C|NET News: Gauging the health of the oceans

Gauging the health of the oceans (Published: February 16, 2005, 5:33 AM PST, By Michael Kanellos, Staff Writer, CNET News.com)

A mathematical technique for using satellite images to gauge the growth rate and mass of the ocean's phytoplankton, or plant plankton, could help scientists more fully understand the food cycles of the oceans, as well as global climate change, researchers say.

The new approach--devised by researchers with NASA; the University of California, Santa Barbara; and other institutions--involves studying the "greenness" and brightness of phytoplankton from satellite images. Computers take the data from the images, and then try to mathematically determine the levels of phytoplankton and the rate of reproduction taking place.

You may recall from high school biology that plankton are the bottom of the food chain. Thus the overall health of us depends on the presence of plankton in the ocean, and anything that restricts their presence will eventually come to bite us in the ass.

NYTimes: Pollution Is Linked to Fetal Harm

A year ago I read a book, Having Faith, written by an Ecologist who became pregnant and realized she had become an ecosystem herself. She decided to study herself and her pregnancy from an ecological viewpoint concerning the inner ecosystem occurring within her womb. The sole occupant of that ecosystem? Her child, later to be named Faith

The book details studies from around the world showing effects of pollution in the environment, how various pollutants can cross the blood barrier and enter the womb. The blood barrier is part of the fetal sack, and is supposed to protect the fetus from poisions or diseases through ensuring that only certain things cross from the mothers blood system to the fetus.

However, humans with their ingenuity have come up with whole ranges of chemicals that can cross that barrier. The evolutionary process that created our bodies took millions of years, and the hundred or so years of modern technological might happened much too quickly for evolution to create better filtering techniques. Hence, our biology doesn't know how to reject the environmental pollution plaguing us.

Pollution Is Linked to Fetal Harm (By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS; Published: February 16, 2005; NYTIMES.COM) This article details one study performed at Columbia University in New York City. It centered on non-smoking pregnant women and their children, and showed an increase in persistent genetic abnormalities. The women lived primarily in Harlem and The Bronx.

"We already knew that air pollutants significantly reduced fetal growth, but this is the first time we've seen evidence that they can change chromosomes in utero," Dr. Perera said, adding that the kind of genetic changes that occurred had been linked in other studies to increased risk of cancer.
- said the study's senior author, Dr. Frederica P. Perera, director of the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health.

I ask every reader of this article to look at the stickers on the gasoline pump the next time you fill up. Ever see the one that warns that the product sold through that pump is known to cause cancer and other serious diseases?

I also invite you to visit my electric vehicles content for information on non-polluting vehicles. Electric vehicles are the only way to have the vehicles be zero pollution, though the electricity does come from somewhere and the actual pollution effect depends on the electrical power plant in your area. Note that a hydrogen fuel-cell powered vehicle is, in the end, an electric vehicle, it's just using a hydrogen tank to store the power rather than a battery pack. Also, the hybrid vehicles that are all the rage right now, are not much of a solution, since every electron driving the electric half of the car comes from gasoline.

End of life automobile recycling

What happens to your car when it's done, finished, and no longer in the world? Does it just go into a landfill? What about all the valuable materials in the car?

The first step is a junk yard where any salvageable parts are removed. My father used to own a junk yard, and once enough parts were removed the bulk of the car was sent to a scrap yard. At the scrap yard the cars were crushed and melted for their metal.

But what about all the plastics and foams and cloths and whatnot in modern cars? What happens to them?

Agreement Will Reduce Auto Shredder Waste in Europe: An agreement between Argonne National Labs and a company in Belgium to set up a plant that can process and recycle the mix of foams and plastics that would otherwise be "scrap" left over from shredding automobiles. Yup, this has the hallmarks of yet another technology invented in America but capitalized upon by foreigners. All because our government leaders have their hands so deeply in Industry's hands that they can't do the right thing.

Argonne and Industry to Tackle End-of-Life Vehicle Recycling: Well, there is hope. This news release talks of cooperation with U.S. industry. And since it is cost effective maybe it will actually be deployed. Here's hoping ;-)

Vehicle Recycling Partnership Plant: That's because Argonne has this facility for automobile recycling. Presumably it's a pilot plant and they don't mean to operate it commercially.

This page:

Recovering Usable Plastics from Automotive Scrap on Argonne's site has more details.

DidYouKnow.org: The Environment

http://www.doyouknow.org/topics/theenvironment/index.html

The DidYouKnow site was launched for the 2004 election year, with this idea:

Over the past few years, we've noticed that while a lot of important decisions have been made in Washington about our country and its future, those decisions have been getting drowned out in the media by Chandra and Kobe and sharks and mad cow and orange alerts.

And that's just not healthy for our Republic.

So, because there's so much at stake for our country in this election year, we've compiled important facts that we think every voting American should know before marking their ballot on November 2.

How quaint that they believe the distractive use of the media is anything new. Maybe they believe that under prior administrations the people were better informed? Hah!

In any case, they have done an excellent job with putting together a list of head-turning facts.

Global Warming Exposes Arctic to Oil, Gas Drilling

er... ah... are we sure we want this?

Global Warming Exposes Arctic to Oil, Gas Drilling

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Rising global temperatures will melt areas of the Arctic this century, making them more accessible for oil and natural gas drilling, a report prepared by the United States and seven other nations said on Monday.

It predicts that over the next 100 years, global warming could increase Arctic annual average temperatures 5 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit over land and by up to 13 degrees over water. Warmer temperatures could raise global sea levels by as much as 3 feet.

Such a change would threaten coastal cities, change growing patterns for vegetation and destroy habitats for some wildlife, but an energy-starved world would have new areas for oil and gas exploration, according to the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report.

The Arctic region, particularly offshore, has huge oil and gas reserves, mostly in Russia, Canada, Alaska, Greenland and Norway.

Baked Alaska - Global Warming in Alaska

Baked Alaska (September 10, 2004; salon.com; Rebecca Clarren) In an article just like the opening scene to Arrival/Arrival 2 we learn of scientists observations that the weather in Alaska is warming, that the cause is carbon emissions in warmer climates, and the whole global warming story. This scientist, Syndonia "Donie" Bret-Harte, has been studying plants in the Alaska Tundra regions for over 10 years. She is witnessing that, because the "growing season" has lengthened the confused plants are budding twice in each growing season. Once a plant buds twice in a growing season, it will not bud the next year.

"It's a bad strategy for them because they'll lose their seeds to the frost," says Bret-Harte, looking worried behind large gold-rimmed glasses. Flowers only make one set of buds each year so if they spend next year's buds now, they'll be out of luck next spring. If the warming trend continues, the flowers may go extinct.

As in any ecosystem, what makes the ecosystem work is the interdependance of all creatures that live in that ecosystem. If one goes extinct, what of the creatures that eat the one that just went extinct? They would then become endangered, possibly go extinct, and eventually the whole thing will crumble.

Over the past century, Bret-Harte explains, due to the increase in oil and gas consumption, carbon dioxide and methane emissions have skyrocketed. Such gases hover above the earth, preventing hot air from escaping into the atmosphere. In just the past three decades, these gases have warmed the Arctic by nearly 5 degrees Fahrenheit. Since the mid-1950s, Alaska's glaciers have lost about 3,300 cubic kilometers of melted ice and snow -- enough to submerge the entire state of Texas in 15 feet of water. Due in part to this influx of fresh water combined with warmer temperature, computer models predict that the Arctic Ocean's sea ice could completely disappear within 70 years.

While it's unlikely the four horsemen of the apocalypse are saddled up and ready to ride, global warming will likely have an enormous and dire impact on human populations in the Arctic and beyond. Already, native communities that dot Alaskan shorelines are seeing villages crumble. Waves, unhindered by large ice chunks, now swell and break against the shore with a ferocity never seen before. Banks are eroding and high water has consumed so many homes and buildings that two villages have been forced to move inland.

The article mentions The Boiling Point, a book with a similar theme. That the global warming issue is real, and will cause disastrous consequences. Especially infuriating is that the current Administration (G.W. Bush) is "misrepresenting the science on climate change in order to justify a path of inaction".

Review: The Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan

The Boiling Point by Ross Gelbspan

At this point I haven't (yet) read this book. Instead I am working from this review

The end of the world is here (Aug. 5, 2004; salon.com; Katharine Mieszkowski)

The salon.com review reads as if the book is a dire warning like Silent Spring. For example, we have this quote from the book:

"The continuing indifference by the United States to atmospheric warming -- since this country generates one-fourth of the world's emissions with 5 percent of its people -- will almost guarantee more anti-U.S. attacks from people whose crops are destroyed by weather extremes, whose populations are afflicted by epidemics of infectious disease, and whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees."

This statistic relates to the oft-quoted ratio:

• The U.S. has 5 percent (or so) of the worlds people.
• The U.S. uses 25% of the worlds resource production.

Obviously if the environment is "bad" now, then what will it be like as India and China proceed further with their modernization efforts? Obviously a "modernized" society is one with huge resource needs, from energy to steel to food to cotton and every other raw material. The production, transportation and use of each of these raw materials has significant side effects in the world ecological situation. In the past India and China were having resource use rates typical of third-world countries, but as they modernize their resource use rates certainly will rise, and their huge population's will inundate (so the theory goes) the ecological capacity of the planet.

Much of the world talks of his discussion of the "global warming" problem. Examples given are:

• In Scotland, hundreds of thousands of arctic seabirds are no longer having babies. Their prime food supply, sandeels, have moved north due to changes in sea temperature. (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds)
• The residents of Tuvalu (famous for the ".tv" toplevel domain name) are likely to be abandoning their country soon. It is a low-lying island in the southern pacific, and soon to be inundated by rising sea levels. New Zealand has offered the Tuvalans refuge.
• Wildlife around the world are "on the move", with one butterfly species having moved its "range" 60 miles north for cooler climes.
• The spread of diseases like West Nile virus, malaria, Dengue and yellow fever are happening as their insect carriers expand their "range".

Gelbspan also spends some time discussing the news media, political leadership in the U.S. and the environmental organizations who are supposed to be leading the "fight". All are found to be lacking. The news media is obviously failing to inform the public about the real dangers, and instead is cooperating with the disinformation that global warming is still unproven. When a politician says an issue requires "more study" that's double-speak for them saying they want to bury the idea and hope the population will lose interest over time. The Bush Administration (President Enron, Vice President Halliburton, National Security Directory Chevron and the others) are especially egregious, as they have been instituting policies that would roll back decades of "progress" on environmental issues. About the environmental groups, he finds that they spend too much time inside the beltway fighting petty legislative battles.

This is an illustrative point:

"People are made to feel guilty if they own a gas guzzler or live in a poorly insulated home. In fact, people should be outraged that the government does not require automakers to sell them cars that run on clean fuels, that building codes do not reduce heating and cooling energy requirements by 70 percent, and that government energy policies do not mandate home-based or regional sources of clean electricity."

Okay, so he's putting "us" in a victim role in which we have no power of choice. The big corporations and governments decide for us the products we are allowed to buy, the policies under which our houses are built, and so forth, that's what he's saying. Is that the truth?

In a way this point is largely true. Who is it that decides what size vehicles to sell, or what fuel they run on? Why, it's the car companies. But how do they make their decisions? Why, it's by what we as individuals purchase. We individuals have a lot of power, the power of our pocketbooks. This is the flaw of Gelbspan's point, namely it is the continued purchase of SUV's which cause them to be the most produced vehicles. The same goes true for all other products from the lack of organic food, to the lack of organically produced cotton, to the relative paucity of recycling and the products of recycled materials. The issue lies as much with us, individuals, and I do mean you, the one reading this article, as much as the governments and corporations that are supposedly in charge of our lives.

We are not at the mercy of those powerful institutions. They exist merely because we individuals have caused them to exist, by buying products from one company or another, by voting for one politician or another, by sending tax money, etc. These signals are taken by those in positions of influence as saying that we, the people, wish to choose a specific style of living that is not sustainable ecologically, economically or politically. If we used our money and our voting power differently, it would send a different signal to those in power, or perhaps put others in power.

Yes, there are positions of power. Yes, the corporations and governments decide a lot of things. Those decisions are made by people, however, people who hold the positions of power. All it would take for the direction to change is for the holders of those positions of power to change their decisions.

An example is Gelbspan's plan for solving the worlds ecological crisis, as described in the salon.com review. Gelbspan would end all subsidies for fossil fuels, put the money instead into subsidising "clean" energy resources, and mandate a sweeping swath of changes worldwide in how we go about producing goods, services, where we get the energy resources, and more. The coal miners would have to be "bought out" and retrained for something else. Otherwise we are doomed to utter catastrophe, with a dead planet as our reward.

Dire warnings indeed.

Again, obviously, he is seeing the government as the only possible decision maker. What, I ask, would lead to take those actions? Government nor Industry are likely to take those actions right now. The salon.com review doesn't tell how he plans to have that scenario come about, but to put a guess on it, a requirement would be "consciousness raising". In other words, making it clear somehow that a problem exists and drastic changes are required to solve the problem. Unfortunately the problem is very complex and hard to see because it is made of little changes happening here and there.

It's obvious to me that, if the people truly wanted change in environmental policy, changes in the types of products we have available to purchase, then change would happen. The trick is the phrase "truly wanted", for that has to be followed through by dedicated action and choices.

Obviously there are lots of roadblocks in front of us. In the U.S. the whole shape of everything revolves around individual ownership of automobiles, fueled by fossil fuels. We have roads everywhere, that impede individuals ability to walk and cover the land with asphalt so that water and air are robbed from the plants and creatures that live in the earth. Further there is a massive disinformation campaign misleading the population into thinking everything is okay. These are simply roadblocks, and they are hardly insurmountable.

If we want clean vehicles, various types of electric driven vehicles exist today. Or you can build your own. It simply takes dedication and perseverance to find the vehicles, or to build your own. The same goes for the food you eat, the clothing you wear, the recycling you do or do not do, the presence of recycled materials in the products you buy. All of these are available today, and it is simply your choice. Every choice you make, and again I am speaking to you that is reading this article right now, every choice you make leads in some direction. If you choose to go along with the environmentally unsustainable products and services in the world, then you are voting for the continuation of those products and policies that support the products. If you choose environmentally sustainable products and services, then you are voting for and feeding the companies or other organizations that produce those products and services.

The choice is up to you my friend.