Desdemona Despair

by Jeremy Hance

A new analysis shows that the heavily-deforested Amazonian region of Mato Grosso is particularly susceptible to 'savannization' due to repeated burning that has likely depleted the region's soils of precious nutrients. According to the study, published in the Journal of Geophyscial Research, savannization, or the process of tropical ecosystems shifting to savannah, is likely in northern Mato Grosso even if no more further deforestation occurs.

Dr. Marcos Costa, one of the study's authors, describes the savannization tipping point in an ecosystem as such: “the coupled atmosphere-biosphere system would shift from the present rainy climate-rainforest situation to an alternate drier-savanna situation...It involves the coupled vegetation-atmosphere-ocean system, but the evolution of this system apparently depends on other feedbacks that are usually neglected. These feedbacks are associated with the deforestation and agricultural practices, like soil nutrient limitation and fires.”

These feedback systems, soil nutrients and fires, are particularly important to an area like Mato Grosso, where large-scale burning has been used for decades by settlers seeking more land for ranching and agriculture. The repeated burning causes a direct loss of soil nutrients in the ecosystem.

“Frequent fires volatilizes significant stocks of [nitrogen], provoking a co-limitation of this nutrient in forests recovering from repeated fire,” the authors write. “Nutrients in the remaining ash might be lost by ash transport, and leaching to surface and groundwater.”

The authors point to previous study which showed that tropical forests suffering from repeated burning—five or more times—“accumulate biomass at an average rate lower than 50% of forests that burned only once, and are more susceptible to further burning.”

Why is the loss of soil nutrients through burning important? “Any plant must capture nutrients from the soil to grow,” explains Costa. “If soil nutrients are depleted, trees grow at a slower rate, because they can't use efficiently the light and water available.” … According to the study: “over northern Mato Grosso, the rainforest does not recover on the timescale of 50 years, no matter how much is deforested.” …

Amazonian region likely to become savannah due to burning, deforestation

By SUSAN SAULNY

…City officials and housing advocates here and in cities as varied as Buffalo, Kansas City, Mo., and Jacksonville, Fla., say they are seeing an unsettling development: Banks are quietly declining to take possession of properties at the end of the foreclosure process, most often because the cost of the ordeal — from legal fees to maintenance — exceeds the diminishing value of the real estate.

The so-called bank walkaways rarely mean relief for the property owners, caught unaware months after the fact, and often mean additional financial burdens and bureaucratic headaches. Technically, they still owe on the mortgage, but as a practicality, rarely would a mortgage holder receive any more payments on the loan. The way mortgages are bundled and resold, it can be enormously time-consuming just trying to determine what company holds the loan on a property thought to be in foreclosure. …

“It is what some of us think is the next wave of the crisis,” said Kermit Lind, a clinical professor at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law and an expert on foreclosure law. …

In Buffalo, where officials said the problem had reached “epidemic” proportions in recent months, the city sued 37 banks last year, claiming they were responsible for the deterioration of at least 57 abandoned homes; the city chose a sampling of houses to include in the lawsuit, even though the banks had walked away from many more foreclosures. So far, five banks have settled.

In Kansas City, Rachel Foley, a lawyer who handles housing cases, said bank walkaways were “a rare occurrence two to three years ago.”

“We’re seeing them dumped more and more at the moment,” she said. …

Banks Starting to Walk Away on Foreclosures

By John King

BALLWIN, Missouri (CNN)  -- For Stuart and Dianne Falk, it is a two-bus, 45-minute trip into downtown St. Louis to head to the gym and to volunteer at a theater group.

And it is a lifeline that ends Friday.

"To be saddled, to be imprisoned, that is what it is going to feel like," says Stuart Falk. "It is going to feel like being punished for something we didn't do."

Stuart and Dianne Falk are both in wheelchairs. And the bus route that takes them downtown, and to one of the few tastes of personal freedom they have, is being eliminated because of a funding crunch.

In all, two dozen bus routes are being eliminated outright effective March 30. Numerous other routes have been shortened or otherwise modified, including less frequent runs. Light rail service schedules also have been scaled back as part of an effort to close a $51 million funding shortfall. …

King: Bus route closing devastates disabled couple

Six bonobos, a species of chimpanzee, have died from a flu epidemic in a month at the Lola Ya Bonobo in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Ten more have contracted the flu. “There is no fever. Antibiotics don’t do anything. The bonobos have severe respiratory infections and then they can’t breath for 3 days then they die,” writes a staff member on the sanctuary's blog through the conservation organization WildlifeDirect. The staff of Lola Ya Bonobo have sent out a plea for help and donations, as the flu continues to sweep through their center.

“There is no fever. Antibiotics don’t do anything. The bonobos have severe respiratory infections and then they can’t breath for 3 days then they die,” writes a staff member on the sanctuary's blog through the conservation organization WildlifeDirect. The staff of Lola Ya Bonobo have sent out a plea for help and donations, as the flu continues to sweep through their center.

Located in sixty acres of forest, the Lola Ya Bonobo sanctuary is a place for bonobos who have been confiscated by police following attempts to sell them to pet markets in the US, Europe, or Middle East. The sanctuary provides rehabilitation for the bonobos and educates the local populace about the apes in an effort to curb hunting bush meat, one of the major threats to bonobos and apes across Africa. The center eventually hopes to reintroduce some of the bonobos back into the wild. …

Bonobos are listed as endangered by IUCN's Red List. Only found in the DRC estimates of their population vary widely, from 5,000 to 50,000 individuals. Bonobos are threatened by habitat loss, deforestation, the pet trade, the bushmeat market, and even for use in witchcraft. …

Flu epidemic killing bonobos in Congo sanctuary

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says a former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises. If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

by Simon Johnson

One thing you learn rather quickly when working at the International Monetary Fund is that no one is ever very happy to see you. Typically, your “clients” come in only after private capital has abandoned them, after regional trading-bloc partners have been unable to throw a strong enough lifeline, after last-ditch attempts to borrow from powerful friends like China or the European Union have fallen through. You’re never at the top of anyone’s dance card.

The reason, of course, is that the IMF specializes in telling its clients what they don’t want to hear. I should know; I pressed painful changes on many foreign officials during my time there as chief economist in 2007 and 2008. And I felt the effects of IMF pressure, at least indirectly, when I worked with governments in Eastern Europe as they struggled after 1989, and with the private sector in Asia and Latin America during the crises of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Over that time, from every vantage point, I saw firsthand the steady flow of officials—from Ukraine, Russia, Thailand, Indonesia, South Korea, and elsewhere—trudging to the fund when circumstances were dire and all else had failed. …

The Quiet Coup

March 25, 2009 -- Fish caught near wastewater treatment plants serving five major U.S. cities had residues of pharmaceuticals in them, including medicines used to treat high cholesterol, allergies, high blood pressure, bipolar disorder and depression, researchers reported Wednesday.

Findings from this first nationwide study of human drugs in fish tissue have prompted the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly expand similar ongoing research to more than 150 different locations.

"The average person hopefully will see this type of a study and see the importance of us thinking about water that we use every day, where does it come from, where does it go to? We need to understand this is a limited resource and we need to learn a lot more about our impacts on it," said study co-author Bryan Brooks, a Baylor University researcher and professor who has published more than a dozen studies related to pharmaceuticals in the environment. …

Brooks and his colleague Kevin Chambliss tested fish caught in rivers where wastewater treatment plants release treated sewage in Chicago, Dallas, Phoenix, Philadelphia and Orlando, Fla. For comparison, they also tested fish from New Mexico's pristine Gila River Wilderness Area, an area isolated from human sources of pollution. …

In an ongoing investigation, The Associated Press has reported trace concentrations of pharmaceuticals have been detected in drinking water provided to at least 46 million Americans. …

During 2008 and early 2009, Endangered Species International (ESI) conducted monitoring activities using undercover methods at key markets in the city of Pointe Noire, the second biggest city in Congo. Findings reveal that 95 percent of the illegal bushmeat sold originates from the Kouilou region about 100-150 km northwest to Pointe Noire where primary and unprotected rainforest still remains. The Kouilou region is one the last reservoirs of biodiversity and endangered animals in the area. …

If the present trend in forest exploitation continues in Kouilou, most edible endangered wildlife — including great apes — will vanish within a few years in this region. …

More than 300 gorillas butchered each year in the Republic of Congo

From Calculated Risk:

The graph shows monthly vehicle sales (autos and trucks) as reported by the BEA at a Seasonally Adjusted Annual Rate (SAAR).

This shows that sales have plunged to a 9.29 million annual rate in February; the lowest since Dec 1981.

March 2009 sales will be down sharply from March 2008 too, but analysts will be looking for some stabilization on a seasonally adjusted basis. …

Vehicle Sales: Cliff Diving in February

by Joe Romm

In this post, I will examine the key impacts we face by 2100 if we stay anywhere near our current emissions path. I will focus primarily on:

• Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 15°F over much of the United States
• Sea level rise of 5 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
• Widespread desertification — as much as one-third of the land
• Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
• Unexpected impacts — the fearsome “unknown unknowns”
• More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf

Equally tragic, as a 2009 NOAA-led study found, these impacts be “largely irreversible for 1000 years.”

The single biggest failure of messaging by climate scientists (until very recently) has been the failure to explain to the public, opinion makers, and the media that business-as-usual warming results in impacts that are beyond catastrophic. For these impacts, terms like “global warming” and “climate change” are essentially euphemisms. That is why I prefer the term “Hell and High Water.” …

So I pieced together those impacts from available studies and from discussions with leading climate scientists for my book, Hell and High Water. But now as climate scientists have sobered up to their painful role as modern-day Cassandras, the scientific literature on what we face is much richer. Let me review it here. …

An introduction to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water

COLLEGE STATION, March 24, 2009 – Researchers led by a Texas A&M University professor have discovered coral beds off the coast of Hawaii that are more than 4,200 years old, making them among the oldest living creatures on Earth.

The team, directed by Brendan Roark of Texas A&M's College of Geosciences, and colleagues from the University of California-Santa Cruz and Australian National University in Canberra, have had their work published in the current Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The project was funded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the National Science Foundation. …

The coral beds were discovered in about 1,200 feet of water using submersible vehicles. One of the beds covers several hundred square feet, Roark notes.

"The beds are quite large, but sadly, not in very good shape," Roark explains.

"The color of the coral makes them highly sought-after for making jewelry, and the Gerardia coral especially is a beautiful gold color. There are laws protecting the beds, but much of the harvesting still continues.

"Also, the beds are threatened by local fishermen in the area. You could compare the situation to that of the Amazon rain forest areas, where huge tracts of land are disappearing because of man-made activities. The same is true of these coral beds." …

4,000-year-old coral beds among world's oldest living things, prof says

Large size and a fast bite spelled doom for bony fishes during the last mass extinction 65 million years ago, according to a new study to be published March 31, 2009, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Today, those same features characterize large predatory bony fishes, such as tuna and billfishes, that are currently in decline and at risk of extinction themselves, said Matt Friedman, author of the study and a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Chicago.

"The same thing is happening today to ecologically similar fishes," he said. "The hardest hit species are consistently big predators." … 

Study unravels why certain fishes went extinct 65 million years ago

God will not intervene to prevent humanity from wreaking disastrous damage to the environment, the Archbishop of Canterbury has warned.

In a lecture, Dr Rowan Williams urged a "radical change of heart" to prevent runaway climate change.

At York Minster he said humanity should turn away from the selfishness and greed that leads it to ignore its interdependence with the natural world.

And God would not guarantee a "happy ending", he warned.

Dr Williams has often spoken out about environmental issues.

Speaking on Wednesday he said just as God gave humans free will to do "immeasurable damage" to themselves as individuals it seemed "clear" they had the same "terrible freedom" as a human race.

"I think that to suggest that God might intervene to protect us from the corporate folly of our practices is as unchristian and unbiblical as to suggest that he protects us from the results of our individual folly or sin," he said. …

Without a change of heart, Dr Williams warned, the world faced a number of "doomsday scenarios" including the "ultimate tragedy" of humanity gradually "choked, drowned, or starved by its own stupidity."  …

God 'will not give happy ending'

by Fred Pearce, environment correspondent for New Scientist

"I AM shocked, truly shocked," says Katey Walter, an ecologist at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks. "I was in Siberia a few weeks ago, and I am now just back in from the field in Alaska. The permafrost is melting fast all over the Arctic, lakes are forming everywhere and methane is bubbling up out of them."

Back in 2006, in a paper in Nature, Walter warned that as the permafrost in Siberia melted, growing methane emissions could accelerate climate change. But even she was not expecting such a rapid change. "Lakes in Siberia are five times bigger than when I measured them in 2006. It's unprecedented. This is a global event now, and the inertia for more permafrost melt is increasing." …

The danger is that if too much methane is released, the world will get hotter no matter how drastically we slash our greenhouse gas emissions. Recent studies suggest that emissions from melting permafrost could be far greater than once thought. And, although it is too early to be sure, some suspect this scenario is already starting to unfold: after remaining static for the past decade, methane levels have begun to rise again, and the source could be Arctic permafrost.

What is certain is that the Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth. While the average global temperature has risen by less than 1°C over the past three decades, there has been warming over much of the Arctic Ocean of around 3°C. In some areas where the ice has been lost, temperatures have risen by 5°C.

This intense warming is not confined to the Arctic Ocean. It extends south, deep into the land masses of Siberia, Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Scandinavia, and to their snowfields, ice sheets and permafrost. In 2007, the North American Arctic was more than 2°C warmer than the average for 1951 to 1980, and parts of Siberia over 3°C warmer. In 2008, most of Siberia was 2°C warmer than average (see map). …

Arctic meltdown is a threat to humanity

Warm summers are dramatically reducing populations of daddy long legs, which in turn is having a severe impact on the bird populations which rely on them for food.

New research by a team of bird experts, including Newcastle University’s Dr Mark Whittingham, spells out for the first time how climate change may affect upland bird species like the golden plover – perhaps pushing it towards local extinction by the end of the century. …

Previous research has shown how changes in the timing of the golden plover breeding season as a result of increasing spring temperatures might affect their ability to match the spring emergence of their cranefly (daddy long legs) prey.

The new research, published today in the scientific journal Global Change Biology, shows the true effects are much more severe.

Higher temperatures in late summer are killing the cranefly larvae, resulting in a drop of up to 95 per cent in the number of adult craneflies emerging the following spring. With these craneflies providing a crucial food source for a wide range of upland birds like the golden plover, this means starvation and death for many chicks.

“The population of Golden Plovers in our study will likely be extinct in around 100 years if temperature predictions are correct and the birds cannot adapt to feed on other prey sources,” explains Newcastle University’s Dr Mark Whittingham, who worked on the study with scientists from RSPB Scotland and Aberystwyth and Manchester universities. …

Drop in daddy long legs is devastating bird populations

Slideshow: Inside California’s Tent Cities

By JESSE McKINLEY

FRESNO, Calif. — As the operations manager of an outreach center for the homeless here, Paul Stack is used to seeing people down on their luck. What he had never seen before was people living in tents and lean-tos on the railroad lot across from the center.

“They just popped up about 18 months ago,” Mr. Stack said. “One day it was empty. The next day, there were people living there.”

Like a dozen or so other cities across the nation, Fresno is dealing with an unhappy déjà vu: the arrival of modern-day Hoovervilles, illegal encampments of homeless people that are reminiscent, on a far smaller scale, of Depression-era shantytowns. At his news conference on Tuesday night, President Obama was asked directly about the tent cities and responded by saying that it was “not acceptable for children and families to be without a roof over their heads in a country as wealthy as ours.” …

In Seattle, homeless residents in the city’s 100-person encampment call it Nickelsville, an unflattering reference to the mayor, Greg Nickels. A tent city in Sacramento prompted Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to announce a plan Wednesday to shift the entire 125-person encampment to a nearby fairground. That came after a recent visit by “The Oprah Winfrey Show” set off such a news media stampede that some fed-up homeless people complained of overexposure and said they just wanted to be left alone. …

The surging number of homeless people in Fresno, a city of 500,000 people, has been a surprise. City officials say they have three major encampments near downtown and smaller settlements along two highways. All told, as many 2,000 people are homeless here, according to Gregory Barfield, the city’s homeless prevention and policy manager, who said that drug use, prostitution and violence were all too common in the encampments.

“That’s all part of that underground economy,” Mr. Barfield said. “It’s what happens when a person is trying to survive.”

He said the city planned to begin “triage” on the encampments in the next several weeks, to determine how many people needed services and permanent housing. “We’re treating it like any other disaster area,” Mr. Barfield said. …

Cities Deal With a Surge in Shantytowns

From Calculated Risk:

The graph shows New Home Sales vs. recessions for the last 45 years. New home sales have fallen off a cliff.

Sales of new one-family houses in February 2009 were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 337,000, according to estimates released jointly today by the U.S. Census Bureau and the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

This is 4.7 percent (±18.3%) above the revised January rate of 322,000, but is 41.1 percent (±7.9%) below the February 2008 estimate of 572,000. …

New Home Sales: Just above Record Low

Flint Michigan typifies the plight of inner city urban decay. Inquiring minds are wondering what if anything can be done. MLive explores that issue in an article discussing what to do with abandoned neighborhoods in Flint.

Look in any direction from Bianca Bates' north Flint home, and you'll see graffiti-covered siding, boarded-up windows and overgrown lots.

About half of the homes on her block are burned out or vacant magnets for drug dealers and squatters. It isn't where she thought she'd end up, but it's all she can afford to rent.

Property abandonment is getting so bad in Flint that some in government are talking about an extreme measure that was once unthinkable -- shutting down portions of the city, officially abandoning them and cutting off police and fire service. …

Last year, the city of Youngstown, Ohio, proposed incentives to encourage people to move out of nearly empty blocks and relocate to more populated areas closer to the heart of the city. Some people were offered upward of $50,000, according to news reports.

The idea was to shut down entire streets and bulldoze abandoned properties so the city could discontinue services such as police patrols and street lighting, according to a CNN report. …

Our throw-away society has effectively reached a new level of efficiency: the throw-away city.

America's Abandoned Cities

This is highly refined doomer source material.

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

By MATT TAIBBI

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."  …

The Big Takeover

 

Poachers in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) threaten the existence of the largest remaining continuous population of chimpanzees in the world. This conclusion is based on observations made during a 2007-2008 survey of towns, villages and forests in the Buta-Aketi region of the country.

Hicks, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), describes the plight of the apes and other forest creatures in a new e-book to be released this week. Together with colleagues, Hicks was able to take in five orphaned chimpanzees who will soon be sent to a sanctuary in eastern Congo.

During his previous one and a half year study near the town of Bili, the DRC between 2004-2007, Cleve Hicks, who works for the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics (IBED) of the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, did not observe a single chimpanzee orphan or carcass in the area, despite the fact that chimpanzees were numerous in the forests there. When Bili was overrun with gold miners in June 2007, Hicks conducted a 13 month survey of large mammals about 200 km of Bili, in the Buta Aketi region. …

During this most recent study period, Hicks and his staff witnessed 34 chimpanzee orphans and 31 carcasses for sale in the Buta-Aketi-Bambesa area.  In addition, the team documented 10 okapi skins, 9 leopard skins, the parts of 13 elephants and hundreds of monkey orphans and carcasses.  Locals have told Hicks that up to a few years ago there was very little poaching (except for elephants) in the area, and that it is the mining of diamonds and gold that has lead to the current slaughter of wildlife. Sadly, there is evidence that the bushmeat trade is spreading rapidly into the Bili and Rubi-Tele protected areas, both of which have been recently invaded by illegal miners. Since Hicks left in November 2008, his colleagues Laura Darby and Adam Singh have observed another seven chimpanzee orphans and 3 carcasses. … if something is not done now, we will soon lose one of the largest remaining tracts of untouched wilderness on the planet, and with it will go the apes, elephants, okapis and traditional human societies that depend upon its existence.

Raising The Alarm About Chimpanzee Massacre In The Democratic Republic Of Congo

Twenty years ago today—at 12:04 AM on March 24th, 1989—the Exxon Valdez tanker struck Bligh reef in Prince William Sound causing 10.8 million gallons of crude oil to spill into the sea. The spill decimated the ecosystem and wildlife for 11,000 square miles and became one of the world's most infamous oil spills. Twenty years later, researchers say that several bird species have yet to recover from the spill.

“Analysis of the oil spills’ impacts found that a significant portion of several species’ populations were killed, including 5-10 percent of the world’s Kittlitz’s Murrelet population and 6-12 percent of the area’s population of the Marbled Murrelet,” said Dr. Michael Fry, director of Conservation Advocacy at American Bird Conservancy (ABC). “We are concerned about a number of the bird species harmed in the catastrophe such as the Kittlitz’s Murrelet whose population has yet to rebound.”

According to ABC, Kittlitz's Murrelet's population plummeted 99 percent from 1972 to 2004. Since the Exxon Valdez spill in 1989 the rate of decline went from 18 percent to 31 percent. Researchers also believe that climate change is negatively affecting the species.

Two other bird species, the Pigeon Guillemot and the Marbled Murrelet, have not seen significant recovery in the Prince William Sound. In fact, the Exxon Valdez Trustee Council has found that leaked oil can still be found in the Sound. Given its slow rate of dissolving, the oil may persist for decades, even centuries.

“Twenty years after the Exxon Valdez spill, oil still poses a grave threat to marine bird,”said Dr. Fry. …

Twenty years on, some birds still haven't recovered from Exxon Valdez oil spill

From Calculated Risk:

Here are the Kennedy-Greenspan estimates (NSA - not seasonally adjusted) of home equity extraction for Q4 2008, provided by Jim Kennedy based on the mortgage system presented in "Estimates of Home Mortgage Originations, Repayments, and Debt On One-to-Four-Family Residences," Alan Greenspan and James Kennedy, Federal Reserve Board FEDS working paper no. 2005-41.

For Q4 2008, Dr. Kennedy has calculated Net Equity Extraction as minus $77 billion, or negative 2.9% of Disposable Personal Income (DPI).
This graph shows the net equity extraction, or mortgage equity withdrawal (MEW), results, both in billions of dollars quarterly (not annual rate), and as a percent of personal disposable income. …

Q4 Mortgage Equity Extraction Strongly Negative

By Peter Greste, BBC News, Nairobi

Kenya has mobilised 3,500 security personnel to fight a series of bush fires raging out of control in some of the country's most important forests.

The government estimates that more than 4,600 hectares (11,370 acres) of bushland have already been destroyed.

At least 10 people have been arrested on arson charges. Mau - East Africa's largest forest - and Mount Longonot are among the places worst affected.

Some of the world's most endangered species are threatened.

With fires burning in at least eight forests, Kenyan emergency services are already overstretched.

Police, the national youth service, forestry service workers - all have been drafted in to help save the bushland in some of the country's most important watersheds.

On Mount Longonot, an extinct volcano to the west of the country, the fires have begun advancing into the crater, trapping and killing thousands of small animals unable to escape.

Some larger antelope have managed to get away but they now face starvation in grasslands already overgrazed in a prolonged drought.

Several rare sitatunga antelope have already been killed in another park.

Although it will take time to assess the impact on wildlife, a spokesman for the Kenyan Wildlife Service said there were real fears for rare and endangered species. …

Kenyan forces deployed for fires

By Rina Chandran

ALANG, India (Reuters) - A global economic slowdown has hit industries ranging from automakers to investment banks, but in one small town on India's western coast, business is at record levels and workers can hardly keep up with demand.

In Alang, home to the world's largest ship breaking facility on the coast of Gujarat state, the financial year to April will be one of its best ever, as a slowdown in global trade and lower freight rates mean ships are being scrapped faster.

But there is a flip side. Activists fret that the booming business will encourage a disregard for safety and environment guidelines, which they say ship breakers are already flouting.

Stretched along the 11-km (7 mile) coastline, beached oil tankers and cargo carriers lie in various stages of disembowelment. Peculiar tide patterns that brings high tide in only twice a month enable the beaching of ships right up to the yards. …

At the same time, the workers who earn only a few dollars a day, face health hazards as they cut up the hulls of ships, navigating through razor sharp pieces of steel, and being exposed to carcinogens and even radioactive materials from the former cargoes of these ships.

"These are the most vulnerable of workers, working in extremely dangerous conditions with little protection or recourse to proper care," said Gopal Krishna of Toxics Watch in New Delhi. …

Slowdown brings bounty to Indian ship breaking town

Armed gangs are logging rosewood and other valuable hardwoods from Marojejy and Masoala parks in Madagascar following abandonment of posts by rangers in the midst of the island nation's political crisis, reports marojejy.com and local sources.

"It is with great sadness that we report the temporary closure of Marojejy National Park to tourism," stated the marojejy.com web site. "The closure was deemed necessary by park management due to the lawlessness that has descended over the SAVA region during this time of political unrest in Madagascar, and the resultant looting and destruction which is currently occurring within the park. In particular, gangs of armed men (led primarily by foreign profiteers in conjunction with the rich local mafia) are plundering the rainforests of Marojejy for the extremely valuable rosewood that grows there."

Illegal logging of rosewood, ebonies, and other hardwoods has emerged as one of the primary drivers of forest degradation in northeastern Madagascar in recent years but, as noted by marojejy.com, the situation has been exacerbated by the political crisis that has led rangers and park officials in some areas to abandon their posts. Timber poachers and other interests are now moving aggressively into protected areas to take advantage of the opportunity according to a local source who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

"Turmoil is going to last for months — no more rules, no more laws, no more police or control, just weapons and people starved for money or by greed," said the source. "2000 to 3000 people went to Masoala to harvest rosewood."

The source notes that poachers are coming in from the town of Antalaha on the side of Masoala, an expanse of rainforest renowned for its biological diversity, opposite from the big park headquarters. "The big businessmen are all in Antalaha. This is where the timber goes for export."

"Foreign traders have arrived in local towns seeking to take advantage of the political crisis that has weakened park protection and enforcement," the source continued. "This is the worst, by far, that has happened to the park in recent years. The situation is worse than desperate." …  

Scramble to log Madagascar's valuable rainforest trees in midst of crisis

 

NAIVASHA, Kenya, March 23 (Reuters) - Game wardens fear wildlife is trapped in the crater of an extinct Kenyan volcano that was engulfed by a bush fire for a third day on Monday.

The blaze at on Mount Longonot -- one of the best-known trekking spots in Kenya's Great Rift Valley -- has sent thousands of animals scampering to safety in nearby villages.

"The fire is still burning inside the crater and we fear that some animals like baboons and rabbits have been burnt as they have no escape route,"park warden Peter Muthusi said.

Several blazes have been fed by weeks of hot, dry conditions in the east African country. Zebras, buffaloes, antelopes, gazelles and giraffes all fled the national park that surrounds Longonot, crossing a busy road to reach safety. …

Kenya is suffering a drought that has parched the landscape, left farmers facing ruin and contributed to hunger that the government says is afflicting some 10 million people.

Muthusi said strong winds and the very dry vegetation were making it harder to fight the fire.

"It's very smoky inside the crater," he said. "We are determined to put out the fire inside the crater using all possible means so as to save the animals inside." (Reporting by Antony Gitonga; Writing by Helen Nyambura-Mwaura)

Wildlife trapped by Kenyan bush fire

Hundreds of thousands of flamingos and other wildlife are at risk after five forest fires erupted in Kenya, officials say.

Police say they suspect some of the still-raging blazes were started by communities to make space for farmland.

The fires have had an adverse effect on the Masai Mara and in Tanzania on the Serengeti national park, officials say.

Other wildlife reserves are under threat, including Lake Nakuru, which is home to almost a million flamingos.

According to the Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS), all the rivers that drain from south-western Kenya's Mau forest into the lake have dried drastically.

Nearly 60 species of wildlife, including white rhino, depend on the lake. …

KWS communications manager Paul Udoto told the BBC: "We now have to pump water from underground bore holes to shallow pans to water the animals in the park otherwise they will all die. This is costing us a lot of money." …

Kenya is suffering a drought this year that has contributed to hunger the government says is affecting 10 million people.

Wildlife flee Kenyan forest fires

By Kara Finnstrom and Chuck Conder

LANCASTER, California (CNN) -- The sound of pounding hooves thunders in the high desert air. A cloud of dust marks the trail of a herd of wild horses as they race across the arid plain. This is Lifesavers Wild Horse Rescue, a shelter for wild mustangs and unwanted horses near Lancaster, California.

Lifesavers President Jill Starr says she and other shelter operators are witnessing an equine crisis.

"People have lost their homes, their jobs, their hope," she said. "And they are giving up their animals."

"We've had horses come onto the property in a horse trailer, unannounced, and just offloaded and [owners] ask us, beg us, if we could take these skinny horses," she said.

Starr says she has taken in so many unwanted horses in the past year that her resources are stretched to the breaking point.

"All of a sudden it's like somebody flipped a switch and people started bringing back the horses they adopted from us," she said. …

The Los Angeles County animal shelter is killing abandoned horses at a rate of three or four a week. …

Economy causing horse crisis: People 'giving up their animals'

I always enjoy blockquoting Dmitry Orlov, but this post is a real gem.

In the unfolding global financial collapse, it is not just our accounts and balance sheets that come up short, but our language as well. What do you call a bunch of liar loans packaged into toxic assets and placed on the balance sheets of the Federal Reserve as collateral for rescue loans? J.K. Galbraith has proposed the term “Bezzle,” taking it to mean the eternal ebb and flow of questionable transactions within an economic cycle. Rational actors cut corners during easy times when they know no-one is looking, and then play nice again when the times change and someone starts paying attention again.

But I believe that the phenomenon we are observing is something different: we need a word that describes the artifacts generated in response to irrational actors who demand to be fooled. As the old saying goes, “A fool and his money are soon parted” – at the fool's own insistence, no less! If the deer comes out of the forest and walks up to the hunter, it is not proper hunting, and this is not proper con artistry or grift or embezzlement or any other term we use to describe proper works of evil. If the victim, at the site of the economic predator, goes into doggie submission, we must stop discussing the phenomenon in terms of conflict and consider whether what we are observing might be some strange instance of symbiosis. …

Yes, the Russians actually have a word for precisely the thing that has bewitched us, first accounting for an ever-increasing share of our gross domestic product, and is now responsible for our ever-larger financial black hole. That word is “фуфло” /fufló/ when applied to a quantity of something, and фуфел /fúfel/ when applied to a singular item. This word has the obscure English cognate “fuffle,” which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to the early XVI century but fails to define adequately. I suspect that this word has been in circulation in many languages ever since some Protoindoeuropean simpleton showed up at some archaic fair and, being none too wise, bartered his meager trade goods in exchange for what thereafter became known as a fuffle. At that point, his story may have gone two different ways. Either he could have discovered that he'd been handed a fuffle, chased after the unlucky fuffller, and summarily ran him through with a pointed stick (positive outcome) or he could have stumbled back to his village proudly displaying his prize, and perhaps even got his entire tribe to acquire a taste for fuffles (negative outcome). In the latter case, the fuffle-addled tribe could never grasp the meaning of the word “fuffle,” because doing so would have resulted in some painful cognitive dissonance. (Perhaps this psychological mechanism accounts for the fact the Anglo-Saxon tribe still has the vestigial word but no longer remembers its meaning.) …

Welcome to Fuffland!

by GEORGE MONBIOT

Quietly in public, loudly in private, climate scientists everywhere are saying the same thing: it's over.

The years in which more than 2 degrees of global warming could have been prevented have passed, the opportunities squandered by denial and delay.

On current trajectories we'll be lucky to get away with 4 degrees.

Mitigation (limiting greenhouse gas pollution) has failed, now we must adapt to what nature sends our way. If we can.

This was the repeated whisper at the climate change conference in Copenhagen earlier this month.

It is more or less what Bob Watson, the environment department's chief scientific adviser, has been telling the British government.

It is the obvious, if unspoken, conclusion of scores of scientific papers.

Recent work by scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, for instance, suggests that even global cuts of 3 per cent a year, starting in 2020, could leave us with 4 degrees of warming by the end of the century.

At the moment, emissions are heading in the opposite direction at roughly the same rate.

If this continues, what does it mean? Six? Eight? Ten degrees? Who knows? …

Opportunity for 2 degrees lost

From The Big Picture:

The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession".  

 

Scenes from the recession

 

By Julie Steenhuysen

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A nerve toxin produced by marine algae off California appears to affect creatures in the deep ocean, posing a greater threat that previously thought, U.S. researchers said on Sunday.

Surface blooms of the algae known as Pseudo-nitzschia can generate dangerously high levels of domoic acid, a neurotoxin blamed for bizarre bird attacks dramatized in Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds.

"It's a natural neurotoxin. It is produced by a diatom, which is a phytoplankton. As other animals eat this phytoplankton, like sardines or anchovies, this toxin can be transferred up the food chain," said Emily Sekula-Wood, a doctoral student at the University of South Carolina whose study appears in the journal Nature Geoscience.

Domoic acid has been linked to deaths of sea lions, whales and other marine animals and people who eat large quantities of shellfish.

"If you consume enough of it, you can get brain damage. In humans it's called amnesic shellfish poisoning. You experience short-term memory loss," Sekula-Wood said.

Large toxic blooms of Pseudo-nitzschia have closed beaches and disrupted the shellfish industry in the western United States. They have been implicated in toxic blooms throughout the coastal waters of Europe and Asia and North America. …

They found that large quantities of domoic acid were sinking to the ocean floor, invading the deep-sea food chain.

And the toxin appears to linger. …

Deadly nerve toxin affecting deep ocean creatures

Mar. 13--TAMPA -- With local lakes and rivers at critically low levels, the region's water provider has virtually shut down the surface water supply to the Tampa Bay region.

"The reservoir's level is so low we are unable to provide water, consistently, to the water treatment plant and we are unable to pull water from the Alafia River or the Tampa Bypass Canal," said Tampa Bay Water spokeswoman Michelle Robinson.

The agency is asking everyone to cut back in every way possible, from repairing leaky toilets and faucets to shortening showers and only watering lawns when it is absolutely necessary. …

"The water in the reservoir is depleted," Robinson said, referring to the C.W. Bill Young Regional Reservoir, south of Plant City. "Without surface water, we have to rely on groundwater and the relatively small amount of desalinated water" coming from the local desalination plant, she said. "It's going to be a couple of months before we get any real rain." …

FL: Area surface water supply nearly gone, supplier says

Go down to the beach today and you'll find plenty of garbage among the sand — but that's nothing compared with the continent-sized whirlpools of lethal waste out there beyond the horizon 

By WINIFRED BIRD, Special to The Japan Times

Umbrella handles. Pens. Popsicle sticks. Lots and lots of toothbrushes. These are just a few of the items that make up the approximately 13 million sq. km Eastern Garbage Patch, an immense plastic soup in the Pacific Ocean that starts about 800 km off the coast of California and extends westward. Sucked from the coasts of Asia and America by ocean currents, or discarded at sea, plastic debris accumulates there in an ever-growing mass that does not biodegrade and is said to be already larger than the United States.

Scientists have long known that plastic in the garbage patch and elsewhere is stuffing the stomachs of seabirds and causing them to starve, suffocating fish and choking marine turtles.

But what is now becoming clear is that when pieces of plastic meet other pollutants in the ocean, the results can be even more toxic. That's because, as a growing number of studies are showing, the plastic debris absorbs harmful chemicals from the seawater it floats in, acting like a "pollution sponge" that concentrates those chemicals and poses a different, more insidious threat to marine and other life. …

Oceans awash in toxic seas of plastic

(Cell Press) By combining data from 48 studies of coral reefs from around the Caribbean, researchers have found that fish densities that have been stable for decades have given way to significant declines since 1995. The study appears online on March 19 in Current Biology, a Cell Press publication.

"We were most surprised to discover that this decrease is evident for both large-bodied species targeted by fisheries as well as small-bodied species that are not fished," said Michelle Paddack of Simon Fraser University in Canada. "This suggests that overfishing is probably not the only cause."

Rather, they suggest that the recent declines may be explained by drastic losses in coral cover and other changes in coral reef habitats that have occurred in the Caribbean over the past 30 years. Those changes are the result of many factors, including warming ocean temperatures, coral diseases, and a rise in sedimentation and pollution from coastal development. Overfishing has also led to declines of many fish species, and now seems to also be removing those that are important for keeping the reefs free of algae.

"All of these factors are stressing the reefs and making them less able to recover from disturbances such as hurricanes, which also seem to be occurring more frequently," Paddack said. …

"If we want to have coral reefs in our future, we must ensure that we reduce damage to these ecosystems," she said. "On a personal level, this may mean not buying wild-caught aquarium fish and corals, not eating reef fish species that are declining, taking care not to anchor on reefs, and reducing our carbon emissions to help control climate change. But importantly, we need to let lawmakers and resource managers know that we care about these ecosystems and we need to push for changes in how they are managed."

Major losses for Caribbean reef fish in last 15 years

 

(Wiley-Blackwell) A new study published in the journal Soil Use and Management attempts for the first time to measure the extent and severity of land degradation across the globe and concludes that 24 percent of the land area is degrading -- often in very productive areas.

Land degradation - the decline in the quality of soil, water and vegetation – is of profound importance but until now there have been no consistent global data by which to assess its extent and severity. For nearly thirty years the world has depended on the Global Assessment of Soil Degradation (GLASOD) based on the subjective judgement of soil scientists who knew the conditions in their countries.

GLASOD indicated that 15 per cent of the land area was degraded, but this was a map of perceptions, rather than measurement of land degradation.

The new study by Bai et al. measures global land degradation based on a clearly defined and consistent method using remotely sensed imagery. The results are startling. The new assessment indicates that 24 per cent of the land has been degraded over the period 1981-2003 - but there is hardly any overlap with the GLASOD area that recorded the cumulative effects of land degradation up to about 1990.

One of the authors, Dr David Dent of ISRIC - World Soil Information explains: "Degradation is primarily driven by land management and catastrophic natural phenomena.” …

A quarter of the world's population depends on degrading land

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The International Monetary Fund said on Thursday that the world economy, reeling from financial crisis, was on track to shrink for the first time in 60 years in 2009, by as much as 1.0 percent.

In a report prepared for the Group of 20 meeting of finance chiefs last week in Britain and published Thursday, the IMF slashed forecasts from two months ago to a global contraction of between 0.5 percent and 1.0 percent.

The latest IMF projections were sharply lower than those in the World Economic Outlook update published on January 28 that had put global growth at an annual rate of 0.5 percent.

"Global economic activity is falling -- with advanced economies registering their sharpest declines in the post-war era -- notwithstanding forceful policy efforts," the IMF staff report said.

The revisions "reflect unrelenting financial turmoil, negative incoming data, sinking confidence, and the limited effect to date of policy responses with respect to the restoration of financial system health." …

Advanced economies were expected to suffer "deep recessions" in 2009, shrinking between 3.0 and 3.5 percent, according to the IMF report. …

World economy to shrink 'for first time in 60 yrs'

by Abby Haight, The Oregonian

Researchers were shocked when they counted breeding tufted puffins along the Oregon coast last summer.

The numbers showed the charismatic seabird with the comical mask had become alarmingly scarce. From 6,560 tufted puffins in 1979 to a rough count of 142 found on Oregon's cliffsides and rock islands last year.

The decline mirrored some of the grim news in a report released today by the Interior Department showing that almost a third of the 800 bird species in the United States are endangered or in decline from habitat loss, invasive species and climate change.

The State of the Birds report, a sweeping compilation of 40 years of survey data, found a 40 percent decline in grassland birds, a 30 percent loss of birds in arid lands, and a 30 percent decline in species dependent on U.S. oceans. …

U.S. birds threatened by habitat loss, invasives, report says

As the cold, dry climate of the western Antarctic Peninsula becomes warmer and more humid, phytoplankton - the bottom of the Antarctic food chain - is decreasing off the northern part the peninsula and increasing further south, Rutgers marine scientists have discovered.

In research to be published tomorrow in the journal Science, Martin Montes-Hugo and Oscar Schofield report that levels of phytoplankton off the western Antarctic Peninsula have decreased 12 percent over the past 30 years.

Their paper, “Recent Changes in Phytoplankton Communities Associated with Rapid Regional Climate Change Along the Western Antarctic Peninsula,” draws on 30 years of satellite data and field studies. …

"What is new is that we're showing for the first time that there is an ongoing change on phytoplankton concentration and composition along the western shelf of the Antarctic Peninsula that is associated with a long-term climate modification," Montes-Hugo said.

"These phytoplankton changes may explain in part the observed decline of some penguin populations"

Researchers have noticed that populations of adelie penguins, whose lifestyle requires an Antarctic climate, have dropped sharply in recent years in the northern part of the peninsula, while populations of sub-Antarctic penguins, such as chin-strap penguins, have increased.

"Now we know that climate changes are impacting at the base of the food web and forcing their effects on up through the food chain," said Hugh Ducklow, co-author of the paper and co-director of the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. …

Phytoplankton Is Changing Along The Antarctic Peninsula