate the drying down of the grain. The pre-harvest use of
glyphosate allows farmers to harvest crops as much as two weeks earlier than
they normally would, an advantage in northern, colder regions.
Farmers
union head skeptical of Trans-Pacific Partnership | Crop Protection News:
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is trying to gain support on Capitol Hill for
its Trans-Pacific Partnership by telling partners on about the benefits it
anticipates, including job growth and rural prosperity. However, the National
Farmers Union (NFU), which represents over 200,000 family farms and ranches,
believes the USDA’s promises are the same kind made with previous trade pacts
that did not come to fruition. “While access to global markets is important for
American agriculture, a trade agreement that does little to fix currency
manipulation, rein in foreign predatory trade practices, or improve the $531
billion trade imbalance is not the solution,” NFU President Roger Johnson said.
The NFU believes the TPP will hurt rural communities more than help them by
opening American jobs up to cheaper, foreign labor. “In its current form, the
TPP stands to hurt our rural economies by pitting American jobs against foreign
labor that is paid mere pennies per hour,” Johnson said. “Beyond the farm gate,
any consumer that cares about where their food comes from should be concerned
with the TPP. This is an issue that affects all Americans alike. I continue to
urge Congress to give thoughtful consideration to opposing the TPP.”
Food
Fraud Infographic | Big Picture Agriculture: Sadly, the amount of food fraud
in the world is horrendous. What a poor testament of human nature, greed, and
self-honor. The only thing that can combat this is growing your own, knowing
your supplier or local grower, more testing, and more public awareness.
We
Might Be Severely Underestimating Climate Change’s Impact On Agriculture --
For all intents and purposes, climate change is not going to be good news for
agriculture. Studies have shown that it will
likely
reduce crop yields,
create
a malnutrition crisis, and make large portions of the globe
inhospitable
to staple crops like maize or bananas. But researchers from Brown and Tufts
universities have a dire message for the world: studies linking climate change
to a decrease in crop production might be underestimating the true impact of
climate change on agriculture. “The real missing pieces have been about peoples’
decision making,” “This is not just about suitability. It’s not just about the
climate. It’s farmers making decisions in real time.” The study,
published
Monday in Nature Climate Change, looked at how climate change might affect
crop production in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a rapidly developing
agricultural region of the country that produced 10 percent of the world’s
soybeans in 2013. But the study didn’t just look at crop yields, or the
productivity of a certain crop per given unit of land. The study took a much
broader approach, looking at how farmers might react to climate shocks — how
much land farmers will put into rotation if the climate changes, and how many
different crops a farmer might grow. It’s not just about the climate. It’s
farmers making decisions in real time. “They need to get their crops in the
ground as soon as they can, they are planting short cycle soy varieties that
they need to harvest at the peak of the rainy season, and then they need to
plant that corn at the peak of the rainy season, and then hope that the rainy
season lasts long enough so the corn gets enough water.”
Why
the Oregon Refuge Occupiers Had a Legitimate Grievance…..Just Not the One They
Went After - The history of the refuge and grazing, the diversion of water,
the low grazing prices charged ranchers, and the over grazing of land in the
early years is mostly correct. To take over a refuge and federal land, it is
hard to understand why someone would risk life and limb to challenge the local
authorities, the government, and the military. In any case, it is a sure recipe
to lose, go to prison, or die when you challenge the authorities, are armed, and
considered dangerous. One man did pay with his life and the rest are under
restraint by the authorities. This short commentary is not so much an argument
of whether their stance was right or wrong as much as whether it was worth it or
the right one to make. By taking over the Refuge, I believe the protesting
ranchers left the public with the wrong impression. The domination of the beef
production by the meat packers and retailers plus the failure of Government to
react to it has increased the costs faced by smaller ranchers and contributed to
the controversy of grazing rights. With the consolidation of meat packers and
the rise of giant retailers such as WalMart, prices for bringing cattle to feed
lots decreased forcing cattlemen to reduce cost. Two ways to reduce cost are
increase the size of your herds which requires more land or increase the numbers
of meat packers so no one meat packer can influence the market. Smaller ranches
have higher costs in production over larger ranches result from the numbers of
cattle brought to market. Fewer cattle to feed lots or markets result in higher
costs per head. In my opinion, the argument should be made with the government
about the consolidation of meat packer market. Grazing rights and the ownership
of land by the Federal Government is not necessarily the right argument to make.
Whether the Government can own or control land was decided by SCOTUS (Light vs.
U. S. and U.S vs. Grimaud) years previous and after the Sagebrush wars when the
Federal Government started to charge fees for access after land was designated
as national parks.
GOP
congressman furious after Obama thwarts plan to sell sacred Apache land to
foreign mining firm: Two Arizona congressional representatives are angry
that President Barack Obama has intervened to prevent sacred Apache land from
being sold off to foreign business interests, according to
Tucson
Weekly. Republican Congressman Paul Gosar had joined forces with Democratic
U.S. Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick in an effort to sell off the ancestral Native American
land, known as Oak Flat or Chi’chil Bildagoteel to the Apache community, to
mining firm Resolution Copper, owned by an Australian-British corporation.
According to the
New
York Times, it would have been the first time in history Native American
lands would have been handed over to a foreign company by Congress. The land was
set to be handed over due to last-minute language added to a must-pass military
spending bill. But according to the Weekly, the Obama administration prevented
that from happening. The site has long been used for Apache coming-of-age
ceremonies, particularly for girls. “This fraudulent action is the latest in a
long list of egregious bureaucratic abuses of power by the Obama Administration.
I will continue to fight this overreach,” Gosar wrote in a statement. “Shame on
the Park Service and Forest Service for ramming a bogus historic place listing
down the throats of Arizonans,” Gosar continued. “Clearly, the Obama
Administration cares more about pandering to extremist environmental groups and
a D.C. lobbyist from the Clinton Administration than following the law and
listening to the American public.”
‘Sitting
on the edge of a knife’: Deforestation ramps up in Queensland -- The
northeastern Australian state of Queensland is home to lush tropical forests,
unique wildlife, and rivers that feed into the largest reef system in the world.
But researchers write that Queensland’s wilderness is under increasing strain,
with data showing a big ramp-up in deforestation over the last two years. In
total,
satellite
data compiled and analyzed by the Queensland Government indicate more than
296,000 hectares of woody vegetation (ranging from very sparse woodland to dense
forest) was lost in the state between 2013 and 2014. This number is up nearly
400 percent from 2009-2010, which saw around 77,500 hectares lost, according to
the data. Scientists from the University of Queensland and other Australian
institutions responded to the findings in an article
published
last week in The Conversation, an academic and research online news
source. They write that much of this clearing is the result of pasture
expansion, and is occurring despite ambitious restoration goals in greater
Australia. “There’s a strong rural lobby in Queensland that’s simply grown
accustomed to clearing lots of land,” Bill Laurance, a research professor at
James Cook University and co-author of the article, told
Mongabay.
“They feel entitled to do this, as though it’s their traditional right.
According to them, nobody—especially the government—is going to tell them what
to do.
23
Million Salmon Dead Due to Toxic Algal Bloom in Chile - Chile’s salmon
industry is
once again
in a tailspin as the ongoing and toxic
algal bloom in the country’s
coastal waters has led to the death of nearly 23 million fish—or
15
percent of Chile’s salmon production—putting the total economic blow from
lost production around $800 million,
Reuters
reported. Jose Miguel Burgos, the head of the government’s Sernapesca
fisheries body, told Reuters that the amount of dead fish in Chile could fill 14
Olympic-size swimming pools. The 100,000 tonnes in lost production—including
Atlantic salmon, Coho and trout—is equivalent to some $800 million in exports,
Burgos added. Chile exported $4.5 billion of farmed salmon, on 800,000 tonnes of
shipments last year. Algal blooms are becoming an
increasingly
frequent phenomenon in fresh and saltwater bodies
around
the world that can
contaminate
or kill aquatic life and make people sick. Warming waters from
climate change, inorganic
fertilizers, and manure runoff from
industrial
agriculture and wastewater treatment plants have been pegged as conditions
that can cause algal blooms.
Scientists
may have found a new bug capable of transmitting Zika — and it could be bad news
for how far the virus can spread -- Another, far more common mosquito could
transmit the Zika virus, Brazilian researchers suggest. Currently, Zika is
mainly transmitted from person to person via one species of mosquito, the
Aedes
aegypti. But scientists are exploring the idea that the virus could spread via a
far more common species called the
Culex quinquefasciatus,
Reuters
reports.
Culex quinquefasciatus is 20 times more common than
Aedes aegypti
in Brazil. Once infected with Zika, only a small proportion of people ever show
symptoms, which most commonly include fever, rash, joint pain, and red eyes.
There is no vaccine or treatment available for the virus. Zika poses a big
concern because of its connections with birth defects in babies whose mothers
have had Zika symptoms and with a neurological condition called
Guillain-Barré
Syndrome. To find out if this other, more common mosquito species could
carry Zika, researchers injected 200 of them with the virus. They then watched
to see if it made its way into the bug's salivary glands, which is where it
would need to be to infect a person. It did, which means it's possible that
could happen outside the lab as well. The bug is a
subtropical
species, with a range as far north as Virginia and covering most of Central
and South America. They're active in the night, as opposed to
Aedes aegypti,
which is a daytime biter. It's been known to carry other viruses, including West
Nile virus.
WHO: Zika
Sexual Transmission Is Unexpectedly Common: — The sexual transmission of the
Zika virus is more common than previously thought, the World Health Organization
said Tuesday, citing reports from several countries.After a meeting of its
emergency committee on Tuesday, the U.N. health agency also said there is
increasing evidence that a spike in disturbing birth defects is caused by Zika,
which is mostly spread by mosquito bites.WHO Director-General Dr. Margaret Chan
said “reports and investigations in several countries strongly suggest that
sexual transmission of the virus is more common than previously assumed.”She
said nine countries have now reported increasing cases of Guillain-Barre
syndrome, a rare condition that can cause temporary paralysis and death, in
people beyond women of child-bearing age, including children, teenagers and
older adults. “All of this news is alarming,” Chan said. Despite the lack of
definitive evidence proving that Zika causes birth defects and neurological
problems, Chan said officials shouldn’t wait for definitive scientific proof
before making recommendations.“Women who are pregnant in affected countries or
travel to these countries are understandably deeply worried,” Chan said.
Will
Climate Change Boost Mosquito-Borne Disease? -The immense amount of
coverage of the
Zika virus outbreak has
focused attention on the health care situation in Brazil, particularly with the
Rio Olympics almost upon us. Most recently, U.S. women’s soccer goalkeeper Hope
Solo
has
said that, because of the virus, she is unsure about whether she will
participate in the games. A recent
PBS
Frontline report showed how Zika strained the country’s health care system —
the largest in the world — which was already overwhelmed by a huge increase in
two other mosquito-borne illnesses: dengue fever and chikungunya. Pouring
gasoline on the fire is an economic crisis resulting in fewer doctors and nurses
to a combat greater numbers of cases. And of course, it isn’t just Brazil. The
spread of Zika across the Americas has prompted the World Health Organization to
declare a
public
health emergency. One of the questions raised about the outbreak is whether
climate change is involved. After all, it has to varying degrees also been
implicated in the spread of other mosquito-borne diseases. There have been
big
increases in cases of West Nile Virus and dengue in the United States, while
chikungunya has recently been reported in western Europe. And if climate change
is responsible, it’s easy to understand why. As temperatures around the country
rise, the areas that are conducive to such mosquitoes could expand, and the
insects
could start to emerge earlier in the year, meaning more opportunities for
bites that could spread disease. It’s notable that the 2012 West Nile Virus
outbreak in the United States followed an unseasonably warm late, spring, summer
and early fall. But within that overall trend, there some nuance.
El
Niño rain and snow storms headed for California.-- The drought break that
Californians have been waiting for all winter is about to arrive: a series of
storms bringing loads of rain and snow from the El Niño–fueled Pacific Ocean.
Over the next 10 days, beginning Friday, a series of Pacific storm systems will
batter the California coastline, bringing intense tendrils of moisture
northeastward from the deep tropical Pacific Ocean where El Niño has juiced the
atmosphere’s energy. So far this winter, these storms have been largely directed
on the Pacific Northwest, where on Tuesday,
Seattle
clinched its rainiest winter in history. That energy will now be
directed
squarely at California. These storms are sometimes referred to as
atmospheric
rivers, or, more colloquially, as the “Pineapple Express” for their origins
near Hawaii. The amount of moisture one of these storms contain is comparable to
the flow of the Amazon River—and it now looks like California will get at least
two big ones by midmonth, one this weekend and one next weekend. The event is
such a big deal that for the first time ever, Air Force Hurricane Hunter
aircraft
will
be dispatched into the atmospheric rivers, laden with scientific equipment
to better understand what makes them tick.
California
awash in water for first time in a long while - (AP) – The first West Coast
waves of a week of powerful storms arrived to provide strong evidence March will
not be as parched as the month that preceded it. Steady rain fell in Northern
California on Saturday and was expected to go statewide Sunday. Fresh and
growing snow blanketed the slopes of the Sierra Nevada, ending a dry spell and
raising hopes the drought-stricken state can get much needed precipitation.
Droves of snowboarders, skiers and sledders packed Sierra slopes while tourists
braved wet weather and visited San Francisco landmarks before an even more
blustery storm arrived later in the day. "It doesn't matter if it rains, we want
to see as much as possible because we only have four days," said Olle Klefbom, a
tourist from Sweden wearing rain jackets and holding umbrellas with his family,
who waited for a cable car on Saturday afternoon. "We want to go to Alcatraz
this afternoon. But if it rains too hard, we'll go shopping instead." Dozens of
arriving flights into San Francisco International Airport were delayed by more
than two hours, and dozens more short flights were cancelled, officials said.
California is not the only place expecting severe weather. Conditions are
especially ripe for tornadoes in the Southeast and Great Plains. Specifically,
Louisiana, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Missouri, Kentucky, southern Illinois,
Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, North and South Carolina and parts of
Virginia.
L.A.
officials seeded clouds during El Nino storm in hopes of more rain - Clouds
over Los Angeles County were seeded with silver iodide to increase the amount of
rainfall during Monday's storm, marking the first cloud seeding done by the
Department of Public Works since 2002. Los Angeles County has used cloud seeding
to boost water supplies since the 1950s, backing off in times of heavy rain or
when wildfire devastation creates an outsized risk of flooding or debris flows.
A 2009 cloud seeding contract for services was terminated after the Station
Fire, which burned roughly 250 square miles of the Angeles National Forest.
Then, last October, the state's severe drought led the county Board of
Supervisors to approve a new one-year contract with Utah-based North American
Weather Consultants for as much as $550,000 a year. This week's storm offered a
good opportunity for "the first go-round for cloud seeding" this season,
Department of Public Works spokesman Steve Frasher said. North American Weather
Consultants has set up land-based generators in 10 locations between Sylmar and
Pacoima, Fraser said. Only some of those generators were used Sunday night, as
weather conditions were not ideal in all areas. The generators shoot silver
iodide into the clouds, creating ice particles. Water vapor freezes onto those
particles, which fall as rain.
Drought-hit
California county still relying on water tanks, despite rainfall –
Reveal reported in early January about
the
water tank program in Tulare County, California. What began as an emergency
response measure to the drought was becoming the norm for hundreds of families
who no longer had running water. At the crisis’ peak, Tulare County reported
about 1,400 private well failures. To combat the problem, the county began
installing 3,000-gallon tanks and delivering water to residents for free.
Homeowners were the only ones who qualified for the program initially. Socorro
Ambriz’s well ran dry in July. She didn’t qualify for the tank program because
she rented her home. So Ambriz and her family cobbled together a system to get
water into her house. After our story ran, Ambriz paused her routine. Heavy
rains brought water back to her well, at least for now. But more than 800
domestic wells still are dry, according to Tulare County officials. And where
the water has returned, the supply remains unpredictable. Ambriz knows that,
and so do county officials, who have advised residents to continue using their
tanks because the well water could contain unsafe levels of arsenic or nitrates.
Tim Lutz of the Tulare County Health and Human Services Agency said residents
should test their water before using it and, until they know it’s safe, continue
to use bottled water for drinking and cooking. But no one knows how long the
water will last. [
more]
Vietnam hit by
worst drought in 90 years - Vietnam is suffering its worst drought
in nearly a century with salinization hitting farmers especially hard in the
crucial southern Mekong delta, experts said Monday. “The water level of the
Mekong River has gone down to its lowest level since 1926, leading to the worst
drought and salinization there,” Nguyen Van Tinh, deputy head of the hydraulics
department under the Ministry of Agriculture, told AFP. The low-lying and
heavily cultivated Mekong region is home to more than 20 million people and is
the country’s rice basket. Intensive cultivation and rising sea levels already
make it one of the world’s most ecologically sensitive regions. Scientists blame
the ongoing 2015-2016 El Nino weather phenomenon, one of the most powerful on
record, for the current drought. Water shortages have also hampered agriculture
in nearby Cambodia, Laos, Thailand and Myanmar. Le Anh Tuan, a professor of
climate change at the University of Can Tho in the heart of the Mekong region,
said as much as 40-50 percent of the 2.2 million hectares (5.4 million acres) of
arable land in the delta had been hit by salinization. “We do not have any
specific measures to mitigate the situation,” Tuan told AFP, adding that
residents had been urged to save water for domestic rather than agricultural
use.
Drought in eastern Mediterranean
worst of past 900 years A new NASA study finds that the recent drought that
began in 1998 in the eastern Mediterranean Levant region, which comprises
Cyprus, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey, is likely the
worst drought of the past nine centuries. Scientists reconstructed the
Mediterranean’s drought history by studying tree rings as part of an effort to
understand the region’s climate and what shifts water to or from the area. Thin
rings indicate dry years while thick rings show years when water was plentiful.
In addition to identifying the driest years, the science team discovered
patterns in the geographic distribution of droughts that provides a
"fingerprint" for identifying the underlying causes. Together, these data show
the range of natural variation in Mediterranean drought occurrence, which will
allow scientists to differentiate droughts made worse by human-induced global
warming. The research is part of NASA's ongoing work to improve the computer
models that simulate climate now and in the future. "The magnitude and
significance of human climate change requires us to really understand the full
range of natural climate variability," said Ben Cook, lead author and climate
scientist at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the Lamont Doherty
Earth Observatory at Columbia University in New York City. "If we look at recent
events and we start to see anomalies that are outside this range of natural
variability, then we can say with some confidence that it looks like this
particular event or this series of events had some kind of human caused climate
change contribution,"
Why This City
of 21 Million People Is Sinking 3 Feet Every Year -- Mexico City is sinking.
Home to 21 million people, who consume nearly 287 billion gallons of water each
year, the city has sunk more than 32 feet in the last 60 years because 70
percent of the water people rely on is extracted from the aquifer below the
city. Many of Mexico City’s buildings are seriously leaning because of the land
subsidence. “There’s no fixing it,” journalist Andrea Noel told producer Alan
Sanchez in the video below from
Fusion. “Once
land is subsided, it’s subsided.” The water table is sinking at a rate of 1
meter (3.2 feet) per year. As the city population grows and water demand
increases,
the
problem will only get worse. “It needs to be stopped because it’s too late
to be remedied,” Noel said. “The city needs to find a way to figure out their
water problem. They really need to look into alternatives like collecting
rainwater, which makes so much sense in a city like this, which gets so much
rainfall every year.” It’s not just Mexico City either. A
recent NASA
analysis found that 4 billion people—nearly two-thirds of the world
population—are at risk as water tables drop all over the world.
China’s
Expansion Spells Nicaragua’s Destruction - With 42 percent of people below
the poverty line, Nicaragua has the weakest social indicators in Latin America.
The country’s economic situation is mainly a result of the U.S. embargo
following the 1980s Sandinista Revolution. Nicaragua also lacks diversification
in its economy and infrastructure, and it has an unskilled workforce. In July
2013, Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega made an
agreement
with Chinese businessman Wang Jing, president of the startup investment firm
Hong Kong Nicaragua Canal Development (HKND), to create a transoceanic channel.
Competing with the smaller Panama Canal, this Gran Canal initiative includes
many sub-projects such as a port on the Pacific and Atlantic coasts, an
international airport, free trade areas, and an oil pipeline. It would also
represent a firm push toward progress, economic growth, and social welfare.Even
though the economic and social boost that Nicaraguans could see from with this
transoceanic channel, many related issues appear to be underestimated if not
concealed, despite warnings from local experts. The transoceanic channel will
extend to 173 miles, and its area of influence will affect many protected areas
such as natural reserves, wetlands, archipelagos, islands, and Lake Cocibolca,
in particular. Due to its low depth, the lake will be drained to reach a minimal
depth of 33 yards throughout the 65 miles of the canal route to allow safe
passage for containers up to 547-yards-long. The drenching operation will result
in over 1 billion tons of waste—the destination of which remains unknown.
Science
is warning us that a food crisis is coming to Southern Africa. Will we stop
it? -- In April, harvest season begins in Southern Africa. An
ongoing drought means the season will yield a historically poor crop. Countries
including Malawi, South Africa, and Zimbabwe will have major shortfalls of
grain. By one count, more than 20 million people in the region already have
limited access to food—
notwithstanding the drought.
Without intervention, the next year will put those people and millions more at
risk of malnutrition or even starvation. But knowing all this makes intervention
more possible than ever. Famines are a powerful illustration of how suddenly
nature can undercut a poor or poorly prepared society. We have paid dearly for
our failure to respond to them efficiently. Economist Stephen Devereux has
estimated
70 million
people (pdf) were killed by famine in the 20th century alone. Today,
analysts employing new sources of information, better technology, and networks
of human monitors have made it possible to foresee agricultural disaster far
enough ahead so that resources can be mobilized to prevent starvation. The
impending food crisis in Southern Africa has yet to capture the international
media’s attention, but it is the subject of ongoing analysis by a network of
agriculturists, climatologists and economists. Global monitoring centers, such
as the
Famine Early Warning Systems Network
(FEWS), issue regular updates. If the crisis does devolve into a famine, the
world will have known it was coming for at least six months.
Regional
Climate Change and National Responsibilities by
James
Hansen &
Makiko Sato - Global warming of about 1°F
(0.6°C) over the past several decades now “loads the climate dice.” Fig. 1
updates the “bell curve” analysis of our 2012 paper
[1] for Northern Hemisphere land, which showed that extreme
hot summers now occur noticeably more often than they did 50 years ago. Our new
paper
[2] shows that there are strong regional variations in this
bell curve shift, and that the largest effects occur in nations least
responsible for causing climate change. In the United States the bell curve
shift is just over one standard deviation
[b] in summer and less than half a standard deviation in
winter (Fig. 2). Measured in units of °F (or °C) the warming is similar in
summer and winter in the U.S., but the practical implication of Fig. 2 is that
the public in the U.S. should notice that summers are becoming hotter but is
less likely to notice the change in winter. Summers cooler than the average
1951-1980 summer still occur, but only ~19% of the time. Extreme summer heat,
defined as 3 standard deviations or more warmer than 1951-1980 average, which
almost never occurred 50 years ago, now occur with frequency about 7%. Warming
in Europe (see paper) is modestly larger than in the U.S. In China (Fig. 2)
warming is now almost 1½ standard deviations in summer and one standard
deviation in winter, a climate change that should be noticeable to people old
enough to remember the climate of 50 years ago. Bell curve shifts in India (see
paper) are slightly larger than in China. In the Mediterranean and Middle East
the bell curve shift in summer is almost 2½ standard deviations (Fig. 2). Every
summer is now warmer than average 1951-1980 climate, and the period with
“summer” climate is now considerably longer. Given that summers were already
very hot in this region, the change affects livability and productivity as noted
below. Bell curve shifts in the tropics, including central Africa (see paper)
and Southeast Asia (Fig. 2), which also was already quite hot, are about two
standard deviations and occur all year round.
It’s
Official: This Winter Was America’s Warmest on Record - This winter was the
warmest on the
record for the continental U.S.,
new
data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows, as
average temperatures climbed nearly 5 F above normal. Every state in the lower
48 saw temperatures at least 1.7 F above average.
New England lead
the pack, with all six states experiencing the warmest winter ever.
Alaska was a
“freakish” 10.6 F above average. The last six months were the warmest such
period on record for the contiguous U.S. Global weather data will be released
later this month, but scientists are already expecting February to once again
smash
global heat records as
the warmest month on record. For a deeper dive: news:
AP,
The
Hill,
USA
Today,
Climate
Central,
Washington
Post; commentary:
Slate,
Eric Holthaus column For more climate change and clean energy news, you can
follow Climate Nexus on
Twitter
and
Facebook, and sign up
for daily
Hot
News.
March
2016's shocking global warming temperature record. -- Our planet’s
preliminary February temperature data are in, and it’s now abundantly clear:
Global warming
is
going into overdrive. There are dozens of global temperature datasets, and
usually I (and my climate journalist colleagues) wait until
the
official ones are released about the middle of the following month to
announce a record-warm month at the global level. But this month’s data is so
extraordinary that there’s no need to wait: February obliterated the all-time
global temperature record
set
just last month. Using unofficial data and adjusting for different base-line
temperatures, it appears that February 2016 was likely somewhere between
1.15
and
1.4
degrees warmer than the long-term average, and about 0.2 degrees above last
month—good enough for the most above-average month ever measured. (Since the
globe had already warmed by about +0.45 degrees above pre-industrial levels
during the 1981-2010 base-line meteorologists commonly use, that amount has been
added to the data released today.)
Update, March 3, 2016: Since this
post was originally published, the heat wave has continued. As of Thursday
morning, it appears that average temperatures across the Northern Hemisphere
have breached the 2 degrees Celsius above “normal” mark for the first time in
recorded history, and
likely the
first time since human civilization began thousands of years ago.* That mark
has
long
been held (somewhat arbitrarily) as the point above which climate change may
begin to become "
dangerous"
to humanity. It's now arrived—though very briefly—much more quickly than
anticipated. This is a milestone moment for our species. Climate change deserves
our greatest possible attention.
The
mercury doesn’t lie: We’ve hit a troubling climate change milestone
-- Bill McKibben - Thursday, while the nation debated the relative size of
Republican genitalia, something truly awful happened. Across the northern
hemisphere, the temperature, if only for a few hours, apparently crossed a line:
it was more than two degrees Celsius above “normal” for the first time in
recorded history and likely for the first time in the course of human
civilization. That’s important because the governments of the world have set two
degrees Celsius as the must-not-cross red line that, theoretically, we’re doing
all we can to avoid. And it’s important because most of the hemisphere has not
really had a winter. They’ve been trucking snow into Anchorage for the start of
the Iditarod; Arctic sea ice is at record low levels for the date; in New
England doctors are already talking about the start of “allergy season.”
Advertisement This bizarre glimpse of the future is only temporary. It will be
years, one hopes, before we’re past the two degrees mark on a regular basis. But
the future is clearly coming much faster than science had expected. February,
taken as a whole, crushed all the old monthly temperature records, which had
been set in … January. January crushed all the old monthly temperature records,
which had been set in … December. In part this reflects the ongoing El Nino
phenomenon — these sporadic events always push up the planet’s temperature. But
since that El Nino heat is layered on top of the ever-increasing global warming,
the spikes keep getting higher. This time around the overturning waters of the
Pacific are releasing huge quantities of heat stored there during the last
couple of decades of global warming.
Why
is 2016 smashing heat records? - Yet another global heat record has been
beaten. It appears January 2016 - the most abnormally hot month in history,
according
to Nasa - will be comprehensively trounced once official figures come in for
February. Initial satellite measurements,
compiled
by Eric Holthaus at Slate, put February’s anomaly from the pre-industrial
average between
1.15C
and
1.4C.
The UN Paris climate agreement struck in December seeks to limit warming to 1.5C
if possible. “Even the lower part of that range is extraordinary,” said Will
Steffen, an emeritus professor of climate science at Australian National
University and a councillor at Australia’s Climate Council. It appears that
on
Wednesday, the northern hemisphere even slipped above the milestone 2C
average for the first time in recorded history. This is the arbitrary limit
above which scientists believe global temperature rise will be “dangerous”. The
Arctic in particular experienced terrific warmth throughout the winter.
Temperatures at the north pole
approached
0C in late December – 30C to 35C above average. Mark Serreze, the director
of the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre, described the conditions as
“absurd”. “The heat has been unrelenting over the entire season,” he said. “I’ve
been studying Arctic climate for 35 years and have never seen anything like this
before”. All this weirdness follows the record-smashing year of 2015, which
was
0.9C above the 20th
century average. This beat the previous record warmth of 2014 by 0.16C.
El
Niño, La Niña and Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide -- What effect does El Niño
have on the rate at which the concentration of carbon dioxide changes in the
Earth's atmosphere changes? And for that matter, what is the effect of El Niño's
cooler counterpart, La Niña, have on airborne CO
2 as well? We're
asking the question today because we've
ruled
out China's attempts to stimulate its economy in 2015 as a significant
contributor to the increase in atmospheric CO
2 levels that have been
observed since July 2015. In China's place, we're considering the impact that
widespread and intense wildfires in Indonesia as the most likely culprit that
contributed to the increase measured at the remote and high altitude
Mauna Loa Observatory in the
middle of the Pacific Ocean. Reports on Indonesia's wildfires have
pointed
to the effect of El Niño on weather patterns as an influence that explains its
severity, where the warming of surface waters in the Pacific Ocean contributed
to drier than normal conditions on the Indonesian islands of Sumatra and Borneo,
which in turn, promoted the rapid spread of wildfires on these islands once they
had started. That observation agrees with what the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) has
reported
on the topic back in 2004.
Hotter
planet spells harder rains to come – study - Severe rainfall has increased
throughout the world’s wettest and driest regions and is set to intensify this
century, new research suggests. Since 1950, daily extremes have risen 1-2% a
decade, a
study
published in journal
Nature said on Monday. That trend is expected to last
until at least 2100, prompting emergency planners to take precautions against
flash flooding. Dry regions such as Saharan Africa, the Arabian Peninsula or
Australia, whose parched soil poorly absorbs excess water, would be most
vulnerable. Global warming increases the amount of water vapour in the
atmosphere, leading to heavier downpours. The study led by Markus Donat at the
University of New South Wales in Australia couldn’t say exactly where extreme
rainfall would occur, but underlined the heightened risks. Tropical regions were
most uncertain. Floods made up almost half of all weather-related disasters in
the last two decades, according to the UN office for disaster risk reduction.
They affected 2.3 billion people, 95% of whom were in Asia.
The
Economist Takes a Strange Turn on Science -- In recent issues of
The Economist, a strange habit has popped up:
a reliance on a
controversial climate skeptic for scientific climate consensus. Said
scientist, Bjorn Lomborgh,
known
to many for pushing climate skepticism and presenting climate change
mitigation and the fight against HIV/Aids as an “either-or scenario”, has
somehow become the go-to source for climate change analysis in
The
Economist, an otherwise reasonable magazine. In a recent climate special –
coming on the heels of the
successful
climate conference held in Paris this past December –
The Economist
took a closer look at geoengineering as a potential option for avoiding climate
catastrophe; the basic idea being that instead of preventing global greenhouse
gases, could we instead reverse the effects? While there are many open questions
about this approach, including from
an
ethical point-of-view, the biggest problem with geoengineering is that it
assumes we can foresee or accurately model the consequences of any global
intervention; something
we are really not good at doing. None of this comes across when reading
The Economist’s take on it, as one is instead told that, “
…[a]
report published in 2012 for the Copenhagen Consensus Centre estimated that
marine-cloud brightening would prevent global warming even more effectively than
a carbon tax.”
Greenland’s
melting is ‘feeding on itself,’ scientists say -- A
new scientific study
released Thursday has delivered yet another burst of bad news about Greenland —
the vast northern ice sheet that contains
20 feet of
potential sea level rise. The ice sheet is “
darkening,”
or losing its ability to reflect both visible and invisible radiation, as it
melts more and more, the research finds. That means it’s absorbing more of the
sun’s energy — which then drives further melting.“I call it melting cannibalism.
You have melting feeding on itself,” says Marco Tedesco, the lead author of the
study and a researcher with Columbia University’s Lamont Doherty Earth
Observatory. The research was published in
The Cryosphere by Tedesco
and five other authors from U.S. and Belgian universities. Scientists have long
feared that when it comes to the Greenland ice sheet’s melt, there are a number
of so-called “positive feedbacks,” or self-amplifying processes, that could make
it worse. For instance, one of the best known of these
involves simple
elevation, a crucial feature for an ice sheet that is well
over a mile high
into the atmosphere in places. In the new study, however, researchers examined
a different so-called feedback — this one involving a property called the ice
sheet’s “albedo,” or simply its overall reflectivity. Bright white snow, falling
atop the ice sheet, reflects light away, preventing it from being absorbed and
thus blocking its heat energy from melting ice. However, there are many
different hues and properties of ice and snow (and water), not all of which are
equally reflective of either visible or non-visible radiation. (The “darkening”
in question here refers both to changes that we can all see with our eyes, and
also important changes that we can’t see).
Flood
Damage Costs Will Rise Faster Than Sea Levels, Study Says -
Communities facing rising sea levels are likely to see the cost of flood damage
increase faster than water levels, concludes a new study. Three scientists in
Germany made this sobering conclusion while developing a new analysis tool to
help coastal communities worldwide understand and calculate the estimated
economic costs of rising sea levels driven by climate change. So far, the
investigation of flood-related damages has lagged behind studies on sea level
rise, said
Jürgen Kropp,
one of the study authors and a climate scientist at the
Potsdam Institute for Climate
Impact Research in Potsdam, Germany. This
new study,
published Monday in the journal
Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences, comes
on the heels of two related climate papers. One found that the current rate of
sea level rise is the fastest on record for
at
least the last 28 centuries.
That study,
by researchers from seven institutions including Potsdam, was published last
week in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The other,
by scientists at
Climate
Central, concluded that the coastal flooding of American towns and cities
will continue to intensify in the future due to manmade global warming. "For
decision makers, it's important to know what the expected costs [of coastal
flooding] will be for the future"—not just how much sea levels will increase,
said Kropp. This new analysis underscores that urgency, showing "damages rise
much faster than sea levels," he said. U.S. communities already feeling the
impact of, and responding to, sea level rise have probably already figured this
out or wouldn't find the results surprising, flood expert
Chad Berginnis told
InsideClimate News. But for rest of the country, "it could be a very surprising
conclusion,"
The
US Is Dumping an Insane Amount of Methane Into the Air - It's no
secret that the United States has a methane problem. Methane accounts for about
one
half of one percent of the country's greenhouse gas emissions—it's released
mostly from natural gas production, landfills, and agriculture (
cow
farts and burps). But as a greenhouse gas, it's incredibly potent in the
short term, capable of trapping
up
to 90 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-30 time period. And
although the Obama administration has
proposed
some potential solutions, methane emissions are currently unregulated by the
federal government. A couple new analyses came out this week painting a picture
of just how severe methane emissions really are. The first deals with the Aliso
Canyon natural gas facility near Los Angeles, which was
finally
plugged on Feb. 12 after spewing gas from a major leak for four months. In a
new
study published Thursday in the journal
Science, scientists
reported that the leak single-handedly doubled Los Angeles' methane footprint.
The study, one of the first peer-reviewed measurements of the leak and based on
a series of scientific flights over the site, found 60 metric tons of methane
leaking
every hour. Aliso Canyon is an extreme case, but methane leaks
are frighteningly common, and they take a significant toll for the environment.
This week the Environmental Protection Agency released an
updated
draft of its Greenhouse Gas Inventory, the official accounting of America's
carbon footprint. In 2014, total greenhouse gas emissions in the US were 6.8
billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (a metric used to make
apples-to-apples comparisons between different gases). The new figures for
methane emissions from the oil and gas sector are about 27 times higher than
previous estimates. According to the
Environmental
Defense Fund, that difference represents a 20-year climate impact equal to
200 coal-fired power plants. It also represents about $1.4 billion worth of lost
natural gas.
Obama,
Trudeau target methane emissions in new agreement (AP) — President Barack
Obama and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau committed on Thursday to
curbing methane emissions by reducing methane emissions from the oil and gas
sectors by at least 40 percent over the next decade from 2012 levels. It’s a
goal the Obama administration had cited previously, and it rolled out
regulations in August that were focused on emissions from new and modified oil
and natural gas wells. But U.S. officials said better data indicate more
regulation is needed. And Canada has agreed with that assessment. “To get all
the way to that goal, we’re going to have to tackle emissions from existing
sources,” said Gina McCarthy, the administrator of the Environmental Protection
Agency. The agreement also commits Canada to regulating methane emissions from
new and existing oil and gas production. Environment and Climate Change Canada
intends to publish its initial proposals by early next year. The oil and gas
industry has objected to the Obama administration’s efforts targeting new and
modified wells. The American Petroleum Institute said additional regulation
could discourage the shale energy revolution that had lowered costs for
consumers while also reducing emissions.
NOAA: Carbon
Dioxide Levels ‘Exploded’ in 2015, Highest Seen Since End of Ice Age - The
amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose 3.05 parts per million in 2015,
the largest year-to-year increase ever recorded, scientists at the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
report
finds. It was the fourth year in a row that CO2 concentrations grew by more than
2 parts per million. “Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have
in hundreds of thousands of years,” a lead scientist at NOAA said. Some of the
spike in CO2 levels can be attributed to last year’s monster
El Niño event and the rest the
scientists chalk up high levels of fossil fuel emissions. CO2 levels in the air,
which contribute to
climate
change and
extreme weather
events, have increased more than 40 percent since the beginning of the
industrial revolution. For a deeper dive:
Washington
Post,
Climate
Home,
Mashable,
Independent,
BBC
News,
Climate
Central
CO2
levels make largest recorded annual leap, NOAA data shows - Atmospheric
concentrations of carbon dioxide last year rose by the biggest margin since
records began, according to a US federal science agency. Fossil fuel burning and
a strong El Niño weather pattern pushed CO2 levels 3.05 parts per million (ppm)
on a year earlier to 402.6 ppm, as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory in
Hawaii, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) said on
Wednesday. “Carbon dioxide levels are increasing faster than they have in
hundreds of thousands of years,” said Pieter Tans, lead scientist at Noaa’s
Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. “It’s explosive compared to natural
processes.” The big jump in CO2 broke a record held since 1998, also a powerful
El Niño year.Drought and erratic rainfall caused less carbon to be stored by
parched forests and drylands, on top of the effect of fossil fuel emissions,
Noaa said. CO2 levels in the air have increased over 40% since 1880, as industry
ramped up emissions. The build-up of those gases traps heat, which warm the
planet and stoke extreme weather. Last year was the hottest year on record,
according to multiple weather agencies. The last time the Earth experienced such
a sustained CO2 rise was between 11,000 and 17,000 years ago, in which period
CO2 jumped by 80ppm. Today’s rate is 200 times faster, said Tans.
Dangerous
global warming will happen sooner than thought – study - The world is on
track to reach dangerous levels of global warming much sooner than expected,
according to new Australian research that highlights the alarming implications
of rising energy demand.University of Queensland and Griffith University
researchers have developed a “global energy tracker” which predicts average
world temperatures could climb 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2020. That
forecast, based on new modelling using long-term average projections on economic
growth, population growth and energy use per person, points to a 2C rise by
2030. The UN conference on climate change in Paris last year agreed to a 1.5C
rise as the preferred limit to protect vulnerable island states, and a 2C rise
as the absolute limit. The new modelling is the brainchild of Ben Hankamer from
UQ’s institute for molecular bioscience and Liam Wagner from Griffith
University’s department of accounting, finance and economics, whose work was
published in the journal Plos One on Thursday. It is the first model to include
energy use per person – which has more than doubled since 1950 – alongside
economic and population growth as a way of predicting carbon emissions and
corresponding temperature increases. The researchers said the earlier than
expected advance of global warming revealed by their modelling added a newfound
urgency to the switch from fossil fuels to renewables.
India
vs US @ WTO on Solar Panels, Work Visas - You can have a national solar
program...but the WTO says you should not discriminate against foreign solar
panels. A few years ago, the US complained that India was discriminating
against foreign producers of solar panels by requiring that
government-subsidized
purchases meet a local content requirement under a national procurement program.
[See case
DS
456.] Late last year, the WTO dispute settlement mechanism ruled
against
India. Recently, an appeal by India on the matter was also rejected:
A
three-member dispute settlement panel of the WTO, which was set up in 2013 after
the US complained that India unduly favours local solar manufacturers, had ruled
against India in August and the February 24 ruling is a reiteration by the panel
after India went in appeal. India's Solar Mission offers a subsidy of up to Rs 1
crore per MW to solar developers sourcing components from local manufacturers.
It also stipulates that 10% of the solar capacity target of 100,000 MW by 2022
should be built with domestically manufactured solar modules, which has led to a
small part of the solar auctions being reserved for developers employing only
domestic content. India had suggested a compromise by which the domestic
content requirement would not be imposed on private solar developers or made
part of the auctions and would be restricted to public services such as the
railways and defence. But even this failed to cut much ice with the US or the
WTO. Unhappy about this state of affairs, India has
hit
back at the US timing-wise with a complaint that the US was failing to meet
its commitments concerning the temporary movement of natural persons to the US.
That is, Indian services firms needing engineers and others to complete work
Stateside have found it increasingly difficult to do so given (a) higher visa
expenses and (b) fewer available visas.
21 Kids
Take on the Feds and Big Oil in Historic Climate Lawsuit [Editor’s note:
Twenty-one youth plaintiffs, as well as climate scientist
Dr. James Hansen as guardian
for future generations, is suing the federal government to cease conduct that
promotes fossil fuel extraction and consumption, and instead develop and
implement an actual science-based climate recovery plan. The complaint argues
the youth have a fundamental constitutional right to be free from the
government’s destruction of their Earth’s atmosphere. Yesterday’s court
appearance was scheduled for the judge to hear oral arguments from the U.S.
government and the fossil fuel industry on
their
motions to dismiss the landmark constitutional climate change lawsuit.] At
Wednesday morning’s
historic
hearing, U.S. Magistrate Judge Thomas M. Coffin questioned Department of
Justice attorney Sean C. Duffy on whether the federal government was allowing
tradeoffs between present and future generations. To illustrate his question,
the Judge used an example of a discount rate, and pondered whether the
government’s actions were effectively trading future harm for present day
benefits. “Are you robbing Peter to pay Paul?” the judge asked a flustered
Duffy. The hearing began with Duffy denying the federal government’s duty under
the public trust doctrine to protect essential natural resources for the benefit
of all present and future generations. The judge asked, “Both (water & air)
are vital to life, right?” “Yes, your honor,” replied Duffy. The Judge also asked
if the government could sell the Pacific Ocean to Exxon. Remarkably, Duffy had a
constitutional argument handy to support even that proposition.
35
Students Occupy DEQ Lobby Demanding Investigation of Illegal Coal Ash
Dumping [Update: 17 students have been arrested. For the latest update via
Twitter, click
here.] Thiry-five
students from the Virginia Student Environmental Coalition are refusing to leave
the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality’s (DEQ) lobby until the
director, David Paylor, complies with their demands regarding Dominion
Resources’ dumping of
coal ash
wastewater into the James River and Quantico Creek. This action is taking place
in light of the
recent
news that Dominion illegally dumped 33.7 million gallons of untreated
wastewater into Quantico Creek last summer. The demands are as follows:
- 1. The DEQ repeals the permits issued to Dominion to begin dumping coal ash
wastewater from their Bremo and Possum Point power plants.
- 2. The current permits are re-issued only after an investigation into the
2015 dumping of untreated wastewater into Quantico Creek.
- 3. The permits for coal ash wastewater release are rewritten to comply with
the best available technology standards, in accordance with the Clean Water Act
and that a mechanism for independent third party monitoring is implemented.
Students from the University of Virginia, University of Mary Washington,
College of William & Mary, Virginia Tech and Virginia Commonwealth
University entered the headquarters at 629 E Main St, Richmond, Virginia, at 10
a.m. and presented their intentions and demands, requesting to speak with Paylor
immediately. A rally is also taking place outside of the building.
Dominion,
James River Association settle on coal ash water (AP) — More stringent water
treatment and fish testing will be required along the James River under a
settlement reached by Dominion Virginia Power and the James River Association on
the release of coal ash wastewater. The announcement Wednesday ends the
association’s legal challenge of a state permit allowing the so-called
dewatering of coal ash impoundments at Bremo Power Station in Fluvanna County.
Water is drained from the ponds before the power company caps the potentially
toxic remnants of coal-fired power generation. But a separate challenge will
move forward of the dewatering plan for Dominion’s Possum Point power plant in
northern Virginia. The Potomac Riverkeeper Network said the state permit for
discharges into Quantico Creek and the Potomac River is inadequate to protect
the waterways. Late Tuesday, Prince William County announced it had reached
settlement with Dominion and would not challenge the Possum Point permit. The
settlement governing the Bremo discharges followed weeks of debate, protests and
arrests over the discharge of millions of gallons of coal ash wastewater into
state waterways. Much of the anger has been directed at the Virginia Department
of Environmental Quality, which issued the permits. The DEQ said in a statement
it was pleased Dominion will voluntarily “go beyond federal and state regulatory
requirements to further enhance water quality protections at its Bremo and
Possum Point power stations.” It defended the permits, saying they protect water
quality and human and aquatic health.
Settlement
Gives Utility The Go-Ahead To Dump Coal Ash Wastewater Into Virginia Rivers
-- A utility company that will legally dispose of coal ash water in two Virginia
waterways agreed Wednesday to treat waste going into the James River to a more
stringent standard than the state requires, though legal appeals to
controversial plan remain. The settlement
agreement
between Dominion Virginia Power and the James River Association comes a day
after the company reached a similar
deal
with Prince William County regarding Quantico Creek, a tributary of the Potomac
River located within its borders. Quantico Creek and James River will start
receiving discharges as early as April. Two months ago, the Virginia Water
Control Board
issued
permits allowing Dominion to drain coal ash water into Quantico Creek and
the James River in southeastern Virginia, as Dominion was directed by the EPA to
close its coal ash ponds at two power plants. That entails treating and draining
the less-polluted top water from coal ash ponds at the Possum Point power plant
by Quantico Creek, and the Bremo Bluff power plant by the James River. But
Dominion’s plan was questioned from the get-go. Just on
Monday,
17 college students protesting the plan were arrested in Richmond. Critics have
long said the permits were lax and didn’t take advantage of best available
technology to keep the river safe enough from pollutants. For their part,
Dominion and the DEQ said the permits were stringent and protective. Still,
environmentalists, Prince William County, and Maryland filed separate appeals to
the permits last month. Yet now only two parties, Maryland and the Potomac
Riverkeeper, have pending appeals. Both are related to Quantico Creek.
Dominion,
James River Association settle on coal ash water (AP) — More stringent water
treatment and fish testing will be required along the James River under a
settlement reached by Dominion Virginia Power and the James River Association on
the release of coal ash wastewater. The announcement Wednesday ends the
association’s legal challenge of a state permit allowing the so-called
dewatering of coal ash impoundments at Bremo Power Station in Fluvanna County.
Water is drained from the ponds before the power company caps the potentially
toxic remnants of coal-fired power generation. But a separate challenge will
move forward of the dewatering plan for Dominion’s Possum Point power plant in
northern Virginia. The Potomac Riverkeeper Network said the state permit for
discharges into Quantico Creek and the Potomac River is inadequate to protect
the waterways. Late Tuesday, Prince William County announced it had reached
settlement with Dominion and would not challenge the Possum Point permit. The
settlement governing the Bremo discharges followed weeks of debate, protests and
arrests over the discharge of millions of gallons of coal ash wastewater into
state waterways. Much of the anger has been directed at the Virginia Department
of Environmental Quality, which issued the permits. The DEQ said in a statement
it was pleased Dominion will voluntarily “go beyond federal and state regulatory
requirements to further enhance water quality protections at its Bremo and
Possum Point power stations.” It defended the permits, saying they protect water
quality and human and aquatic health.
State
orders end to hauling radioactive waste - Kentucky officials have begun to
take enforcement actions in their investigation of radioactive oil and gas
drilling wastes they say was brought illegally into Kentucky and dumped at two
landfills. State health officials ordered the company they say hauled the
fracking waste into Kentucky to stop or face $100,000 per incident fines and
potential criminal charges. And two landfills in Kentucky were sent violation
notices Tuesday from the Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet. The violation
notices claim the landfill operators in Greenup and Estill counties failed to
accurately characterize the waste for what it was, allowing what's considered an
illegal release of a hazardous material into the environment. They were also
cited for poor record keeping and other violations. The Energy Cabinet and the
Cabinet for Health and Family Services have been investigating a potential
pipeline of sorts of radioactive waste from out of state fracking operations
into Kentucky. Health Cabinet assistant counsel Jennifer Wolsing wrote a March 4
letter made public Tuesday that claims BES LLC, doing business as Advanced
TENORM Services, imported, collected, transported and/or deposited radioactive
oil and gas drilling waste in several Kentucky counties since at least June
2015. Wolsing said the state would go to court to stop the company if it did not
comply. As of Tuesday, health cabinet officials had not heard from the company,
said Beth Fischer, cabinet spokeswoman.
Fukushima
Nuclear Disaster 5 Years On: Water, Water Everywhere (Part I) - Forbes: Now,
on the fifth anniversary of what is known here as the Great East Japan
Earthquake, how much progress has TEPCO and the government made in dealing with
what was fundamentally a man-made disaster? The answer is they continue to face
the same four huge challenges they grappled with in 2011: dealing with
contaminated water that has grown into a million-ton headache; locating and
somehow retrieving the molten fuel debris; removing spent fuel rods from the
damaged reactor storage pools; and disposing of millions of cubic meters of
radioactive waste. Most evident of these challenges is the contaminated water.
Cooling water must be continuously circulated through the damaged reactors Units
1, 2 and 3, where nuclear fuel has melted through at least the inner containment
vessels. Consequently, the cooling water injected into the reactor becomes
contaminated and finds its way down into the turbine basements adjacent to each
reactor; there, it mixes with incoming ground water to greatly compound the
problem. Some of the pooled water is partly decontaminated, cooled and
recirculated through the reactors again, the rest is treated and pumped out and
stored in tanks to prevent it flowing into the Pacific Ocean. Naohiro Masuda,
TEPCO’s Chief Decommissioning Office, told the foreign press in Japan March 2nd
that there are over 1,000 such storage tanks located inside and outside the
plant, each holding as much as 1,000 metric tons of treated water. And with
groundwater streaming in at 150 metric tons a day, a new tank is being added
weekly. The stored water, while filtered and largely decontaminated, still
contains tritium—radioactive hydrogen, which can cause cancer if ingested.
Crippled
Fukushima Reactors Are Still a Danger, 5 Years after the Accident - Scientific
American: Japan in February started up a third reactor among those that had
been shut down. But even as the government seeks to leave the disaster behind,
Fukushima remains a wound that will not heal—for former residents, the local
landscape and for the Japanese psyche. Two-thirds of the populace dreads another
accident enough to oppose the restarts. More than 1,100 square kilometers of
villages, mountains and forests remain uninhabitable, and future generations
will still be cleaning up the plant site, according to Japan's Ministry of
Economy, Trade and Industry (METI). Echoing citizens' groups, some scientists
are complaining that important questions about the disaster's impact are not
being addressed. Authorities, they suspect, are subtly discouraging certain
kinds of scientific research, possibly because they fear findings that could
further alarm the public. Exacerbating widespread suspicions of a cover-up,
this February Tepco admitted it had waited for two months after the accident
before announcing the meltdowns—which possibly delayed evacuations and
endangered lives. The uranium fuel in three of the six reactors eventually
melted, and explosions blew holes in the roofs of three reactor buildings,
releasing radioactive iodine, cesium and other fission products over land and
sea. Emergency managers on site, desperately trying to cool the molten cores,
poured water into the damaged reactor buildings using fire-hoses. As a result,
highly contaminated water flowed directly into the Pacific Ocean. Since then,
Tepco has substantially cleaned up the site. It has capped shredded roofs,
removed spent fuel from a damaged reactor and constructed ice walls to stanch
the flow of groundwater that was washing contaminants from the site into the
ocean. Because the molten fuel still generates heat by radioactive decay,
however, Tepco has to keep pumping water through the reactor buildings and
collecting as much as possible—some 400 cubic meters a day, stored in on-site
tanks. Around 8,000 workers are now assisting in the cleanup.
Fukushima
Five Years Later: "The Fuel Rods Melted Through Containment And Nobody Knows
Where They Are Now" -- Today, Japan marks the fifth anniversary of the
tragic and catastrophic meltdown of the Fukushima nuclear plant. On March 11,
2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast coast of Japan, killing
20,000 people. Another 160,000 then fled the radiation in Fukushima. It was the
world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and according to some it would
be far worse, if the Japanese government did not cover up the true severity of
the devastation. At least 100,000 people from the region have not yet returned
to their homes. A full cleanup of the site is expected to take at least 40
years. Representative of the families of the victims spoke during Friday’s
memorial ceremony in Tokyo. This is what Kuniyuki Sakuma, a former resident of
Fukushima
Province said:
For those who remain, we are seized with anxieties and
uncertainties that are beyond words. We spend life away from our homes. Families
are divided and scattered. As our experiences continue into another year, we
wonder: 'When will we be able to return to our homes? Will a day come when our
families are united again?' There are many problems in areas affected
by the disaster, such as high radiation levels in parts of Fukushima Prefecture
that need to be overcome. Even so, as a representative of the families that
survived the disaster, I make a vow once more to the souls and spirits of the
victims of the great disaster; I vow that we will make the utmost efforts to
continue to promote the recovery and reconstruction of our hometowns.
Sadly, the 2011 disaster will be repeated. After the Fukushima nuclear
meltdown, Japan was flooded with massive anti-nuclear protests which led to a
four-year nationwide moratorium on nuclear plants. The moratorium was lifted,
despite sweeping opposition, last August and nuclear plants are being restarted.
Meanwhile, while we await more tragedy out of the demographically-doomed nation,
this is what Fukushima's ground zero looks like five years later. As Reuters
sums it up best, "
no
place for man, or robot."
5 Years
After Fukushima, ‘No End in Sight’ to Ecological Fallout - The environmental
impacts of the 2011
Fukushima
Daiichi
nuclear
disaster are already becoming apparent, according to
a
new analysis from Greenpeace Japan, and for humans and other living things
in the region, there is “no end in sight” to the ecological fallout. The report
warns that these impacts—which include mutations in trees, DNA-damaged worms,
and radiation-contaminated mountain watersheds—will last “decades to centuries.”
The conclusion is culled from a large body of independent scientific research on
impacted areas in the Fukushima region, as well as investigations by Greenpeace
radiation specialists over the past five years. According to
Radiation
Reloaded: Ecological Impacts of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Accident 5 Years
Later, studies have shown:
- High radiation concentrations in new leaves, and at least in the case of
cedar, in pollen;
- apparent increases in growth mutations of fir trees with rising radiation
levels;
- heritable mutations in pale blue grass butterfly populations and DNA-damaged
worms in highly contaminated areas, as well as apparent reduced fertility in
barn swallows;
- decreases in the abundance of 57 bird species with higher radiation levels
over a four year study; and
- high levels of caesium contamination in commercially important freshwater
fish; and radiological contamination of one of the most important
ecosystems—coastal estuaries.
The report comes amid a push by the government of Japanese Prime Minister
Shinzō Abe to
resettle
contaminated areas and also
restart
nuclear reactors in Japan that were shut down in the aftermath of the
crisis.
Radioactive
Waste Still Leaking Five Years After Fukushima Nuclear Disaster --
naked
capitalism Yves here. While the Fukushima nuclear disaster seems like it
took place a long time ago, but the site is still leaking radioactive water and
the cleanup and remediation will take decades, as this Real News Network story
explains. (video and transcript)
Fukushima
‘decontamination troops’ often exploited, shunned (AP) — The ashes of half a
dozen unidentified laborers ended up at a Buddhist temple in this town just
north of the crippled Fukushima nuclear plant. Some of the dead men had no
papers, others left no emergency contacts. Their names could not be confirmed
and no family members had been tracked down to claim their remains. They were
simply labeled “decontamination troops” — unknown soldiers in Japan’s massive
cleanup campaign to make Fukushima livable again five years after radiation
poisoned the fertile countryside. The men were among the 26,000 workers — many
in their 50s and 60s from the margins of society with no special skills or close
family ties — tasked with removing the contaminated topsoil and stuffing it into
tens of thousands of black bags lining the fields and roads. They wipe off
roofs, clean out gutters and chop down trees in a seemingly endless routine.
Coming from across Japan to do a dirty, risky and undesirable job, the workers
make up the very bottom of the nation’s murky, caste-like subcontractor system
long criticized for labor violations. Vulnerable to exploitation and shunned by
local residents, they typically work on three-to-six-month contracts with little
or no benefits, living in makeshift company barracks. And the government is not
even making sure that their radiation levels are individually tested.
Court
orders Japan reactor to shut down, keeps 2nd offline (AP) — A court issued
an unprecedented order Wednesday for a nuclear reactor near Kyoto to stop
operating and ordered a second one to stay offline. The Otsu District Court,
which issued the injunction, said the emergency response plans and equipment
designs at the two reactors have not been sufficiently upgraded after the 2011
Fukushima nuclear disaster. The order requires Kansai Electric Power Co. to shut
down the No. 3 reactor and keep the No. 4 unit offline at the Takahama plant in
Fukui prefecture in western Japan, home to about a dozen reactors. The two
reactors restarted this year after a high court in December reversed an earlier
injunction by another court. The No. 3 reactor, which uses a riskier
plutonium-based MOX fuel, resumed operation in late January, while the No. 4
reactor had to be shut down late last month after operating for just three days
because of a series of technical problems. Kansai Electric said it would abide
by the decision and start the shutdown procedures for the No. 3 reactor Thursday
morning. The utility, meanwhile, said that the decision was “disappointing” and
that it planned to appeal.
Locals
eating radioactive food 30 years after Chernobyl: Greenpeace tests |
Reuters: Economic crises convulsing Russia, Ukraine and Belarus mean testing
in areas contaminated by the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has been cut or
restricted, Greenpeace said, and people continue to eat and drink foods with
dangerously high radiation levels. According to scientific tests conducted on
behalf of the environmental campaigning group, overall contamination from key
isotopes such as caesium-137 and strontium-90 has fallen somewhat, but lingers,
especially in places such as forests. People in affected areas are still coming
into daily contact with dangerously high levels of radiation from the April,
1986 explosion at the nuclear plant that sent a plume of radioactive fallout
across large swathes of Europe. "It is in what they eat and what they drink. It
is in the wood they use for construction and burn to keep warm," the Greenpeace
report, entitled "Nuclear Scars: The Lasting legacies of Chernobyl and
Fukushima" says. The research report seen by Reuters ahead of publication on
Wednesday said Ukraine "no longer has sufficient funds to finance the programmes
needed to properly protect the public... this means the radiation exposure of
people still living in the contaminated areas is likely increasing." Ukraine is
suffering economic hardship, worsened by a pro-Russian insurgency in its eastern
territories, while Russia and Belarus are also experiencing financial pressures.
The report found that in some cases, such as in grain, radiation levels in the
contaminated areas - where an estimated 5 million people live - had actually
increased.
7
Top NRC Experts Break Ranks to Warn of Critical Danger at Aging Nuke Plants
-- Seven top Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) experts have
taken
the brave rare step of publicly filing an independent finding warning that
nearly every U.S. atomic reactor has a generic safety flaw that could spark a
disaster. The warning mocks the latest industry push to keep America’s
remaining 99 nukes from being shut by popular demand, by their essential
unprofitability, or, more seriously, by the kind of engineering collapse against
which the NRC experts are now warning. According to Reuters, the NRC engineers
worry the flaw leaves U.S. reactors “vulnerable to so-called open-phase events
in which an unbalanced voltage, such as an electrical short, could cause motors
to burn out and reduce the ability of a reactor’s emergency cooling system to
function. If the motors are burned out, backup electricity systems would be of
little help.” A small but well-funded band of reactor proponents has been
pushing
nukes as a solution to
climate change. That idea
was buried at recent global climate talks in Paris, where a strong corporate
pro-nuke push
went nowhere. So some key industry supporters have shifted their efforts to
keeping the old reactors open, which is where it gets really dangerous. Each of
the 99 remaining U.S. reactors is in its own particular state of advanced decay.
All are based on technology dating to the 1950s, and all but one are at least 30
years old. Ohio’s
Davis-Besse
has a shield wall that is literally crumbling.
Leaking
Beachfront Nuclear Reactor Near Miami Threatening Florida Everglades -
According to a study released by Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez on
Monday, the waters of Biscayne Bay measured 215 times the level of radioactive
tritium as is found in normal ocean water. Tritium is a radioactive isotope
traceable to nuclear plant cooling tower operations. In this case,the
leak
appears to be emanating from the aging canals in the Turkey Point Nuclear
Generating Station located nearby.
“This is one of several things we were
very worried about,” said South Miami Mayor and biological sciences
professor, Philip Stoddard,
as
the Miami New Times reported.
“You would have to work hard to
find a worse place to put a nuclear plant, right between two national parks and
subject to hurricanes and storm surge.” Biscayne Bay harbors one of the
largest coral reefs on the planet and is situated near the Everglades. Hot,
salty water from the canals appears to be flowing back into both national parks,
which has caused concern among environmentalists and others from the time Turkey
Point planned to expand its reactors in 2013.
“They argued the canals were a
closed system, but that’s not how water works in South Florida,” Stoddard
remarked.
“How much damage is that cooling canal system causing the bay is a
question to be answered,” Everglades Law Center Attorney Julie Dick
told
the Miami Herald prior to reviewing the report.
“There are a
lot more unknowns than knowns and it just shows how much more attention we need
to be paying to that cooling canal system.”
FPL
nuclear plant canals leaking into Biscayne Bay, study confirms | Miami
Herald: A radioactive isotope linked to water from power plant cooling
canals has been found in high levels in Biscayne Bay, confirming suspicions that
Turkey Point’s aging canals are leaking into the nearby national park.
According to a study released Monday by Miami-Dade County Mayor Carlos Gimenez,
water sampling in December and January found tritium levels up to 215 times
higher than normal in ocean water. The report doesn’t address risks to the
public or marine life but tritium is typically monitored as a “tracer” of
nuclear power plant leaks or spills. The study comes two weeks after
a
Tallahassee judge ordered the utility and the state to clean up the nuclear
plant’s cooling canals after concluding that they had caused a massive
underground saltwater plume to migrate west, threatening a wellfield that
supplies drinking water to the Florida Keys. The judge also found the state
failed to address the pollution by crafting a faulty management plan. This
latest test, critics say, raise new questions about what they’ve long suspected:
That canals that began running too hot and salty the summer after FPL overhauled
two reactors to produce more power could also be polluting the bay.
FPL
nuclear plant canals likely violating water quality laws - Florida Power
& Light’s troubled cooling canals, blamed for contaminating groundwater and
now
found
to be leaking into Biscayne Bay, are likely violating local water laws and
federal operating permits, critics said on Tuesday. Following the release of a
report that found a radioactive “tracer” at levels up to 215 times more than
normal in Biscayne Bay, Miami-Dade County commissioners called for quicker
action and closer scrutiny of the nuclear power plant’s canals. The county’s
chief environmental regulator said he planned to issue another violation — the
county cited the utility in October for polluting groundwater — to force FPL to
take more steps to fix the chronic problems.Critics, including state Rep. Jose
Javier Rodriguez, D-Miami, environmentalists and neighboring rock miners, also
demanded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency intervene. "Evidence of radio
active material at high density in Biscayne Bay? How much more do we need to
see." “This is the last straw,” Rodriguez said. “Evidence of radioactive
material at high density in Biscayne Bay? How much more do we need to see?”
Rodriguez and others said the state has repeatedly failed to address worsening
conditions. In February, a Tallahassee judge
ordered
the state to redo an administrative order managing the canals, saying it
lacked the most “fundamental element of an enforcement action: charges.”
World's
highest court will hear case from tiny island country in the Pacific that's
taking on 3 nuclear nations - A small chain of Pacific islands will face off
against Britain, India and Pakistan in court next week to try and get an
international ruling ordering them to start work on dismantling their nuclear
arsenals. While nobody expects the Marshall Islands to force the three powers to
disarm at Monday's hearing, the archipelago's dogged campaign at the
International Court of Justice highlights the growing scope for political
minnows to get a hearing through global tribunals. All three are expected to
argue that the Marshall Islands' claims are beyond the Hague court's
jurisdiction and should be thrown out. But many activists and academics believe
getting them into court is a victory in itself. The island republic, a US
protectorate until 1986 and home to just 50,000 people, was the site of 67
nuclear tests by 1958, the health impacts of which linger to this day. "The
success will be in putting the issue back on the agenda ... This is as much as
the Marshall Islands can hope for," said Dapo Akande, professor of international
law at Oxford University. "When the Marshall Islands goes to the ICJ, it's equal
with Britain and with India," Akande added. "Big countries get dragged into
disputes to which they otherwise would not have needed to pay attention."
Interactive Map
Details What You Need to Know About the World’s Nuclear Power Plants - From
the latest
crisis
over plans for Hinkley Point in the UK, to today’s fifth anniversary of the
Fukushima
disaster, nuclear power plants are currently much in the news. To help
provide a global overview of the
nuclear
power sector both today and throughout its history, Carbon Brief has
produced this interactive map. It shows the location, operating status and
generating capacity of all 667 reactors that have been built or are under
construction, around the world, ever since Russia’s tiny Obninsk plant became
the first to supply power to the grid in 1954.
The
Nuclear Industry Prices Itself Out Of Market For New Power Plants - In the
modern era, nuclear power plants have almost always become more and more
expensive over time. They have a “negative learning curve” — along with massive
delays and cost overruns in market economies. This is confirmed both by recent
studies and by the ongoing cost escalations of nuclear plants around the world,
as I’ll detail in this post.The cost escalation curse of nuclear power “Ever
since the completion of the first wave of nuclear reactors in 1970, and
continuing with the ongoing construction of new reactors in Europe, nuclear
power seems to be doomed with the curse of cost escalation,” read one 2015
journal
article, “Revisiting the Cost Escalation Curse of Nuclear Power.” In the
United States, the cost of Georgia Power’s newest twin Vogtle reactors may top
initial estimates of $14 billion and reach
$21
billion, according to recent Georgia Public Service Commission testimony. Of
course, the first two Vogtle Units begun in 1971 took 18 years to build (a
decade over schedule) at a final price of $9 billion — ten times the original
price tag. Even the
French
can’t build an affordable, on-schedule next generation nuclear plant in
their own nuclear-friendly country. Their newest Normandy plant, which
originally was projected to cost €3bn ($3.3 billion) and start producing power
in 2012 “will not start until 2018 at a cost of €10.5bn [$11.3 billion],” the
Financial Times reported last year. The high and rising price of new nuclear
power plants does not mean new nukes will play no role in the fight to avoid
catastrophic warming, as I
discussed
in January. It does means that, barring a huge unprecedented and ahistorical
price drop in next-generation nuclear plants, the role nuclear power plays will
be a limited one — a very limited one in market economies especially if the
industry can’t reverse decades of cost escalation. Certainly an R&D
breakthrough is worth pursuing, but adding even more policies to specifically
accelerate deployment of new nukes makes little sense at this point.
Illinois
AG mulling legal case over delayed coal mine rules (AP) — Illinois Attorney
General Lisa Madigan’s office is considering legal action against the state’s
natural resources agency for what prosecutors call a failure to follow the terms
of a court-brokered plan to toughen oversight of coal mines. The tougher
regulations were part of broader reforms touted with much fanfare two years by
the administration of former Gov. Pat Quinn. They followed criticisms by
environmentalists who alleged the state Department of Natural Resources was too
cozy with mining companies and other businesses it regulates. The rules included
a requirement that regulators provide earlier citizen notification of new mine
applications and that mine permit applicants be available to answer questions at
public hearings. But two years later, the new rules have not been enacted, and
the resources agency now wants to package the new rules with other pending
changes that some environmental groups say actually weaken public participation.
“It is frustrating that the new rules are not yet in place,” said Ann Spillane,
Madigan’s chief of staff. “It is past time for the department to stop delaying
the implementation of new rules and to fully comply with the court order by
allowing meaningful public participation.” The threat of renewed legal action
comes as the coal industry is battling economic and political challenges that
threaten many jobs in central and southern Illinois. The DNR is now overseen by
the administration of Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner, a former venture capitalist
who defeated Quinn, a Democrat, in 2014 after the new regulations had been
announced.
Oregon
To Be First U.S. State To Ban Coal-Fired Power -- Citizens of Oregon will no
longer derive their energy from coal, putting the environmentally-conscious
state at the front of the line of U.S. jurisdictions that are turning their
backs on the widely-derided fossil fuel. The Clean Energy and Coal Transition
Act commits to eliminating the use of coal-fired power by 2035 and to double the
amount of renewable energy by 2040. It will also require its two largest
utilities to increase their share of clean energy such as solar and wind to 50
percent by 2040, the Guardian reported. Critics say the bill, which has been
passed but still has to be signed into law by Governor Kate Brown, will drive up
power costs.Coal provides about a third of Oregon's electricity, but most of it
is imported from Utah, Montana and Wyoming. The state only has one operating
coal-fired power plant, the 36-year-old Boardman facility supplying about 550
megawatts, but it is due to shut down by 2020. State Republicans criticized the
bill as leading to higher electricity costs for households but Pacific Power, a
large Oregon utility, answered that the move to renewables would only raise
costs by less than 1 percent by 2030, the newspaper said. The other major
utility in the state, Portland General Electric, also backed the deal. Noah Long
of the US Natural Resources Defense Council said the law could limit emissions
in other states if it reduces their coal use.
Natural
gas-fired US power generation to surpass coal in 2016: EIA - The US Energy
Information Administration expects lower natural gas prices will result in
natural gas fueling 33.4% of US electricity generation in 2016 compared with 32%
for coal, according to the agency's monthly Short Term Energy Outlook released
Tuesday. It marks the first time the agency has projected natural gas generation
to surpass coal on an annual basis. In the report's February edition, the agency
forecast gas would fuel 32.3% of US generation in 2016 compared with 33.3% for
coal. As a result of decreasing demand, US coal production is projected to total
just 784 million st in 2016, which would be a 12.4% decline from 2015
production, according to the agency. The 2016 estimate, were it to hold, would
be the lowest annual production total since 1983. Furthermore, the drop in
production in 2016 would represent a larger year-over-year decline than the
10.2% decline between 2015 and 2014.
Obama's
Not Really Waging a War on Coal — But China Is -- Roughly 1.3 million
Chinese workers will climb out of mines in the coming years and file out of
coal-fired power plants for the last time. Some 500,000 colleagues, laid off
from the steel sector, will join them. Together this mass will face the
uncertainty of China's shifting economy and effort to turn towards cleaner
energy. But those forced out of work by their government's war on coal can also
expect aid in transitioning to new jobs. Yin Weimin, the country's minister for
human resources and social security, said on Monday that 100 billion Chinese
Yuan ($15.27 billion) would be set aside to help dislocated workers. While this
sounds like a lot of money, Elizabeth Economy, an expert on China with the
Council on Foreign Relation, said that the challenge facing the world's largest
producer of coal is similar to that facing the United States, the world's
second. "In this regard, China is not very different from the United States,
workers are being laid off and they have families to support," said Economy.
"The question is what are [government leaders] going to do with the money. If
it's a one-time payment, it's not going to last very long, and workers will be
asking, 'What about our pensions?'" The 1.8 million layoffs have been announced
as China is trying to ease pollution and shift to a more consumer-driven economy
by ceasing overproduction of manufactured goods. The plan is to cut 500 million
tons of coal production capacity by 2020, but there is no set timeframe for the
layoffs. Economy warned that there could be wide gaps between the economic
messages Beijing sends abroad and what happens domestically. And, she added, the
central government risks political fallout from the mass layoffs in the
state-run coal sector.
Will Fossil
Fuel Prices Fully Recover? --World market prices for coal have slumped and
for months languished at around US$ 45/tonne, compared to US$95/tonne in
February, 2014. Over the last 2 years, coal prices have more than halved and
fallen almost every month.For weeks, crude oil prices have been around US$
30-33/barrel, sometimes falling as low as $26/barrel. Some forecasters
(Goldman
Sachs) predict that oil prices could stay low and do so for longer than
predicted. Some question if fossil fuel prices will ever recover given the
emergence of disruptive technologies making electricity generation from
renewable sources increasingly competitive with fossil fuels, even at their
present depressed prices. Others point to agreement by OPEC to reduce production
in order to stimulate price. However, that agreement has only been reached by 4
OPEC members (Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Russia and Venezuela) and then only when
confronted by Iranian production coming on to the world market, following the
lifting of international sanctions. It is seen by some as an
ineffectual
move to restore oil prices, since the agreement is not to exceed record high
January pumping levels. Far more certain is that the present price malaise is a
taste of the state of things to come for those who have invested in the shares
of fossil fuel producers. Without sustained price recovery, the value of shares
in some fossil fuel companies will decline and could eventually wind-up as
stranded assets of little or no value. Evidence of this is seen in
closure
of coal mines and the unsustainable position of
oil
and gas producers using older technology where cost of pumping oil and gas
is close to or below its market value.
Why
We Need to Keep 80 Percent of Fossil Fuels in the Ground: Physics can impose
a bracing clarity on the normally murky world of politics. It can make things
simple. Not easy, but simple. Most of the time, public policy is a series of
trade-offs: higher taxes or fewer services, more regulation or more freedom of
action. We attempt to balance our preferences: for having a beer after work, and
for sober drivers. We meet somewhere in the middle, compromise, trade off. We
tend to think we’re doing it right when everyone’s a little unhappy. But when it
comes to climate change, the essential problem is not one group’s preferences
against another’s. It’s not—at bottom—industry versus environmentalists or
Republicans against Democrats. It’s people against physics, which means that
compromise and trade-off don’t work. Lobbying physics is useless; it just keeps
on doing what it does. So here are the numbers: We have to keep 80 percent of
the fossil-fuel reserves that we know about underground. If we don’t—if we dig
up the coal and oil and gas and burn them—we will overwhelm the planet’s
physical systems, heating the Earth far past the red lines drawn by scientists
and governments. It’s not “we should do this,” or “we’d be wise to do this.”
Instead it’s simpler: “We have to do this.” And we can do this. Time, however,
is precisely what we don’t have. We pushed through the 400 parts per million
level of CO2 in the atmosphere last spring; 2015 was the hottest year in
recorded history, smashing the record set in … 2014. So we have to attack this
problem from both ends, going after supply as well as demand. We have to leave
fossil fuel in the ground.
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1 comment:
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