Desdemona Despair

Contact: Tierra Curry (928) 522-3681, Center for Biological Diversity
22 March 2011

KNOXVILLE, Tenn.— The Obama administration denied Endangered Species Act protection Monday to the Berry Cave salamander, a rare Tennessee amphibian that government scientists say needs federal protection to keep it from going extinct. The Berry Cave salamander is known from only nine locations in eastern Tennessee in Knox, Meigs, McMinn and Roane counties. In surveys conducted from 2004-2007, only 63 salamanders were found.

Using a tactic that has become commonplace on President Barack Obama’s watch, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said the salamander warrants federal protection but won’t get it. Instead, the species was added to a growing list of “candidates” for protection, where it will wait for same indefinitely. To date, Obama’s Interior Department has used the “warranted-but-precluded” designation for 23 species — more than any other administration. Now 259 species are on the candidate list, where, on average, they wait 20 years before they get protection. At least 24 species have gone extinct while waiting.

“This decision could doom the Berry Cave salamander to extinction, because this rare Tennessee species desperately needs Endangered Species Act protection to survive,” said Tierra Curry, a conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity, which is working to save hundreds of species relegated to the candidate list. 

Monday’s finding that the salamander requires protection, but will not receive it, responds to a 2010 lawsuit by the Center over the Fish and Wildlife Service’s failure to respond to a 2003 petition from a scientist at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville to protect the species. The Service took seven years to issue a 90-day finding on the 2003 petition, and only issued the current 12-month finding after the Center’s lawsuit.

Berry Cave salamanders live in small populations in underground caves with flowing water, where they feed on small insects. The salamanders grow up to nine inches long and retain juvenile body form as adults. They’re threatened by declining water quality caused by urban sprawl from Knoxville, as well as by pollution from logging, pesticides and quarrying. Salamanders are particularly vulnerable to pollution because toxins are easily absorbed through their thin, permeable skin.

To date, the Obama government has only given Endangered Species Act protection to 58 species, for a rate of 29 species per year. In contrast, President Clinton protected 522 species under the Endangered Species Act for a rate of 65 species per year, while the first Bush administration protected 232 species for a rate of 58 per year.

“The Obama government is dragging its feet on protecting our country’s most threatened species,” said Curry. “The Endangered Species Act can save our plants and animals, but only if they’re given actual protection under the Act.”

The Center and other groups have an active lawsuit in Washington, D.C., showing that continued delays in protecting candidate species are illegal because the Fish and Wildlife Service is not making expeditious progress listing species as the Act requires.

Learn more about the Center’s campaign to earn protection for all the candidate species at Candidate Project.

Obama Administration Denies Protection to Knoxville Area Salamander

While industrial disturbances have to date been largely concentrated in the south, expansion northward continues. According to a new report by the Pew Environment Group, Canada’s boreal forest contains the world’s largest and most pristine freshwater ecosystem on Earth.

A Forest of Blue: Canada's Boreal Forest, the World's Waterkeeper

By Leigh Coleman and Steve Gorman; editing by Jerry Norton
25 March 2011

BILOXI, Mississippi (Reuters) - The U.S. government is keeping a tight lid on its probe into scores of unexplained dolphin deaths along the Gulf Coast, possibly connected to last year's BP oil spill, causing tension with some independent marine scientists.

Wildlife biologists contracted by the National Marine Fisheries Service to document spikes in dolphin mortality and to collect specimens and tissue samples for the agency were quietly ordered late last month to keep their findings confidential.

The gag order was contained in an agency letter informing outside scientists that its review of the dolphin die-off, classified as an "unusual mortality event (UME)," had been folded into a federal criminal investigation launched last summer into the oil spill.

"Because of the seriousness of the legal case, no data or findings may be released, presented or discussed outside the UME investigative team without prior approval," the letter, obtained by Reuters, stated.

A number of scientists said they have been personally rebuked by federal officials for "speaking out of turn" to the media about efforts to determine the cause of some 200 dolphin deaths this year, and about 90 others last year, in the Gulf.

Moreover, they said collected samples and specimens are being turned over to the government for analysis under a protocol that will leave independent scientists in the dark about the efficacy and outcome of any laboratory tests. …

"It throws accountability right out the window," one biologist involved in tracking dolphin deaths for more than 20 years told Reuters on condition of anonymity. "We are confused and ... we are angry because they claim they want teamwork, but at the same time they are leaving the marine experts out of the loop completely." …

Government tightens lid on dolphin death probe

By Ruth Dasso Marlaire, Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
29 March 2011

A new NASA-funded study has revealed widespread reductions in the greenness of the forests in the vast Amazon basin in South America caused by the record-breaking drought of 2010.

"The greenness levels of Amazonian vegetation -- a measure of its health -- decreased dramatically over an area more than three and one-half times the size of Texas and did not recover to normal levels, even after the drought ended in late October 2010," said Liang Xu, the study's lead author from Boston University.

The drought sensitivity of Amazon rainforests is a subject of intense study. Scientists are concerned because computer models predict that in a changing climate with warmer temperatures and altered rainfall patterns the ensuing moisture stress could cause some of the rainforests to be replaced by grasslands or woody savannas. This would cause the carbon stored in the rotting wood to be released into the atmosphere, which could accelerate global warming. The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned that similar droughts could be more frequent in the Amazon region in the future.

The comprehensive study was prepared by an international team of scientists using more than a decade's worth of satellite data from NASA's Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) and Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM).

Analysis of these data produced detailed maps showing vegetation greenness declines from the 2010 drought. The study has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.

The authors first developed maps of drought-affected areas using thresholds of below-average rainfall as a guide. Next they identified affected vegetation using two different greenness indices as surrogates for green leaf area and physiological functioning. The maps show the 2010 drought reduced the greenness of approximately 965,000 square miles of vegetation in the Amazon -- more than four times the area affected by the last severe drought in 2005.

"The MODIS vegetation greenness data suggest a more widespread, severe and long-lasting impact to Amazonian vegetation than what can be inferred based solely on rainfall data," said Arindam Samanta, a co-lead author from Atmospheric and Environmental Research Inc. in Lexington, Mass.

The severity of the 2010 drought was also seen in records of water levels in rivers across the Amazon basin. Water levels started to fall in August 2010, reaching record low levels in late October. Water levels only began to rise with the arrival of rains later that winter.

"Last year was the driest year on record based on 109 years of Rio Negro water level data at the Manaus harbor. For comparison, the lowest level during the so-called once-in-a-century drought in 2005, was only eighth lowest," said Marcos Costa, coauthor from the Federal University in Vicosa, Brazil.

As anecdotal reports of a severe drought began to appear in the news media during the summer of 2010, the authors started near real-time processing of massive amounts of satellite data. They used a new capability, the NASA Earth Exchange (NEX), built for the NASA Advanced Supercomputer facility at the agency's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif. NEX is a collaborative supercomputing environment that brings together data, models and computing resources.

With NEX, the study's authors quickly obtained a large-scale view of the impact of the drought on the Amazon forests and were able to complete the analysis by January 2011. Similar reports about the impact of the 2005 drought were published about two years after the fact.

"Timely monitoring of our planet's vegetation with satellites is critical, and with NEX it can be done efficiently to deliver near-real time information, as this study demonstrates," said study coauthor Ramakrishna Nemani, a research scientist at Ames. An article about the NEX project appears in this week's issue of Eos, the weekly newspaper of the American Geophysical Union.

For more information about this study and the NEX project, visit:

https://c3.ndc.nasa.gov/nex/projects/1209/

For more information about the MODIS sensor and data products, visit:

http://modis.gsfc.nasa.gov

For information about the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission, visit:

http://trmm.gsfc.nasa.gov

NASA Satellites Detect Extensive Drought Impact on Amazon Forests

By Kenichi Iwasaki and Tsuyoshi Shimoji, Asahi Shimbun
30 March 2011

The prolonged crisis at the quake-stricken nuclear power plant in Fukushima Prefecture is increasingly wearing down front-line workers, as the exhausting and dangerous work shows no signs of letting up.

Companies supplying the workers say safety fears have grown, particularly since three workers were exposed to high levels of radiation last Thursday from leaked water at the No. 3 reactor of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant.

Although some workers continue to return to the plant to avert a catastrophe, others willing to help cool down the reactors acknowledge they are more concerned about their next paycheck. …

Those who need to stay within the compound sleep on the floor of a tightly sealed room. They are given emergency rations twice a day. …

The company has gradually increased the number of workers in an effort to reduce their burden.

Another company with ties to TEPCO has set a radiation limit lower than the government's standard of 250 millisieverts to make frequent replacements. Some of the workers have already reached the company-set limit.

"The work environment is becoming more and more risky, so it seems not many employees are willing to go," said a senior official. "We cannot force them to go. It's been such a headache." …

Stricken nuclear plant faces staffing difficulties

By Kenneth S. Deffeyes
29 March 2011

One of my former students, Joel Achenbach, has a book being released this week about the BP blowout. (A Hole at the Bottom of the Sea.) His e-mail a week ago asked whether there were parallels between the BP Macondo blowout and the damaged nuclear reactors at Fukushima. My first reaction was "No," but it was wrong. BP treated their blowout as a string of unlikely events that came together by accident. The BP analogy was a random stack of Swiss cheese slices and the rare occasion when a hole in all of the slices happened to line up. I had been going along with the Swiss cheese analogy, although I was using only two slices of cheese. The first unlikely event was a fracture at the bottom of the well and the second rare event was the failure of the blowout preventer to close. If the break at the bottom of the hole has a probability of one chance in 1000 of happening and the blowout preventer fails only one time in 1000 tries, then the wild well happens only once in a million times. That's the approach from Statistics 101: multiply the two probabilities together. That's the Swiss cheese interpretation, but it may not apply to the Macondo blowout. The blowout preventer autopsy from Det Norsk Veritas suggests a different interpretation; an interpretation with a haunting parallel to the Fukushima disaster. …

Macondo — Fukushima

By Shahid Shah
Saturday, March 26, 2011

KARACHI: Pakistan’s fish stocks are depleting at a rate of 15 percent a year, a top exporter said.

M Faisal Iftikhar, chairman Pakistan Fisheries Exporters Association (PAKFEA), said that fish stocks were depleting quickly.

A fisherman with more than 40 years in the business said no survey of fish stocks had been conducted in the Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) of Pakistan for 28 years. “I think fish stocks have declined by 75 percent.” …

According to the FAO, out of 600 marine fish stocks monitored by the organisation, three percent are underexploited, 20 percent moderately exploited, 52 per cent fully exploited, 17 per cent overexploited, 7 percent depleted and one percent recovering from depletion.

“The FAO does not have any particular observation of Pakistani waters,” said an official.

Pakistan Fisherfolk Forum (PFF) Chairman Mohammad Ali Shah said their local survey showed a decline of 75 percent in marine resources. One scientific survey showed that by 2048, the world’s fish stocks would come to an end if emergency measures were not taken now. Over-fishing and degradation of marine environment have endangered several species.

After the decline in fresh water discharge into Indus delta, ghanghro, mori and palla (local names of fish species) either migrated from sweet water mangroves or died, said Majeed Motani, a fisherman. At the junction of sweet and saline water, several species of shark including liaro, mandrio, wasiyoon and kaher “are not seen now. They were in big numbers before the ‘80s,” he said.

Open sea species dhothar, hero and sona and deep-sea species phandan-seyan and shoqi-khago are also on the decline. …

Pakistan’s fish stocks depleting fast

March 29, 2011 (ScienceBlog) – The Deepwater Horizon oil spill of 2010 devastated the Gulf of Mexico ecologically and economically. However, a new study published in Conservation Letters reveals that the true impact of the disaster on wildlife may be gravely underestimated. The study argues that fatality figures based on the number of recovered animal carcasses will not give a true death toll, which may be 50 times higher than believed.

“The Deepwater oil spill was the largest in US history, however, the recorded impact on wildlife was relatively low, leading to suggestions that the environmental damage of the disaster was actually modest,” said lead author Dr Rob Williams from the University of British Columbia.”This is because reports have implied that the number of carcasses recovered, 101, equals the number of animals killed by the spill.”

The team focused their research on 14 species of cetacean, an order of mammals including whales and dolphins. While the number of recovered carcasses has been assumed to equal the number of deaths, the team argues that marine conditions and the fact that many deaths will have occurred far from shore mean recovered carcasses will only account for a small proportion of deaths.

To illustrate their point, the team multiplied recent species abundance estimates by the species mortality rate. An annual carcass recovery rate was then estimated by dividing the mean number of observed strandings each year by the estimate of annual mortality.

The team’s analysis suggests that only 2% of cetacean carcasses were ever historically recovered after their deaths in this region, meaning that the true death toll from the Deepwater Horizon disaster could be 50 times higher than the number of deaths currently estimated. …

Whale and dolphin death toll during Deepwater disaster may have been greatly underestimated

By David McNeill in Tokyo
30 March 2011

Workers at Japan's stricken nuclear plant are reportedly being offered huge sums to brave high radiation and bring its overheated reactors under control, as plant operator, the Tokyo Electric Power Company, battles to stop a spreading contamination crisis which could see another 130,000 people forced to leave their homes. …

"There is a high possibility that there has been at least some melting of the fuel rods," said Prime Minister Naoto Kan.

The admission added to pressure on Mr Kan to widen an exclusion zone around the plant, possibly forcing another 130,000 people to evacuate. Yesterday a tired-looking Mr Kan faced withering criticism from opposition MPs, who called him "irresponsible" and "incompetent". …

Subcontractors to several companies connected to the plant have reportedly been offered 80,000 to 100,000 yen a day (£608 to £760) to join the operation, according to one former plant worker. "They know it's dangerous so they have to pay up to 20 times what they usually do," said Shingo Kanno, a seasonal farmer and construction worker who was offered work at the complex by a subcontractor but refused. "My wife and family are against it because it's so dangerous," he said.

The team of men inside the complex have been dubbed "samurai" and "suicide squads" in the popular press. They have been joined by Self-Defence Force troops and an elite team of fire and emergency service workers, who have used hoses, water canon and helicopters in a bid to cool the reactors since the crisis was triggered by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami. ...

It has been a bad fortnight for Masataka Shimizu. Tepco's beleaguered president has watched the value of the utility giant plummet by $29 billion since 11 March after investors wiped over 70 per cent off its stock.

Its share price of 696 yen is the lowest it has been since 1977 as it battles to stop nuclear catastrophe in Fukushima. The company's problems have just turned existential now that the government has begun openly discussing nationalisation.

Mr Shimizu, 67, has been largely absent from public view since the crisis detonated, appearing briefly on 13 March to issue a boilerplate apology for "causing trouble", then disappearing totally on 16 March, reportedly suffering from overwork. …

'Suicide squads' paid huge sums to stabilise nuclear reactor

24 March 2011 (Survival International) – Tribespeople in Sarawak, in the Malaysian part of Borneo, say the 30-year rule of Chief Minister Taib Mahmud has ‘raped’ their land, destroyed their rainforests and brought ‘hardship and suffering’.

This Saturday, March 26, will mark Taib Mahmud’s 30th anniversary as head of the rainforest state. Malaysia’s longest-serving Chief Minister, he has faced widespread and persistent allegations of corruption.

Taib Mahmud will face hotly contested elections on April 16. He has announced that he will retire after the polls, but observers are skeptical as no date has been given.

The Penan tribe have seen logging companies, licensed by Taib Mahmud’s government, devastate huge tracts of the forests they rely on.

One Penan woman told Survival, ‘Our land and our river have been destroyed by the logging company, by the oil palm plantation. Everything has been destroyed – our sago, our fish, our river – all the jungle’s produce that we depend on has been destroyed. It brings hardship and suffering to our land.’

Sarawak’s tribespeople have condemned Taib Mahmud for razing their forests. A member of the Tring and Berawan tribes told Survival, ‘Taib has been in power for 30 years, and most of our forests, maybe 80%, have gone. They have been chopped down by Taib and his cronies. He is just raping the whole thing, and now indigenous people in Sarawak are really poor.’ …

Borneo tribes: 30-year regime ‘has destroyed everything’

By Gail the Actuary
28 March 2011

The idea that high oil prices cause recessions shouldn’t be any surprise to those who have been following my writings, those of Dave Murphy, or those of Jeff Rubin. Last month, though, the Wall Street Journal finally decided to mention the idea to its readers, in an article called “Rising Oil Prices Raise the Specter Of a Double Dip“. The quote they highlight as a “call out” is

When consumers spend more at the pump, they often cut back on discretionary purchases.

The WSJ shows this graph, linking oil price hikes to recessions…

WSJ, Financial Times Raise Issue of Oil Prices Causing Recession

By Michael Marshall
29 March 2011

The innocuous white vapour trails that criss-cross the sky may not be as harmless as they look. In fact, they might have contributed to more global warming so far than all aircraft greenhouse gas emissions put together.

High-altitude clouds like cirrus warm the planet by trapping heat. Contrail "cirrus" does the same thing, but the question is: how much? We know that contrails trap some extra energy in the atmosphere: their radiative forcing trapped 10 milliwatts per square metre (mW/m²) in 2005, according to an estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That compares with 28 mW/m² trapped by all of the CO₂ released by aircraft engines since the start of aviation.

However, the IPCC estimate only took into account relatively fresh, visible vapour trails that exist for just a few hours. Afterwards they spread out and become indistinguishable from normal cirrus. In this form they may trap energy in the atmosphere for many more hours.

"Only a small part of the problem has been studied," says Ulrike Burkhardt of the Institute for Atmospheric Physics in Oberpfaffenhofen, Germany. With her colleague Bernd Kärcher, she set out to discover how much heat contrail cirrus traps.

Using satellite observations of spreading contrails as a guide, Burkhardt built a model that simulated how they form, spread out and dissipate. Then she embedded it in a global climate model and watched what happened. She found that contrail cirrus ended up covering 0.6 per cent of Earth's surface – an area nine times as great as that covered by line contrails.

Burkhardt then used this figure to produce a more accurate estimate of the total energy trapped by contrails. Her calculations suggest a global figure of 31 mW/m² – higher than that attributable to aviation CO₂. …

Contrails warm the world more than aviation emissions

Nearly a year after the oil disaster began, Gulf Coast residents are sick, and dying from BP's toxic chemicals.

By Dahr Jamil
9 March 2011

"I have critically high levels of chemicals in my body," 33-year-old Steven Aguinaga of Hazlehurst, Mississippi told Al Jazeera. "Yesterday I went to see another doctor to get my blood test results and the nurse said she didn't know how I even got there."

Aguinaga and his close friend Merrick Vallian went swimming at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, in July 2010.

"I swam underwater, then found I had orange slick stuff all over me," Aguinaga said. "At that time I had no knowledge of what dispersants were, but within a few hours, we were drained of energy and not feeling good. I've been extremely sick ever since."

BP's oil disaster last summer gushed at least 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, causing the largest accidental marine oil spill in history - and the largest environmental disaster in US history. Compounding the problem, BP has admitted to using at least 1.9 million gallons toxic dispersants, including one chemical that has been banned in the UK.

According to chemist Bob Naman, these chemicals create an even more toxic substance when mixed with crude oil. Naman, who works at the Analytical Chemical Testing Lab in Mobile, Alabama, has been carrying out studies to search for the chemical markers of the dispersants BP used to both sink and break up its oil.

Poly-aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) from this toxic mix are making people sick, Naman said. PAHs contain compounds that have been identified as carcinogenic, mutagenic, and teratogenic.

"The dispersants are being added to the water and are causing chemical compounds to become water soluble, which is then given off into the air, so it is coming down as rain, in addition to being in the water and beaches of these areas of the Gulf," Naman told Al Jazeera.

"I'm scared of what I'm finding. These cyclic compounds intermingle with the Corexit [dispersants] and generate other cyclic compounds that aren't good. Many have double bonds, and many are on the EPA's danger list. This is an unprecedented environmental catastrophe." …

Gulf spill sickness wrecking lives

By Mike Campbell
March 28, 2011

At least 32 musk oxen in the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve perished during a nasty storm surge last month, and officials are worried many more may be buried deeper in the ice and out of sight.

The carcasses were discovered March 15 frozen in ice on the northern coast of the Seward Peninsula by researchers studying the animals, according to the National Park Service. Four of them had been fitted with radio collars a month earlier, part of a five-year federal study on musk ox population in the Northwest. At that time, some 55 of the animals were gathered together.

The oxen calamity took place within the boundaries of the 2.6 million-acre Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. Shishmaref is the nearest village. The preserve is a remnant of the land bridge that connected Asia with North America some 13,000 years ago. Alaska wildlife biologist Tony Gorn of Nome visited the site on Friday.

He saw remains strewn over nearly a half-mile. "It's pretty interesting," he said. "The carcasses are spread out over several hundred yards, and on the periphery are some young animals. That's terribly unusual."

When threatened, musk ox typically bunch up, with younger animals in the middle. And despite being among the best-insulated animals on Earth, the oxen probably died of exposure, Gorn said. "They do have unbelievable insulating qualities," he said. "But that ends at their legs, which don't have that long hair you see on their bellies. They didn't get wet, they got saturated. They may have drowned, but it's possible they became completely saturated and died from exposure."

Most animals died lying on their sides, Gorn said. However, he saw at least one frozen bull that "looks like it's just standing there." …

Gorn pointed to some recent trouble signs. "There are lots of red flags," he said. "Just about everything you look at is alarming. Mature bull-to-cows ratios are declining. Population growth is slowing." …

At least 32 musk oxen perish in storm surge in Alaska preserve via Richard Pauli

Contact: Fariss Samarrai, fls4f@virginia.edu
28 March 2011

(University of Virginia) Russia's boreal forest – the largest continuous expanse of forest in the world, found in the country's cold northern regions – is undergoing an accelerating large-scale shift in vegetation types as a result of globally and regionally warming climate. That in turn is creating an even warmer climate in the region, according to a new study published in the journal Global Change Biology and highlighted in the April issue of Nature Climate Change.

The Great Russian forest, which includes much of Siberia, is the size of the contiguous United States. It has experienced significant documented warming over the last several decades. As a result, tree species that are more tolerant of warmer weather are advancing northward at an increasing rate as species that are less tolerant to a warmer climate are declining in number.

"We've identified that the boreal forest, particularly in Siberia, is converting from predominantly needle-shedding larch trees to evergreen conifers in response to warming climate," said the study's lead author, Jacquelyn Shuman, a post-doctoral research associate in environmental sciences in U.Va.'s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. "This will promote additional warming and vegetation change, particularly in areas with low species diversity."

Larch trees drop their needles in the fall, allowing the vast snow-covered ground surface of winter to reflect sunlight and heat back into space. This helps keep the climate in the region very cold. But evergreen conifers, such as spruce and fur, retain their needles year round. These trees absorb sunlight, which causes ground-level heat retention. This creates ideal conditions for the proliferation of evergreens, to the detriment of the leaf-dropping larches. The result is a northward progression of evergreens and a farther-northward retreat by the larch forests.

"What we're seeing is a system kicking into overdrive," said co-author Hank Shugart, a U.Va. professor of environmental sciences. "Warming creates more warming."

The researchers used a climate model to assess what would happen if evergreens continued to expand their range farther north and larch species declined. The "positive feedback" cycle of warming promoting warming showed an increase of absorbed surface warming. The model takes into account detailed information about tree growth rates, and the results agree with actual field studies documenting changes in cone production and movement of evergreen treelines northward.

"Such changes in that vast region have the potential to affect areas outside of the region," Shuman noted.

The Russian boreal forest sits over a tremendous repository of carbon-rich soil frozen in the permafrost. As the forest changes in species distribution from larch to evergreens, warming of the ground surface would cause decomposition of the soil, releasing huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – possibly as much as 15 percent of the carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere.

"This is not the scenario one would want to see," Shugart said. "It potentially would increase warming on a global scale."

Russian boreal forests undergoing vegetation change, study shows

By Lewis Smith
Monday, 28 March 2011

Catherton Common reverberates with the distinctive song of skylarks. It boasts stunning views over the Shropshire countryside and is one of the most valuable spots for plants anywhere in Britain.

Just two years ago, its huge botanical diversity and nationally important populations of adders and other struggling native reptiles were under threat of disappearing. The farmers putting animals to graze the land were on the verge of giving up and the common would have deteriorated into scrubland with their departure.

The Shropshire Wildlife Trust determined to save the rare landscape from a damaging decline and bought the 527-acre common, a Site of Special Scientific Interest, to keep grazing going.

To buy the land in the Clee Hills, the trust was reliant on money provided by the aggregates levy sustainability fund, a scheme which has just been scrapped by the Government in a move that wildlife organisations have warned will make it far harder to protect the natural environment.

Until the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs decided to axe it as part of its cost-cutting programme, the fund provided £35m a year to reduce the environmental impacts of the aggregates industry as it dug sand, rock and gravel from the ground. Now the money, while still being collected as part of the aggregates levy as an environmental tax, will go straight into the Treasury's coffers. …

Cuts will destroy rarest habitats in Britain, warn conservationists

USA Today / AP
28 March 2011

TOKYO — Workers at Japan's damaged nuclear plant raced to pump out contaminated water suspected of sending radioactivity levels soaring as officials warned Monday that radiation seeping from the complex was spreading to seawater and soil.

Mounting problems, including badly miscalculated radiation figures and no place to store dangerously contaminated water, have stymied emergency workers struggling to cool down the overheating Fukushima Dai-ichi plant and avert a disaster with global implications

The coastal power plant, located 140 miles northeast of Tokyo, has been leaking radiation since a magnitude-9.0 quake on March 11 triggered a tsunami that engulfed the complex. The wave knocked out power to the system that cools the dangerously hot nuclear fuel rods.

On Monday, workers resumed the laborious yet urgent task of pumping out the hundreds of tons of radioactive water inside several buildings at the six-unit plant. The water must be removed and safely stored before work can continue to power up the plant's cooling system, nuclear safety officials said.

The Japanese government says it does not know where radioactive water is leaking from at the plant.

Government spokesman Yukio Edano earlier said some is "almost certainly" seeping from a damaged reactor core in one of the units. If so, that raises the potential for long-lasting environmental contamination in areas around the plant. …

Radiation spreading to seawater, soil in Japan

TOKYO, March 28, Kyodo

(Kyodo) – Plutonium has been detected in soil at five locations at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, Tokyo Electric Power Co. said Monday.

The operator of the nuclear complex said that the plutonium is believed to have been discharged from nuclear fuel at the plant, which was damaged by the March 11 earthquake and tsunami.

URGENT: Plutonium detected in soil at Fukushima nuke plant: TEPCO

By Stephanie Pappas
25 March 2011

According to just over half of Americans, God is in control of everything that happens on Earth. But slightly fewer are willing to blame an omnipotent power for natural disasters such as Japan's earthquake and tsunami.

A new poll finds that 56 percent of Americans agree or mostly agree that God is in control of all Earthly events. Forty-four percent think that natural disasters are or could be a sign from the Almighty. The fire-and-brimstone version of a vengeful God is even less popular in America: Only 29 percent of people felt that God sometimes punishes an entire nation for the sins of a few individuals.

Nonetheless, the desire to turn to God for an explanation after a disaster is a widespread human urge, said Scott Schieman, a sociologist at the University of Toronto who studies people's beliefs about God's influence on daily life.

"There's just something about the randomness of the universe that is too unsettling," Schieman told LiveScience. "We like explanations for why things happen … many times people weave in these divine narratives." [Read At God We Rage: Anger at the Almighty Found to Be Common]

The poll surveyed a random sample of 1,008 adults in the continental United States in the few days after the Japanese disaster. The sample was weighted by age, sex, geographic region, education and race to reflect the entire population of U.S. adults.

The poll found that evangelical Christians are more likely to see disasters as a sign from God than other religious faiths. Of white evangelicals, 59 percent said disasters are or could be a message from the deity, compared with 31 percent of Catholics and 34 percent of non-evangelical Protestants. The margin of error for the survey was plus or minus 3 percent.

Forty-four percent of all Americans said that recent natural disasters could be a sign of the Biblical end times, with 67 percent of white evangelicals holding that view. (In comparison, 58 percent of Americans attributed recent severe natural disasters to global climate change, as did 52 percent of evangelicals.) …

God's Hand? 44% of Americans See Natural Disasters as Sign of End Times

[And in Nigeria…]

By Etim Imisim (This Day, March 11, 2009)

Abuja, Nigeria - A British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) World Service Trust research has revealed that many Nigerians think that climate change is caused by God. The reason cited for this view was that divine punishment was being meted out for the basket of sins of the world.

The finding shows the pervasive influence of religion on the perception of the environment. It will be recalled that Pope John Paul was progressively 'green'. His successor, Pope Benedict, has been speaking up for environmental protection. The Vatican under him has hosted a scientific conference and discussed global warming and climate change, which are blamed on human use of fossil fuels.

The findings of the BBC survey fitted into the 'God-frame' thinking. Religious leaders and groups as well as local people said since change in the whether pattern had been ordained. The logic of what had been planned and set on course by divine agency naturally led to an iron-cast fatalism. People saw themselves as powerlessness and could do little or nothing to change events.

Outside the God-frame, the report also notes that the understanding of climate change is hazy among every segment of society. The knowledge of private sector people spoken to linked impacts from their own activities on the environment only in terms of waste disposal and pollutions. They did not link climate change to carbon emission.

In general, Nigerians understood climate change in terms of change in weather pattern. And this was limited to their sensual awareness of abnormal increase in the level of heat and effect it had on farm yield in a rain-fed agriculture. …

Nigeria: Citizens See Climate Change As an Act of God -BBC Survey

Cf. “We blamed God”

Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with background from Alan Buis
March 26, 2011

According to a new NASA-funded satellite study, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an accelerating pace and are overtaking ice loss from mountain glaciers and ice caps to become the dominant contributor to global sea level rise. The graph above shows the gain and loss of ice mass from the world's two largest ice sheets. Though there are gains within individual years, the overall trend from 1992 to 2010 has been toward losses.

Each year over the course of the 18-year study, the two ice sheets lost a combined average of 36.3 billion tons more than they did the year before. The Greenland ice sheet lost mass faster at an average of 21.9 billion tons more per year. In Antarctica, the year-over-year speedup in lost ice mass averaged 14.5 billion tons.

“That ice sheets will dominate future sea level rise is not surprising—they hold a lot more ice mass than mountain glaciers,” said lead author Eric Rignot, jointly of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California, Irvine. “What is surprising is this increased contribution by the ice sheets is already happening. If present trends continue, sea level is likely to be significantly higher than levels projected by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.” …

Astrolabe Glacier and Unbalanced Ice

Two years ago, Zimbio hosted a nice photo gallery named “Town Of Rio Vista Nears Bankruptcy, As Foreclosure Crisis Spreads,” which introduced us to a development in Rio Vista, California. Only a handful of the planned 750 homes were built before the global financial bubble burst. Construction halted on November 20, 2008.

2008

Desdemona has seen the revival of a few apparently doomed developments in the Seattle area, so it seemed plausible that the Rio Vista development might have received an infusion of new capital. But as these satellite images from 2010 and 2011 show, it hasn’t happened.

2010

In this 2010 satellite image, yards don’t appear to be very overgrown, but the absence of cars suggests that the houses are abandoned.

2011

In this 2011 satellite view, houses remain abandoned. Yards are visibly overgrown.

2011 Context View

This 2011 satellite view shows the entire housing development site, bounded by Liberty Island Rd. and bisected by McCormack Rd. Note the unpaved roads at the north end of the site.

Cf. Ghost cities of China, Artificial archipelagos of Dubai, 14 Artificial islands of Durrat Al Bahrain, and The World’s Largest Dead Mall.

An unexpected side-effect of the flooding in parts of Pakistan has been that millions of spiders climbed up into the trees to escape the rising flood waters.

Because of the scale of the flooding and the fact that the water has taken so long to recede, many trees have become cocooned in spiders webs. People in this part of Sindh have never seen this phenomenon before - but they also report that there are now less mosquitos than they would expect, given the amount of stagnant, standing water that is around.

It is thought that the mosquitos are getting caught in the spiders web thus reducing the risk of malaria, which would be one blessing for the people of Sindh, facing so many other hardships after the floods.

Find out more about the UK government's response to the Pakistan floods at www.dfid.gov.uk/pakistan-floods-six-months.

Trees cocooned in spiders webs, an unexpected side effect of the flooding in Sindh, Pakistan via Wit’s End

After the biggest mass extinction in Earth's history – 250 million years ago – algae and bacteria in the ocean rebounded so fast that they consumed virtually all the oxygen in the sea, slowing the recovery of the rest of marine animals for several million years.

BY LOUIS BERGERON
March 24, 2011

A mass extinction is hard enough for Earth's biosphere to handle, but when you chase it with prolonged oxygen deprivation, the biota ends up with a hangover that can last millions of years.

Such was the situation with the greatest mass extinction in Earth's history 250 million years ago, when 90 percent of all marine animal species were wiped out, along with a huge proportion of plant, animal and insect species on land.

A massive amount of volcanism in Siberia is widely credited with driving the disaster, but even after the immense outpourings of lava and toxic gases tapered off, oxygen levels in the oceans, which had been depleted, remained low for about 5 million years, slowing life's recovery there to an unusual degree.

The reason for the lingering low oxygen levels has puzzled scientists, but now Stanford researchers have figured out what probably happened. By analyzing the chemical composition of some then-underwater limestone beds deposited over the course of the recovery in what is now southern China, they have determined that while it took several million years for most ecosystems in the ocean to recover, tiny single-celled algae and bacteria bounced back much more quickly.

In fact, according to biogeochemist Katja Meyer, the tiny organisms rebounded to such an extent that the bigger life forms couldn't catch a break – much less their breath – because the little ones were enjoying a sustained population explosion.

As the vast hordes of tiny dead organisms rotted, dissolved oxygen in the seawater was consumed by aerobic microbes involved in the decay process, leaving scant oxygen for larger organisms in what became an oxygen-depleted, or anoxic, environment.

The driver of the ongoing population boom appears to have been the massive amounts of carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere during the volcanism, Meyer said, which caused the world to warm.

"More warmth means an invigorated hydrological cycle, so you get more rain and this rain is also more acidic because there is more carbon dioxide dissolved in the rain," Meyer said.

The increased amounts of more acidic rain increased weathering of the land surface, which sent more nutrients into the ocean, which fueled explosions of life such as algae blooms.

"It is kind of counterintuitive that high productivity on the part of algae and bacteria would likely be generating these toxic geochemical conditions that prevent most of animal life from recovering from mass extinction," Meyer said.

But the process, she said, is basically the same as when excess runoff from fertilizers goes into a body of water, whether it's a pond on a golf course or the infamous dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico created by farm runoff carried down the Mississippi River.

"You get this giant bloom of algae and then it starts to smell bad as that algae decays, pulling oxygen out of the water and causing fish die-offs," Meyer said. …

Algae and bacteria hogged oxygen after ancient mass extinction, slowing recovery of marine life, say Stanford researchers

Caption by Mike Carlowicz, with background from Alan Buis
March 26, 2011

Located in the Terre Adélie-George V Land section of East Antarctica, Astrolabe Glacier streams out from the interior of Antarctica to dump ice into the sea. This outlet glacier is estimated to be 10 kilometers (6 miles) wide, and the drainage basin that feeds it stretches as much as 200 kilometers (120 miles) inland. Astrolabe is named for the flagship of Captain Jules Dumont d'Urville's 19th century expedition to Antarctica.

The Advanced Land Imager (ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1) satellite captured this natural-color image of Astrolabe on November 28, 2010, in late austral spring. Icebergs were breaking off from the glacier tongue—which extends from the coast like a shelf over the open water of the Southern Ocean—and running into sea ice. The calving front is roughly 7 kilometers (4 miles) wide, and scientists estimate that it loses half a cubic kilometer of ice per year.

The ice calving shown in this image is not necessarily unusual for the region or the time of year. But what is unusual is how much more calving all the glaciers of Antarctica and Greenland have been doing in the past two decades. …

Astrolabe Glacier and Unbalanced Ice

By Helvy Shaanika
25 March 2011

OSHAKATI – “The 2011 floods situation can probably take us back 1,000 years because no one is able to measure up or compare the effect,” said the Mayor of Oshakati, Ben Kuutumbeni Kathindi.

Kathindi was referring to the flood situation, which many have described as the worst of its kind in the country.

Oshana and Ohangwena are the worst affected regions, while Oshakati is the worst affected town.

Oshakati resembles a battlefield. Daily, hundreds of people are seen carrying mounds of their belongings, and scenes of trucks and cars transporting people and their belongings in a fashion akin to the movements of civilians fleeing from a war zone, are common sight.

The embankments surrounding some of the locations in Oshakati, which were erected as part of efforts to minimise the effects of floods, have been washed away and this has worsened the situation as water has reached the settlements at high speed.

Kathindi said if the rains and flood situation persist, it is highly likely that water will soon spill over to the formal settlements of Oshakati.

He said apart from the ongoing evacuation of flood victims, there is little that can be done. …

The flooding situation is expected to worsen as more flood waves from Angola and heavy rains are expected in the northern regions. …

2011 floods the worst ever

By Andrew Stern; editing by Vicki Allen
Fri Mar 25, 2011

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Voltage coursing through electrical barriers designed to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes may need to be raised to keep out juvenile fish, U.S. officials said on Friday.

The Army Corps of Engineers has mounted a multimillion-dollar effort to keep voracious Bighead and Silver Carp that now infest the Mississippi River Basin out of the Great Lakes, where scientists predict they could decimate the lakes' $7 billion fishery.

"The current barrier operating parameters are effective for fish as small as 5.4 inches in length," the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a news release.

"The research published in this report suggests that slightly higher operating parameters than those currently in use may be necessary to immobilize all very small Asian carp, as small as 1.7 to 3.2 inches in length."

Juvenile carp can swim 37 miles by the time they reach 6 inches in length.

Environmentalists and several state governments have fought to create a permanent ecological separation between the Mississippi River basin and the Great Lakes. …

Great Lakes barrier may be too weak to stop carp

By SHAILA DEWAN
6 January 2009

The coal ash pond that ruptured and sent a billion gallons of toxic sludge across 300 acres of East Tennessee in December 2008 was only one of more than 1,300 similar dumps across the United States — most of them unregulated and unmonitored — that contain billions more gallons of fly ash and other byproducts of burning coal.

Like the one in Tennessee, most of these dumps, which reach up to 1,500 acres, contain heavy metals like arsenic, lead, mercury and selenium, which are considered by the Environmental Protection Agency to be a threat to water supplies and human health. Yet they are not subject to any federal regulation, which experts say could have prevented the spill, and there is little monitoring of their effects on the surrounding environment.

In fact, coal ash is used throughout the country for construction fill, mine reclamation and other “beneficial uses.” In 2007, according to a coal industry estimate, 50 tons of fly ash even went to agricultural uses, like improving soil’s ability to hold water, despite a 1999 E.P.A. warning about high levels of arsenic. The industry has promoted the reuse of coal combustion products because of the growing amount of them being produced each year — 131 million tons in 2007, up from less than 90 million tons in 1990.

The amount of coal ash has ballooned in part because of increased demand for electricity, but more because air pollution controls have improved. Contaminants and waste products that once spewed through the coal plants’ smokestacks are increasingly captured in the form of solid waste, held in huge piles in 46 states, near cities like Pittsburgh, St. Louis and Tampa, Fla., and on the shores of Lake Erie, Lake Michigan and the Mississippi River.

Numerous studies have shown that the ash can leach toxic substances that can cause cancer, birth defects and other health problems in humans, and can decimate fish, bird and frog populations in and around ash dumps, causing developmental problems like tadpoles born without teeth, or fish with severe spinal deformities.

“Your household garbage is managed much more consistently” than coal combustion waste, said Dr. Thomas A. Burke, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, who testified on the health effects of coal ash before a Congressional subcommittee last year. “It’s such a large volume of waste, and it’s so essential to the country’s energy supply; it’s basically been a loophole in the country’s waste management strategy.”

As the E.P.A. has studied whether to regulate coal ash waste, the cases of drinking wells and surface water contaminated by leaching from the dumps or the use of the ash has swelled. In 2007, an E.P.A. report identified 63 sites in 26 states where the water was contaminated by heavy metals from such dumps, including three other Tennessee Valley Authority dumps. Environmental advocacy groups have submitted at least 17 additional cases that they say should be added to that list. …

Hundreds of Coal Ash Dumps Lack Regulation

At 197 million acres, the surface area of Canada’s boreal lakes and rivers alone are larger than all but 36 countries. According to a new report by the Pew Environment Group, Canada’s boreal forest contains the world’s largest and most pristine freshwater ecosystem on Earth.

A Forest of Blue: Canada's Boreal Forest, the World's Waterkeeper