Here are some interesting environmental news links I’ve come across recently:

1. Today, October 24, 2009, is International Day of Climate Action, organized by 350.org. Science Magazine has an interview with Bill McKibben—the founder of 350.org:
   

   Writer Bill McKibben has built an international climate activism movement around a concentration: 350 ppm. Two years ago he launched 350.org after NASA climate scientist Jim Hansen told him that was the carbon dioxide concentration needed to prevent dangerous man-made warming (pdf). But the atmosphere already is around 390 ppm—and scientists expect the concentration to rise beyond 550 ppm if drastic measures aren’t taken soon to reduce humanity’s carbon emissions. So it’s an understatement to say that McKibben’s goal is a tough one.

   .       .       .

   Q: 350 a really hard goal. Do you wonder sometimes if you’ve chosen a goal that you’ll always be falling short of?

   B.M.: I wonder all the time whether we’re going to get there. It’s definitely a tough number. But the point is aiming for another number isn’t useful. There’s the Tripati study out of UCLA [University of California, Los Angeles]: 390 parts per million, the last time we were there, 15 million years ago, we had 100 foot rise in sea level. If 390 melts the Arctic, there’s no point in doing our best to get to 450. Yes, we’re probably going to hit 450, but we need to bounce off it as fast as we possibly can and get back down. There are whole countries that are going to disappear this century unless we bring things under control. Island nations that are going to go beneath the waves, and African nations that are going to be so drought ridden no one’s going to live there. So this is incredibly pragmatic. It may not be easy, and it may not be at the moment politically realistic—but the negotiation that’s going on right now is between human beings on the one hand and physics and chemistry on the other. … Physics and chemistry have stated their bottom line: 350 parts per million if you want the world to work at all the way you’re used to it working. That’s a pretty hard number. I’m pretty confident it’s going to be easier to change the political reality than it is to change the laws of nature. One of the reasons this seems so difficult to do is that we’ve never built a political movement to demand that change happen. That’s what we’re doing now. The scientists have done their job—they’ve given us a robust number to work with.

   Today’s awareness campaign of 350 ppm is global. Check out this video from downtown Manhattan:
   

   You can learn more about what 350 ppm means and why it’s important here.

2. Groundwater overdrafting is a huge problem in many areas of the world. It occurs when groundwater is extracted and used faster than it’s replaced. In some areas, due to the geology, it’s very difficult to recharge groundwater. The consequences of recklessly using aquifers in Spain are causing peat bogs to dry out, self-combust, and consequently release tones of carbon dioxide. In some areas, the land above an overused aquifer sinks—a process known as land subsidence. From the guardian.co.uk:
   

   They are meant to be Spain’s most important inland wetlands, but yesterday the lagoons at Las Tablas de Daimiel national park were not just dry, they were burning. Stilted walkways stood on baked earth and rowing boats lay stranded on the ground. Observation huts revealed no birds, just an endless stretch of reeds rooted in cracked mud.

   Only 1% of the park’s surface remains wet, but the real catastrophe is happening underground. “If you see smoke it is because the dried-out peat under the ground has begun to self-combust,” a park worker warned visitors. Occasionally, the fire breaks to the surface, sending up puffs of white smoke.

   Scientists warn the wetlands are losing the lining that once retained water, with deep cracks opening up in the worst areas. Park authorities worry the damage may prove irreversible.

   .       .       .

   Spain’s environment ministry, which runs the failing park, this week banned Ruiz from talking to the Guardian, but scientists who know the wetlands all agree on what is happening.

   The aquifer which once fed the lagoons now lies 50ft below them. Farmers near the park have sunk thousands of wells, some 300ft deep, and have spent years pumping out more water than goes in. Furthermore, the Guadiana river, which used to flow into the Tablas de Daimiel, has disappeared.

   “People have been warning that it was going to dry out for 20 years,” said Luís Moreno of Spain’s Geological and Mining Institute.

   As the peat burns, an area that once trapped carbon dioxide has started releasing vast quantities of it. “We saw the first smoke in August but the fires must have been burning for a while,” said Moreno. “It is a very difficult thing to control. It could burn for months.”

3. Unfortunately, a research survey vessel recently collided with a blue whale (Balaenoptera musculus)—the largest living animal on the planet (and possibly that ever lived). More on the fatal blue whale ship strike from the Santa Rosa Press Democrat:
   

   “This is a big deal,” said Thor Holmes, curator of the vertebrate museum at Humboldt State University and a member of the California Marine Mammal Stranding Network.

   The 72-foot whale died after being struck by a research vessel, believed to be the 78-foot Pacific Star. Its crew is under contract to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to update maps of the ocean floor. The contractor is based in San Diego while the boat was leased from Washington, said Joe Cordaro, a NOAA biologist.

   Crew members reported they were seven miles off the coast of Fort Bragg moving at about 5.5 knots when the ship shuddered, he said. They had not spotted a whale and didn’t immediately know what happened. Then a whale surfaced, bleeding profusely, Cordaro said.

   A few hours later, a blue whale with huge gashes washed up along the rocky coast just south of Fort Bragg.

   Cordaro said it’s hard to explain how a ship and whale would collide in the open ocean. But when whales are feeding, breeding or coming up for air, they aren’t paying attention to their surroundings, he said.

   Just so history doesn’t repeat itself, it’s not wise to blow up a whale carcass with dynamite! Via NBC Bay Area:
   

   To offset the terrible news of the blue whale ship strike, in May of this year, it was reported, “The voice of a male blue whale was tracked about 70 miles off the south shore of Long Island on January 10 and 11, 2009 . . . ‘This is a very important moment in the environmental history . . . [since] blue whales were almost hunted to extinction by the middle of the 20th century, and the fact that now we’re finding them migrating not far off our shores is truly remarkable.’”

4. There are consequences to testing nuclear weapons. These consequences are apparently represented by a rise in cancer amongst Americans that lived during testing events. From Politics Daily:
   

   The winds carried Strontium-90, Iodine-129 and other lethal particles across a broad swath of the country. Infants who were bottle-fed, which was then considered the modern approach, were particularly vulnerable to the Strontium-90 that ended up in cows’ milk.

   In 1961, as John Kennedy was poised to resume atmospheric testing after a two-year moratorium, he met with White House science adviser Jerome Wiesner in the Oval Office one rainy day. The president wondered how fallout reached the earth. Wiesner explained that it was washed out of the clouds by rain. “You mean,” Kennedy asked, “it’s in the rain out there?” As Wiesner tells it, the president then “looked out the window, looked very sad and didn’t say a word for several minutes.” Nonetheless JFK, fearful that the Soviet Union might score a nuclear breakthrough, authorized a new round of above-ground testing before negotiating the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

   .       .       .

   But a study released Tuesday documents the enhanced cancer risk that Baby Boomers face because of these long-ago atmospheric tests. Epidemiologist Joseph Mangano analyzed the lingering radiation in infant teeth (donated long ago by the parents of baby boys born in the St. Louis area between 1959 and 1961) and compared the results to contemporary cancer data from the subjects. “What we found out was shocking,” Mangano said. “Persons who had died of cancer had more than double the Strontium-90 in their (baby) teeth than did healthy persons.” The original variance in Strontium-90 levels among individuals, he explained, was caused by seemingly small factors such as how much milk expectant mothers drank, diet and the source of the municipal water supply.

5. Bugs, bugs, and more bugs: This video captures the fascinating flight patterns of bugs flying around a street light (the music is by Telefon Tel Aviv, “What’s The Use Of Feet If We Haven’t Got Legs”)
   
6. Via ClimateWire, scientists argue that the “combustion of fossil fuels is inherently inefficient,” so worldwide energy consumption would drop if “all energy consumption is converted to electricity.” From ClimateWire:
   

   Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University, and Mark Delucchi, a researcher at University of California, Davis, in the article attempt to map out a plan for powering the entire planet with renewable sources of energy. Doing so, they say, is achievable and would cost less than fossil fuels or nuclear power.

   The core of their argument is this: Combustion of fossil fuels is inherently inefficient, while running a vehicle on electricity conserves energy. When gasoline is used to power a standard car, 80 percent of the energy is lost through heat. Electric-powered vehicles, on the other hand, only lose about 20 percent, they say.

   “If you make this transition to renewables and electricity, then you eliminate the need for 13,000 new or existing coal plants,” Jacobson said through the Stanford news service. “Just by changing our infrastructure, we have less power demand.”

   Jacobsen and Delucchi estimated worldwide energy demand with the current mix of energy sources at 16.9 terawatts in 2030. But if virtually all energy consumption is converted to electricity, either for direct use or hydrogen production, that figure would drop to 11.5 terawatts, according to their prediction.

   The long-term savings of converting to wind, geothermal, tidal, hydroelectric and solar power, they claim, would more than make up for the expense of replacing a fleet of plants fueled by coal, natural gas and nuclear. To get there, they argue for an unprecedented construction boom in transmission lines, among other measures.

   In all, the scientists say about 1.3 percent of the Earth’s land surface would suffice to host the wind turbines and solar installations that would dominate in their theoretical clean energy system.

7. Biophysical economics combines economics, ecology, and thermodynamics (e.g., unlimited economic growth is impossible) to argue that “the neoclassical mantra of constant economic growth is ignoring the world’s diminishing supply of energy at humanity’s peril, failing to take account of the principle of net energy return on investment.” . . . [so is the world] headed toward a dramatic economic collapse as energy scarcity takes hold . . . [or can we] turn the ship around.” More from Scientific American (emphasis added):
   

   Central to their argument is an understanding that the survival of all living creatures is limited by the concept of energy return on investment (EROI): that any living thing or living societies can survive only so long as they are capable of getting more net energy from any activity than they expend during the performance of that activity.

   For instance, if a squirrel burns energy eating nuts, those nuts had better give the squirrel more energy back then it expended, or the squirrel will inevitably die. It is a rule that lies at the core of studying animal and plant behavior, and human society should be looked at no differently, as even technologically complex societies are still governed by EROI.

   .       .       .

   The sharpest difference between biophysical economics and the more widely held “Chicago School” approach is that biophysical economists readily accept the peak oil hypothesis: that society is fast approaching the point where global oil production will peak and then steadily decline.

   The United States is held as the prime example. Though the United States is still the world’s third-largest producer of oil, its oil production stopped growing more than a decade ago and has flatlined or steadily fallen ever since. Other once-robust oil-producing countries have experienced similar production curves.

   But the more important indicator, biophysical economists say, is the fact that the U.S. oil industry’s energy return on investment has been steadily sliding since the beginning of the century.

   Through analyzing historical production data, experts say the petroleum sector’s EROI in this country was about 100-to-1 in 1930, meaning one had to burn approximately 1 barrel of oil’s worth of energy to get 100 barrels out of the ground. By the 1990s, it is thought, that number slid to less than 36-to-1, and further down to 19-to-1 by 2006.

   “If you go from using a 20-to-1 energy return fuel down to a 3-to-1 fuel, economic collapse is guaranteed,” as nothing is left for other economic activity, said Nate Hagens, editor of the popular peak oil blog “The Oil Drum.”

   “The main problem with neoclassical economics is that it treats energy as the same as any other commodity input into the production function,” Hagens said. “They parse it into dollar terms and treat it the same as they would mittens or earmuffs or eggs … but without energy, you can’t have any of that other stuff.”

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