An absolutely scandalous report from 60 Minutes about illegal e-waste dumping in China. We have posted stuff about technological dumping before but nothing quite this immediate and damning.
The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition is one place to turn to for more information, and action.
The NRDC, which has a spokesperson in the 60 Minutes piece, also has further information.
While the planet has experienced numerous changes in climate over the past 65 million years, the most significant climate change of the last 5,000 years has been in recent decades. That change is global warming.
A Cornell study reports that as a result of this warming, which has caused Arctic freshwater ice to melt and flow southward, the ranges of some cold-water, northern marine species have been moving down the North American coast — a counterintuitive finding.”
“Sea ice at the top of the planet has apparently reached the lowest volume ever recorded, say scientists, with conditions declining toward a point where the Arctic Ocean may soon be completely ice-free in summertime.
arctic ice
While final numbers are still coming in, experts at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., believe the overall volume of Arctic sea ice — determined by measuring the area covered and the thickness of ice — has reached the lowest level since satellite measurements began in 1979. ”
Wild, unprecedented weather continues around the globe, not only in the U.S.
“Flash floods and landslides have killed 50 people in Vietnam and Thailand, swept away thousands of homes and inundated farmland, official reports said on Sunday.
In Vietnam, the death toll from typhoon Hagupit, which struck the Philippines and China earlier in the week, has jumped to 32 with another five people missing.”
Attention! Ms. Palin! Attention!
The decade ending in 2006 was the warmest such period in the Northern Hemisphere for at least the last 1,300 years and possibly longer, says a new study written by a University of Arizona professor and six other researchers.
And to underline the report:
A huge 19 square mile (55 square km) ice shelf in Canada’s northern Arctic broke away last month and the remaining shelves have shrunk at a “massive and disturbing” rate, the latest sign of accelerating climate change in the remote region, scientists said on Tuesday.
…the total amount of ice lost from the shelves along Ellesmere Island this summer totaled 83 square miles — more than three times the area of Manhattan island.
The figure is more than 10 times the amount of ice shelf cover that
scientists estimated on July 30 would vanish from around the island this summer
“A Dutch-based company announced plans Tuesday to produce affordable electric cars by the end of 2009, promising they will be much more powerful than existing models and have zero emissions.
Detroit Electric is in negotiations with Malaysia’s national auto maker, Proton, to produce the car in this Southeast Asian nation and is also talking to a German and a U.S. carmaker, said the company’s chief executive, Albert Lam. He declined to name the companies.
“We believe in affordable electric vehicles for the public. That is our dream … to find innovative ways to counter global warming,” Lam told a news conference before journalists test drove a sports car, a sedan and a subcompact car fitted with Detroit Electric’s technology.
Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi drove the sedan Sunday when he arrived at a National Day parade — which officials called a testament of the government’s commitment to finding green alternatives to tackle rising fuel prices.
Lam said the car will use lithium ion batteries and a motor developed in-house.”
Attention Governor Palin: Arctic Sea Ice! Gone!
Arctic sea ice has shrunk to the second smallest extent since satellite records began, US scientists have revealed.
The National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) says that the ice-covered area has fallen below its 2005 level, which was the second lowest on record.
Melting has occurred earlier in the year than usual, meaning that the iced area could become even smaller than last September, the lowest recorded.
Researchers say the Arctic is now at a climatic “tipping point”.
Very interesting article.
“…global warming, at its core, is not a technology or policy problem. It is the greatest failure of thought in human history.
Attempts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions will fail unless people first alter their thinking and behavior.
Earth is warming because humans, primarily in industrialized nations, suffer from systems blindness.”
Bob Doppelt’s book, The Power of Sustainable Thinking.
The move towards green roofs is picking up momentum, finding favor even in New York City.
…tiny absorbent leaves and modest but hardy roots of the sedum — typically found in desert climates — are at the center of a growing effort to reduce greenhouse gases, rainwater runoff and electricity demand in New York.
Fay, alternating between storm, depression and hurricane is raining itself out over the South, bringing drought relief to many areas, leaving in its wake record rainfalls and area-wide flooding in northern Florida. Now comes Gustav.
Hurricane Gustav intensified remarkably overnight, and is poised to deliver a heavy blow to Haiti early this afternoon as a Category 1 or 2 hurricane. Gustav intensified from a tropical depression at 11 am yesterday to a Category 1 hurricane last night in just 16 hours, tying Hurricane Humberto’s record–set just last year–for the fastest intensification from first advisory to a Category 1 hurricane.
As best it can be predicted now, Gustav will stay on a westerly course, moving eventually to the Cancun/Cozumel area of Mexico
There are some who think saving the world and ourselves can only happen by cutting back. The infinite manufacturing of useless goods destroys our natural resources and turns us into frantic pursuers of what will disappear as soon as it is captured.
Zeitgeist Films presents, “Manufactured Landscapes,”
a striking new documentary on the world and work of renowned artist Edward Burtynsky. Internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of “manufactured landscapes”—quarries, recycling yards, factories, mines and dams—Burtynsky creates stunningly beautiful art from civilization’s materials and debris. The film follows him through China, as he shoots the evidence and effects of that country’s massive industrial revolution. With breathtaking sequences, such as the opening tracking shot through an almost endless factory, the filmmakers also extend the narratives of Burtynsky’s photographs, allowing us to meditate on our impact on the planet and witness both the epicenters of industrial endeavor and the dumping grounds of its waste.
In the spirit of such environmentally enlightening sleeper-hits as AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH and RIVERS AND TIDES, MANUFACTURED LANDSCAPES powerfully shifts our consciousness about the world and the way we live in it, without simplistic judgments or reductive resolutions.
We’ve been watching Fay dodge back and forth over Florida and before that the Carribean islands, leaving flooding and a dozen or so deaths. The people of north eastern India should have it so lucky. Monsoon rains have upped the ante from “just usual flooding,” to a “catastrophe. Over one million are cut off from food supplies and from the other modes and mechanisms of daily life.
“It is not a normal flood, but a catastrophe,” said Bihar Chief Minister Nitish Kumar after making an aerial survey of the ravaged districts.
Kumar said more than 1 million people were cut off from the rest of the country because the floods had washed away roads and made railway lines impassable.
India’s monsoon season, which lasts from June to September, brings rain vital for the country’s farmers but also massive destruction. Floods, mudslides, collapsing houses and lightning strikes kill hundreds of people every year.
This year’s monsoon has killed more than 330 people in India so far. In 2007, monsoon floods killed more than 2,200 people across South Asia and left 31 million others homeless, short of food or with other problems. The United Nations called last year’s floods the worst in living memory.”
Way out in the Pacific, a trillion gallons from nowhere, floats the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, [...roughly the size of Texas, containing approximately 3.5 million tons of trash. Shoes, toys, bags, pacifers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles...]
A couple of intrepid souls have set sail towards it to try to stir up some interest. Junk is a craft, made up of junk, piloted by Marcus and Joel, which got underway from Long Beach on June 1.
Roz Savage, by her own small self, is rowing in the same direction, from San Francisco to Hawaii, by way of the Patch, and now about 83 days into rowing.
The two voyages crossed paths the other day, trading food and water and calloused hand shakes. What a freakin’ adventure!
Damn! If this can be done on a large scale, with renewable energy to power it, without CO2 emmissions, or other toxic side-effects, it would be phenomenol!
“Plastic water bottles. Plastic toys. Plastic clamshell food packages. Plastic bags. Plastic furniture. Plastic cassettes.
Right now, most of it goes into landfills, much of it on pace to degrade in, oh, 400 years or so.
PolyFlow has a different solution, one that gets around the hassle of recycling. Its patented technology breaks down all manner of plastics into their base chemicals, which can then be processed back into plastic.
A demonstration plant has been erected on a weedy section of asphalt on the site of the former Brown-Graves Lumber Co. mill in Akron. PolyFlow executives have been showing off the technology to plastics industry officials and venture capitalists.
The mobile processor sits atop a flat-bed trailer. At one end is a large vessel, sheathed in shiny silver insulation. Inside go all types of plastic, even carpet samples and shredded tires. The oxygen is removed and the burners turned on, initiating a process called pyrolysis.
The plastic is essentially vaporized, after which it passes through a pipe to a condenser that converts it into a liquid the color of brown mustard. The noncondensable gas is flared off, but eventually will be used to fuel the plant.
The liquid can then be distilled into its raw components - chemicals like tolulene, benzene and styrene, the building blocks of plastics that would normally come from a barrel of crude oil. ”
“- A maroon-striped marauder with venomous spikes is rapidly multiplying in the Caribbean’s warm waters, swallowing native species, stinging divers and generally wreaking havoc on an ecologically delicate region.
The red lionfish, a tropical native of the Indian and Pacific oceans that probably escaped from a Florida fish tank, is showing up everywhere — from the coasts of Cuba and Hispaniola to Little Cayman’s pristine Bloody Bay Wall, one of the region’s prime destinations for divers.
Wherever it appears, the adaptable predator corners fish and crustaceans up to half its size with its billowy fins and sucks them down in one violent gulp.
Research teams observed one lionfish eating 20 small fish in less than 30 minutes.
Lionfish
“Many coastal areas of the world’s oceans are being starved of oxygen at an alarming rate, with vast stretches along the seafloor depleted of it to the point that they can barely sustain marine life, researchers are reporting.
The main culprit, scientists say, is nitrogen-rich nutrients from crop fertilizers that spill into coastal waters by way of rivers and streams.”
If global warming is the number one danger, where is this? 2? 3, behind water? What to do about it is fairly obvious: stop with the frickin’ nitrogen fertilizers. How much would food production diminish? What other, less dangerous, technologies could increase food production? What percent of food is wasted and how much could that be reduced?
“Pacific Ocean shellfish - the mussels and snails, the clams and cockles - are heading for a mass invasion into the North Atlantic that could alter the entire ecology of both oceans as sea ice vanishes from the warming high Arctic, two California scientists predict.”
But the headline implies too much. Adds, in the first paragraph, to the drumbeat of fear we all feel, in prognosis more benign.
“Studying the fossils of marine organisms from 3.5 million years ago, the two California paleontologists saw that water from the Pacific Ocean must have been flowing north through the Bering Strait and into the Arctic Ocean where the ice had cleared and food was abundant. From there, hundreds of Pacific marine species moved into the warm North Atlantic to “colonize and enrich” the sea there, Vermeij and Roopnarine concluded.
“But a million years later the ice age returned in the far north and put an end to all of that,” Roopnarine said. “The Arctic Ocean, covered densely with ice again, became virtually a desert.”
Now that the northern seas are warming and a new mass migration of marine species is in the offing, “there’s a fair likelihood the invasion might generate new fisheries,” Roopnarine said. “Extinctions are unlikely, and there might be a cascading increase in abundance, perhaps, but that’s not easy to predict.”
Vermeij agreed. “Invasions like this can increase the genetic diversity of many species,” he said, “and in the long run we’ll see a lot of new hybrids.” “
A little lead on Earthweek holds out the hope that a species of grass could suck lots of CO2 out of the atmosphere and, at the same time, leave prime corn growing land available for corn
New research in the United States may have found a way to use the majority of traditional grain crops for food rather than diverting nearly a quarter of them for biofuel production.
A team from the University of Illinois says the giant perennial grass Miscanthus x giganteus can produce far more biofuels per acre than current sources, such as corn.
To achieve the current White House goal of offsetting 20 percent of gasoline use with ethanol would take about a quarter of all U.S. cropland out of food production, the researchers say.
Writing in the journal Global Change Biology, crop sciences professor Stephen P. Long said that Miscanthus can be grown on land unsuitable for growing corn or other grains, meaning that acreage used for those crops could be once again allocated exclusively for food production.
A few problems spring to mind: 1) pricing. If a farmer can get more for growing the grass than for growing corn, then grass it will be — corn land or not. 2) “Exotic species” syndrome. We’ve seen a lot of this lately, in which a species — of plant, shellfish, bird– is introduced into a niche it didn’t evolve in. In some cases the introduced species will not survive. In others, not only does it survive but it thrives, and gobbles up the land, food, water needed by existing species, driving them to extinction. Even under well meaning proposals this is a threat which needs to be fully understood before rising for the standing ovation.
In a related piece, Steve Lawrence of AP writes of the re-introduction of tules and cattails into the Sacramento delta. The driving idea is that the islands in the delta which have been farmed and have been submerging into the river bottom for over 100 years need to be built back up. Tule and cattails are what created them if the first place, so why not return some to their original state and let nature take its course. As an added benefit, the two reeds are excellent CO2 captors.
“All that soil out there are plants that grew 6,000 years ago and didn’t decompose completely,” said Robin Miller, a biogeochemist with the Geological Survey. “That’s what peat is. So we’re just making the same thing happen that happened here for millennia.”
About 2 1/2 years ago, scientists noticed that their “big garden,” as Miller calls it, was removing carbon dioxide, one of the greenhouse gases blamed for global warming.
“We were capturing a lot of (carbon dioxide) at levels much greater than other systems — marshes and forests, grasslands,” said Roger Fujii, the project’s director and the bay-delta program chief for the Geological Survey’s California Water Science Center.
That revelation persuaded state and federal officials to expand the project. They are now trying to determine whether the tules and cattails could be used to combat global warming through what they call “carbon-capture” farming.
Under that scenario, companies could meet state greenhouse gas limits by paying delta farmers to plant tules and cattails rather than row crops.
“They can just sit back and watch the tules grow, and they should be making money,” Fujii said. “That’s what the vision is. It’s not to do it just on Twitchell Island. It’s to see if we can do it throughout the delta on subsided land.”
There are problems, however, that need investigating. How much methane is produced? Nitrous oxide?
The predictions that global climate change would bring rain in faster, denser fall is being borne out in New Hampshire. The Southwestern quadrant of the state, which was hit hard in 1999 and 2005, and along with the entire state in the spring of 2006, is underwater over large areas today. A reported 11 inches falling in some places. The average rainfall for Keene, New Hampshire, in August, one of the places hit yesterday, is 3.9 inches.
Satellite observation and number crunching have shown that rising temperatures, indeed, lead to more extreme downpours — and fewer light rains. More extreme downpours in turn, lead to flash flooding, property damage and loss of life. The poorer the area is, the worse the problem.
The observed rise in the heaviest tropical rains is about twice that produced by computer simulations used to assess how human-caused global warming could change rainfall, said the researchers. …
But this analysis, using satellite measurements, is the first to find a strong statistical link between warmth and extreme tropical downpours, the researchers said.
Like Las Vegas, Nevada yesterday for example