Archive for 2008

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Global Warming to Affect U.S. Transport

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Flooded roads and subways, deformed railroad tracks, and weakened bridges may be the wave of the future with continuing warming, a new study says.

Climate change will affect every type of transportation through rising sea levels, increased rainfall, and surges from more intense storms, the National Research Council said in a report released Tuesday.

Complicating matters, people continue to move into coastal areas, creating the need for more roads and services in the most vulnerable regions, the report noted.

“The time has come for transportation professionals to acknowledge and confront the challenges posed by climate change and to incorporate the most current scientific knowledge into the planning of transportation systems,” said Henry Schwartz Jr., past president and chairman of the engineering firm Sverdrup/Jacobs Civil Inc., and chairman of the committee that wrote the report.

Five Major Threats

The report cites five major areas of growing threat:

—More heat waves, requiring load limits at hot-weather or high-altitude airports and causing thermal expansion of bridge joints and rail track deformities.

(Related story: Global Warming Likely Causing More Heat Waves, Scientists Say [August 1, 2006])

—Rising sea levels and storm surges flooding coastal roadways, forcing evacuations, inundating airports and rail lines, flooding tunnels, and eroding bridge bases.

(Related story: Rising Seas Threaten China’s Sinking Coastal Cities [January 17, 2008])

—More rainstorms delaying air and ground traffic, flooding tunnels and railways, and eroding road, bridge < recent (see>, and pipeline supports.

—More frequent strong hurricanes, disrupting air and shipping service, blowing debris onto roads, and damaging buildings.

—Rising arctic temperatures thawing permafrost, resulting in road, railway, and airport runway subsidence and potential pipeline failures.

(Related story: Arctic Summers Ice Free by 2040, Study Predicts [December 12, 2006])

System Not Built for Change

The nation’s transportation system was built for local conditions based on historical weather data, but those data may no longer be reliable in the face of new weather extremes, the report warns.

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Australia’s food bowl lies empty

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

As the BBC looks at the impact of rising food prices around the world, Sydney correspondent Nick Bryant reports from Australia on how the worst drought on record has slashed its exports of wheat.

Though located in a remote corner of the planet, the fields of Australia’s food bowl are central to the worldwide price of wheat.

In this part of rural New South Wales, water-starved farms and cavernous empty grain silos have the potential to create a ripple effect which spreads around the globe.

And that is precisely what is happening right now.

Low yield

After America, Australia is normally the second largest exporter of grain, and in a good year it would hope to harvest about 25 million tonnes.

But the country remains in the grip of the worst drought in a century, which is why the 2006 crop yielded only 9.8m tonnes.

Global wheat stocks are at their lowest levels since 1979, and the ongoing Australian drought is one of the reasons why.

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Posted in Climate Change, CrashBlogging, Desertification, Food Shortages, The Perfect Storm, Water Shortages | No Comments »

Scientists warn of wheat disease

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Scientists say poorer populations in vulnerable countries could starve if a disease called Ug-99 hits yields hard enough to push up wheat prices.

There is already a global wheat shortage and UN agencies are concerned about the impact of high food prices.

Ug-99 is a form of black stem rust that prevents wheat taking up nutrients and can wipe out whole harvests.

Scientists at the John Innes Centre, in England, are trying to find wheat with a natural resistance to the disease.

Most wheat grown in Africa, Asia and China, has little resistance to Ug-99.

The BBC’s Anna Hill says scientists at the John Innes Centre are testing a wide variety of native wheats from Asia and Africa to see if they can find natural resistance to the disease and breed new varieties from them.

But this could take more than five years, by which time Ug-99 could already be causing wide spread harvest failure.

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Supersonic Sheep Impresses Police Pursuers

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

If sheep had Olympic Games, this one would be a gold medalist. A runaway sheep chased by police in northern Germany reached speeds of 45 kilometers an hour before jumping over the police car.

Police in the northern German village of Güster had their hands full on Monday when they were called out to catch an escaped sheep. “They gave chase in their vehicle but the pursuit didn’t prove easy because the animal at times ran at speeds of up to 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour,” police said in a statement.

They finally caught up with it when it briefly got its leg stuck in a fence. “An officer carefully lifted the uninjured animal from the fence and placed in the field. But the sheep evidently didn’t like its new home because it made a daring leap straight over the hood of the police car.”

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Posted in And Now for Something Completely Different | No Comments »

Saudi women make video protest

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Saudi women’s rights activists have posted on the web a video of a woman at the wheel of her car, in protest at the ban on female drivers in the kingdom.

Wajeha Huwaider talks of the injustice of the ban and calls for its abolition as she drives calmly along a highway.

She says the film was posted to mark International Women’s Day. Thousands have viewed it on the YouTube website.

The last such public show of dissent was in 1990 when dozens of women were arrested for circling Riyadh in cars.

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Posted in Culture - How not to do it, Politics - The Wrong Way, Religion - The Wrong Way | No Comments »

The EPA’s tailspin

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

– This is an editorial from Nature Magazine; one of the world’s preeminent magazines about science and for scientists.

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The director of the Environmental Protection Agency is sabotaging both himself and his agency.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is fast losing the few shreds of credibility it has left. The Bush administration has always shown more zeal in protecting business interests than the environment (see Nature 447, 892–893; 2007). But the agency’s current administrator, Stephen Johnson, a veteran EPA toxicologist who was promoted to the top slot in 2005, has done so with reckless disregard for law, science or the agency’s own rules — or, it seems, the anguished protests of his own subordinates.

On 27 February, to take the first of two examples that surfaced last week, Senator Barbara Boxer (Democrat, California) used a routine budget hearing to give Johnson a grilling. Why hadn’t he given her state permission to regulate the carbon dioxide emissions of vehicle exhausts? California needs a waiver from the EPA to regulate in this way, and in the past such waivers have been granted easily. And, Boxer reminded him via a series of leaked memos and PowerPoint presentations, Johnson’s own top-level staff begged him to sign the waiver in this case. “This is a choice only you can make,” one colleague wrote to him. “But I ask you to think about the history and the future of the agency in making it. If you are asked to deny this waiver, I fear the credibility of the agency that we both love will be irreparably damaged.”

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Posted in Capitalism & Corporations, CrashBlogging, Politics - The Wrong Way, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

World `Squandered’ Decade in Climate Debate, Top Scientist Says

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

– This reminds me of something James Gustave Speth said in, Red Sky at Morning:

The results of two decades of international environmental negotiations are disappointing. It is not that what has been agree upon is wrong or useless. But, the bottom line is that these treaties and their associated agreements and protocols do not drive the changes that are needed. Thus far, the climate convention is not protecting the climate, the biodiversity convention is not protecting biodiversity, the desertification convention is not preventing desertification, and even the older and stronger Convention on the Law of the Sea is not protecting fisheries. Nor are they poised to do so in the immediate future. On the big issues the trends of deterioration continue. With few exceptions, our instruments of choice, international environmental law, is not yet changing them, and the hour is late.

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March 11 (Bloomberg) — World leaders wasted a decade debating whether global warming is happening, and now need to act quickly to limit its effects, a former chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said.

The pace of greenhouse-gas emissions risks locking in thousands of years of higher sea levels, as well as damaging marine ecosystems such as coral reefs, melting sea-ice and acidifying the oceans, said Robert Watson, now chief scientific adviser at the U.K. environment ministry.

European nations, which have taken a lead in reducing output of pollution linked to global warming, have “failed miserably” to get the U.S., the largest industrialized emitter, to follow suit, or to work well with China and India, Watson said. China’s emissions growth will swamp pollution cuts planned by the U.K., Germany and other developed nations, U.S. researchers said.

“Have we squandered the last 10 years? Largely yes,” Watson told delegates today at the Oceanology International conference in London. “We should have been acting far more to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions over the last 10 years, especially trying to get technology transfer with developing countries and bringing the United States on board.”

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Perpetuity Shorter in Wyoming

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

– In spite of the fact that my wife and I are working our way towards working in land conservation in future years, I have had strong doubts about many of the land conservation efforts going on today. Like, for instance, when green groups band together and buy large swaths of rain forest and put it all into non-development trusts in coordination with the local governments.

– It all sounds so good on paper but what few folks think about, in my opinion, is that over the long term these ‘paper’ agreements will only have force and be honored so long as the structures (groups, governments, and trusts) behind them continue to have traction and power. If the world begins to get unstable and wars are breaking out over resources and it all gets even more dog-eat-dog than it is now, none of these agreements ‘in perpetuity’ are going to be respected.

– Hell, the Brazilian and Indonesian governments, in perfect health and stability, cannot keep the loggers and miners out of their forests. Who can imagine that if folks are starving, say, in Guyana and the central government there is on the ropes, that some idealistic agreement with green groups based far away on the other side of the planet to only allow eco-tourism activities in the local forests will be honored?

Yeah, right. I think the words ‘in perpetuity’ are going to be ever more, shall we say, flexible as time goes on.

– Along this line comes this excellent piece from the Blog, Only in it for the Gold, wherein Michael discusses how ‘in perpetuity’ is getting a bit shorter in Wyoming…

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To “Perpetuity Shorter in Wyoming“… ➡

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Monsanto Threatens Biodiversity

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

The genetically modified MON810 maize seed has just been banned. Marie-Monique Robin draws an alarming portrait of Monsanto, the firm that invented it.

“You should carry out an investigation into Monsanto. We all need to know the truth about this American multinational, seeing that it is laying hands on the world’s seeds, and therefore on the world’s food.” The request came from an Indian farmer; it did not fall on deaf ears, for the journalist nearby was Marie-Monique Robin, who was an experienced investigative reporter and had already made several documentaries on biodiversity and what threatens it. The name was familiar to her: a North-American multinational with a frightful record, one of the industrial age’s worst polluters, world leader on the GM plants market, which threatens to grow into a monopoly that will jeopardize food safety the world over.
Marie-Monique Robin plunged into the investigation and spent days and nights on the internet. Her first surprise was to find that “Everything was there, and had been there, before our very eyes, for quite a long time. The company has been so often taken to court that lots of its in-house data are now de-classified and available on line. Then I went to check the data in the field.”

For three years the journalist travelled the world, all over South and North America, Europe, and Asia. She meticulously put the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together. Although Monsanto’s chief executives refused to be interviewed, she made a point of giving the company’s viewpoint through written and video records. Nicolas Hulot makes this clear in the preface: “Her book is no pamphlet based on fantasies and gossip. It brings to light a dreadful reality.” The company’s story as told by Marie-Monique Robin is instructive indeed. Orwell himself would have done no better.

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Posted in Biodiversity Loss, Capitalism & Corporations, Social Breakdown, The Perfect Storm | No Comments »

Ozone Rules Weakened at Bush’s Behest

Friday, March 14th, 2008

– It could be argued that one of the few clear wins that the environmental movement has had in recent decades against the many creeping threats against global ecology has been humanity’s response to the ozone depletion threat.

– Now our president has seen fit to dilute part of this success. He will not be remembered well by history and all the generations that will follow us.

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EPA Scrambles To Justify Action

The Environmental Protection Agency weakened one part of its new limits on smog-forming ozone after an unusual last-minute intervention by President Bush, according to documents released by the EPA.

Ozone holeEPA officials initially tried to set a lower seasonal limit on ozone to protect wildlife, parks and farmland, as required under the law. While their proposal was less restrictive than what the EPA’s scientific advisers had proposed, Bush overruled EPA officials and on Tuesday ordered the agency to increase the limit, according to the documents.

“It is unprecedented and an unlawful act of political interference for the president personally to override a decision that the Clean Air Act leaves exclusively to EPA’s expert scientific judgment,” said John Walke, clean-air director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

The president’s order prompted a scramble by administration officials to rewrite the regulations to avoid a conflict with past EPA statements on the harm caused by ozone.

Solicitor General Paul D. Clement warned administration officials late Tuesday night that the rules contradicted the EPA’s past submissions to the Supreme Court, according to sources familiar with the conversation. As a consequence, administration lawyers hustled to craft new legal justifications for the weakened standard.

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