NOAA chief warns of rapid onset of ‘unprecedented’ changes in oceans
A combination of climate change, overfishing, pollution and other threats is changing the world’s oceans at an “unprecedented” rate, the head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said yesterday.
“For the oceans as well as the rest of the planet, the rates and scales and kinds of changes that are under way now are absolutely unprecedented,” NOAA chief Jane Lubchenco said in remarks at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. “And they are happening even faster than our ability to measure or track some of them, much less have institutions that are responding in a fashion that is appropriate.”
She touted the national ocean policy that President Obama implemented by executive order last year. The policy created a National Ocean Council to coordinate federal planning on a wide range of issues, including climate change, pollution, oil drilling and fisheries.
It also calls for regional bodies to use marine spatial and regional planning, a kind of ocean zoning, to balance competing uses of coastal waters and protect ecologically sensitive areas.
That kind of approach will be important as the climate changes, Lubchenco said.
“It’s pretty mind-boggling to think that we are changing the actual chemistry of the ocean, the physical structure of the ocean, the biological contents of the ocean,” she said. “The scale at which our activities play out is really beyond most people’s ability to comprehend.”
You Have No Idea What Mowing Your Lawn Is Doing To The Planet
Imagine a scenario where tens of millions of Americans are condemned by their own illusions to hours of hot, sweaty, grueling unpaid labor every week involving expensive and potentially dangerous chemicals, ear-shattering machines and fuels that pollute the air and water.
This isn’t some nightmarish dystopian science-fiction plot. It’s happening right now as this nation’s suburban homeowners renew their unending and damaging war against nature to preserve, protect and pamper the foreign organisms that make up the American lawn.
“It’s a constant battle to keep a lawn a lawn,” says Judy Prill, an analyst with the state Department of Environmental Protection’s Office of Pollution Prevention. “If you let it go, it will grow back into a forest. “¦ That’s what it wants to do here in New England.”
If you’re skeptical about the potential harm this lawn obsession can do, consider the following: Americans reportedly dump more than 80 million pounds of pesticides and other chemicals onto their lawns and gardens every year. Aside from the potential risks for people and animals coming into direct contact with this toxic crap, pesticides get washed into streams and rivers, ending up as marine pollution in vital places like Long Island Sound.
The EPA also estimates that 5 percent of all air pollution in the U.S. is caused by lawnmowers and leaf blowers, and that Americans spill something like 17 million gallons of gasoline every year while attempting to fill up their lawn machines. That’s more than the Exxon Valdez spilled up in Alaska.
Striking ecological impact on Canada’s Arctic coastline linked to global climate change
Scientists from Queen’s and Carleton universities head a national multidisciplinary research team that has uncovered startling new evidence of the destructive impact of global climate change on North America’s largest Arctic delta.
“One of the most ominous threats of global warming today is from rising sea levels, which can cause marine waters to inundate the land,” says the team’s co-leader, Queen’s graduate student Joshua Thienpont. “The threat is especially acute in polar regions, where shrinking sea ice increases the risk of storm surges.”
By studying growth rings from coastal shrubs and lake sediments in the Mackenzie Delta region of the Northwest Territories – the scene of a widespread and ecologically destructive storm surge in 1999 – the researchers have discovered that the impact of these salt-water surges is unprecedented in the 1,000-year history of the lake.
“This had been predicted by all the models and now we have empirical evidence,” says team co-leader Michael Pisaric, a geography professor at Carleton. The Inuvialuit, who live in the northwest Arctic, identified that a major surge had occurred in 1999, and assisted with field work.
OVERNIGHT ENERGY: Picking up the pieces
State of Play: This week’s failure of Senate GOP and Democratic bills on expanding offshore drilling and nixing oil industry tax breaks respectively highlighted very deep divisions on energy.
But several lawmakers aren’t giving up on finding openings for bipartisan deals – maybe modest ones – despite the strained environment.
On Thursday the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on legislation sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) aimed at boosting deployment of electric vehicles.
Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said several days ago that he hopes the plan can advance.
And next week Bingaman hopes to mark up several bills, including bipartisan measures aimed at speeding carbon capture and storage technologies toward commercialization.
House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.) said Wednesday that he is planning to meet with Bingaman in the next two weeks to look for areas of common ground, including drilling safety, which is the subject of one bill that Bingaman may try and move next week.
Reid, green groups plot strategy on Clean Air Act defense
Top officials with major environmental groups met with Senate Democratic leadership Wednesday evening to discuss how to protect Clean Air Act programs from GOP attacks.
“I think we all agreed in the room what a high priority it is for public health. We think we have achieved quite a bit so far this year, but we know there will be further attacks from the House Republicans,” said Senate Majority Whip Richard Durbin (D-Ill.).
He spoke briefly with reporters after exiting a meeting in Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office that included senior officials with various environmental groups such as Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune and John Podesta, who heads the Center for American Progress.
The meeting comes as Republicans – and some centrist Democrats – in both chambers are hoping to block or delay EPA climate change rules, and scale-back some other air quality rules that industry groups allege are burdensome.
A bill to block EPA greenhouse gas rules passed the House in April, but the same measure – and Democratic alternatives to delay the rules or limit their reach – failed on the Senate floor.
More than half of U.S. energy goes to waste – but not for long
Researchers at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory estimate that the U.S. loses more than half the energy it generates. That doesn’t include heating and cooling loss from buildings, just energy that vanishes into the atmosphere from machines, industrial processes and electronic equipment. In order to reclaim and recycle some of this energy, the researchers are developing a highly efficient thermal waste heat energy converter. The new device would do double duty. It would cool down electronic equipment including photovoltaic cells in order to keep them functioning efficiently, while capturing the waste heat to generate electricity.
ORNL’s new thermal energy converter The team is developing a device that is only about one millimeter square, and each one delivers only 10 milliwatts – at best. That sounds like a drop in the bucket but it’s nothing to sneeze at when you attach hundreds of these devices to, say, a tiny object such as a computer chip. The principle is based on pyroelectricity, which refers to the ability of some materials to produce a temporary charge when they are heated or cooled. The catch has been getting pyroelectric devices to operate at a high enough level of efficiency to make them cost-effective. The ORNL team came up with a relatively inexpensive cantilevered structure that promises to do just that (a cantilever, broadly speaking, is a structural beam supported only at one end).
Other ways to harvest waste energy from machines
ORNL has gone the high tech road, which is years away from commercial development. However, more conventional means are already available. One example is an a new energy harvesting system up at Thule Air Force Base in the Arctic Circle, which captures exhaust heat from the facility’s generators. You can also harvest kinetic energy from a machine’s vibrations, or from the braking systems in vehicles, cranes, trains and other stop-and-go equipment.
Previous in TP Climate Progress
Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga
“On Thursday the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee will hold a hearing on legislation sponsored by Sens. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) aimed at boosting deployment of electric vehicles.”
This isn’t too surprising a partnership. Oregon supports green initiatives in general, and Tennessee is home to a Nissan battery factory and car assembly plant. Gotta bring the pork to get Republican support, I guess.
Not directly related to the items above, but the “news” posts are where us readers tend to post links to other climate related news. Anyway, SciAm says “U.S. weather extremes show ‘new normal’ climate”
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=us-weather-extremes-show-new-normal
“Imagine a scenario where tens of millions of Americans are condemned by their own illusions to hours of hot, sweaty, grueling unpaid labor every week involving expensive and potentially dangerous chemicals, ear-shattering machines and fuels that pollute the air and water.”
as I type, my neighbour is cranking up his huge riding lawnmower, to mow mow mow his large, useless wasteland of grass.
we are surrounded by these people. it can go from early morning till late at night, from friday to sunday. It can be 7 days a week.
It’s as noisy as an industrial park.
many people spend much of their free time, riding around in circles on these noisy, stinking, destructive machines, mowing, and removing it to make it perfect, for another few days.
and few of them spend any time in their yard other than to work there.
As bad a mowing lawns is what I find real stupid is the mowing of road sides. I understand the desire to keep signs and intersections cleared up some but the thousands of miles of grass along roads that is maintained is simply perplexing. Waste of gas and destruction of habitat. Stupid.
I’d like to request that we say out loud, “ocean acidification from our CO2 emissions”, when talking about this. That’s the “chemistry change” mentioned above by NOAA. Shell based creatures and coral reefs thinning, weakening, and dissolving at the base of the food web. This is so fundamental that we could remove the entire global warming threat and this alone would be enough reason to stop the burning of fossil fuels. And we don’t mention it enough or include it often enough in our arguments for action.
I have a question about this :
Sibi Pakistan -
Temperature
120 °F . Heat Index: 125 °F.
http://www.wunderground.com/global/stations/41697.html
————
Namely how much wet bulb temperature humans can stand, after weeks of this kind of heat. It’s 99F degrees at midnight.
Does ORNL’s interesting MEMS generator produce AC or DC? If it is DC, it’s a wonderful complement to PV panels and, at the right cost, solves the intermittency challenge.
I agree that we need much less of that, MarkF. If people want lawns, they could at least keep lawns a reasonable size, maybe grow food on the rest, and choose regionally appropriate newer grass varieties. Crazy, I know. But the article is a bit crazy too, in comparing a presumably rough estimate of mower gasoline spillage (much of which evaporates) with a heavy crude spill in Alaska.
Mark S, out of curiosity, what do you mean by “solves the intermittency challenge”? I can see it evening things out a bit, but would there be enough residual heat in an “idling” solar panel to actually solve the problem without things like storage or natural gas backup?
I wish our EPA types would check their figures before discrediting the rest of us enviros. Now way do about 50 million lawn mowing folks spill 17 million gallons of fuel, which would be more than a quart per person.
That’s a quart _per annum_ per person.
Per month that’s not very much – esp when I see clumsy people filling and spilling fuel containers at service stations. If they handle them that badly at home that’d account for a fair amount. Add that to the occasional kick-overs of uncapped containers and the numbers add up pretty quickly.
A 10 year drought with level 5 water restrictions is a guaranteed cure for a lawn addiction for all bar the very hardest cases.
Re the oceans, I think these changes should be much more publicized as they seem rarely to be in the news although the continuing degradation of them is the really big news. While the price of seafood has gone through the roof, there seems to be little understanding of the web of life that begins in the sea. Whales are a big draw card so perhaps we need to develop some sexy angle about climate change that features the future of whales and plankton, ME
A new report on the Upper Big Branch mine disaster is out, this one from a team set up by then-governor Joe Manchin. Given the source, one might have expected the report to be rather coal-friendly, but it slams Massey for a cultural antipathy to safety, and for excessive political influence!
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/20/us/20mine.html?hp
“Project Geiger”, launched by Interpol and the IAEA in 2005 has now detected 2,500 incidents of illicit trafficking of nuclear and radiological materials.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2011/05/19/3221652.htm
Adaption, Eaarth style…
Maldives plans to build a floating 27 hole golf course.
http://www.terradaily.com/reports/Floating_green_golf_course_for_Maldives_999.html
“She touted the national ocean policy that President Obama implemented by executive order last year. The policy created a National Ocean Council to coordinate federal planning on a wide range of issues, including climate change, pollution, oil drilling and fisheries.
It also calls for regional bodies to use marine spatial and regional planning, a kind of ocean zoning, to balance competing uses of coastal waters and protect ecologically sensitive areas.”
What a load of nothing: She did nothing when the Navy issued its pathetic excuse for a DEIS in the Pacific Northwest, and in fact NOAA signed off on the EIS in which the Navy claims that its sonar as well as other “training exercises” do not threaten a number of marine species (some on the ESA) and will supposedly take measure to “mitigate” the damage. Read the EIS and if the Navy plans to even do what it claims it will do, I would be very very surprised. There is no one, no authority to check on the Navy’s doing so and no consequences for failing to do so.
Of course, despite the EIS & claims of mitigation, the Navy filed a “kill” permit, ie., authorization (from NOAA) to so injure a number of marine species (protected) that they die. The Navy asked for authorization to kill more individuals than may appear in off the PNW, because there hasn’t been that much research on numbers of some of the species. But hey, O & Ms. L, & NOAA really really care, don’tcha know.
And what is NOAA doing about the dolphins that have appeared on the east coast–that are deaf. But it couldn’t possibly be from Navy “training exercises.”
Neither NOAA nor Obama have ANY problem w/the DOD destroying marine life, polluting the oceans (the DOD is exempted from much of the CWA and CAA). As long as we spend what is it 3 times more than the next nation on the MIC, marine life will be depleted, pollution will increase.
So L’s statement is nothing, it’s just a general feel-good statement, designed to make people think that O cares, when what he actually does is what his corporate masters wish.
You can have a lawn without the chemicals or the fuels. Since I stopped using chemicals, started using electric tools and planted a garden, my yard has greened up and attracted all sorts of birds, lizards, and predatory bugs. An electric weedwacker is all I use to kill weeds.
Yes, Merrelyn. Water restrictions.
My laundry window now has a lovely black pipe adorning its lower region – one way to get some water, soapy if needs be, outside onto a bit of lawn under the clothesline and into the roots of some very desperate trees. A not-so-designer way to ‘connect’ indoors and outdoors.
Meanwhile, in Victoria in Australia, the state ‘Liberal’ regime, after the mandatory period of posing as that which they are not, and never will be, ie sane and rational, has decided to give the go-ahead to a brown coal gasification pilot plant. They had some fall guy from the local EPA (we ape all Amerkan institutes, down to the names and acronyms)make the environmentally sensitive announcement. He promised ‘world’s best practise’, which, hereabouts is a familiar, meaningless verbal infelicity, that means, in reality, the opposite of what it proclaims. ‘Tough love’ is the worst such verbal obscenity, when applied to nasty, vicious and coercive socially regressive class vengeance wreaked on the weakest and most vulnerable in society-for their own good and out of the kindness of our hearts, naturally.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110518131427.htm
Species Extinction Rates Have Been Overreported, New Study Claims — But Global Extinction Crisis Remains Very Serious
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It seems that this paper only covers land species and does not say anything about ocean species. Is that correct?
We’re saved! There is an Earth 2.0!
First Habitable Exoplanet? Climate Simulation Reveals New Candidate That Could Support Earth-Like Life
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110516080124.htm
And it is only 20 light years away. We’ll need to get used to weighing 7 times an much as we do on Earth 1.0. But will deniers trust the climate models used? Oh well, we just leave then behind.
@adelady:
Since i’m doing graywater, and have been for years, (I’m on a well), be very sure the laundry detergent you use is safe for garden watering. I found Ecos liquid, which is available in the US. Most other detergents add salt to your garden.
Adelady #18. Yes, we saved some trees with the washing water but all over the city the losses were huge and many people swapped their lawns for native groundcovers which is what we all should have been doing in the first place anyway, ME
catman, never fear, we chose wisely. Our soil is safe from that problem.
Mike #21, most denialists I have met already weigh about seven times what they ought to, and the disadvantages of such a ‘Pickwickian bodily habitus’ from the point of view of blood circulation, crucially to the cerebrum, is tragically apparent.
Finding Mulga’s comments at the end of so many posts all at the same time is of course an absolute delight including the comment here at #25 above, and as another in the long list of complete misunderstandings of Jesus teachings fundamentalist-deniers appear to want to weigh more like 7 times 70 what they might.