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Expedition drills deep in study of climate issues
Kim Westad, Victoria Times Colonist (Canada)
An oil drilling ship converted to a floating high-tech science lab is being used by the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program for a six-week expedition off Vancouver Island to study frozen methane gas deposits 300 metres beneath the seabed.
Just off the coast of Vancouver Island, a ship that looks more like an oil rig is digging deep beneath the ocean floor, unearthing chunks of ice that could tell scientists about climate change, landslides and even the next tsunami.
The gas hydrates — frozen deposits of methane gas — are brought to the surface from their origin 300 metres beneath the ocean floor and studied on board an oil-drilling ship converted to a floating high-tech science lab.
What happens deep beneath the ocean floor can have a direct impact on people and how we live, said Kathy Gillis, the director of the School of Earth and Ocean Sciences at the University of Victoria, and director of the Canadian Consortium for Ocean Drilling.
(17 October 2005)
ANWR Grizzly Attacks: They Did Everything Right
“Climate change is pissing off the bears”
Jonathan Waterman, National Geographic
A rare grizzly attack in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge may be a sign of more than just bear trouble.
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… unbeknownst to the scores of new visitors, this tundra is home to an opportunistic predator that has come to demand more and more respect. In local vernacular, it’s known as the barren ground grizzly, and it’s a different order of bear altogether.
… Although genetically identical to the eight-foot, 900-pound coastal brown bears of southern Alaska, the barren ground grizzly rarely tops six feet and 500 pounds. A scarcity of food in northern Alaska makes these grizzlies smaller, and they behave very differently from coastal brown bears. Well-fed brown bears sleep a lot and shamble around a ten-square-mile territory. In contrast, hungry barren ground grizzlies can prowl 5,000-square-mile territories, constantly sniffing the air for scent. In the Arctic—where there are no streams filled with fat salmon, no forests to provide shade or cover, and food gathering is cut short by the long winters—the omnivorous barren ground’s mission is simple: relentlessly hunt down and consume every available scrap of food.
Roots and sedges help them fend off starvation, but for thousands of years these grizzlies have preferred meat, found in fresh supply at the movable feasts that are Alaska’s legendary caribou herd migrations. Each June on the refuge’s coastal plain, caribou herds birth up to 60,000 calves, and bears can kill up to six newborns a day. But this meat supply has been dwindling as the effects of climate change become manifest in the Arctic, and the habitually famished grizzlies are finding themselves in even more desperate straits.
According to a 2002 U.S. Geological Survey report, increased spring snow and ice—a paradoxical result of global warming trends—is burying the coastal plain plants essential to caribou and grizzly diets. The caribou are decreasing in number or seeking grazing land elsewhere, and the barren ground grizzlies, bereft of this supplemental protein, have been stalking the tundra for alternatives. U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Patricia Reynolds notes that over the past five or six years, the refuge’s musk ox population has dwindled from around 300 to no more than 50. As human traffic increases in the refuge, one can only wonder if grizzlies might test them as new prey.
(October 2005)
Mentioned by Todd Hymas in Gristmill (Climate change is pissing off the bears):
The tragic story of two kayakers killed this summer by a hungry grizzly in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the focus of a captivating cautionary tale about global warming’s effects on wildlife in the latest issue of National Geographic’s Adventure Magazine…Scarce food’s been getting scarcer for caribou in the refuge and making already-hungry tundra grizzlies more and more aggressive, sometimes fatally so.
The price of cheap beef: disease, deforestation, slavery and murder
George Monbiot, The Guardian
If it’s unethical to eat British beef, it’s 100 times worse to eat Brazilian – but imports have nearly doubled this year
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For the past five years I have been at war with Farmers for Action. These are the neanderthals who have held up the traffic and blockaded the refineries in the hope of persuading the government to reduce the price of fuel. It doesn’t matter how often you explain that cheap fuel, which allows the supermarkets to buy from wherever the price of meat or grain is lowest, has destroyed British farming. They will stand in front of the cameras and make us watch as they cut their own throats.
But through gritted teeth I must admit that they have got something right. In January the caveman in chief, David Handley, warned that foot and mouth disease had not been eliminated from Brazil, and that imports of meat from that country risked bringing it back to Britain. The buyers brushed his warning aside. In the first half of this year beef imports from Brazil to the UK rose by 70%, to 34,000 tonnes. Last week an outbreak was confirmed in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso do Sul.
You would, of course, expect British producers to throw as much mud as they can at cheap imports. You would expect them to question their competitors’ hygiene standards and social and environmental impacts, and Mr Handley has done all of these things. But, to my intense annoyance, he is on every count correct.
(18 October 2005)
Climate Model Sees Extreme Future
Jamais Cascio, WorldChanging
A new set of model results from Purdue University give us a foreshadowing of what the effects of global warming-induced climate disruption will be on the nation that currently puts the most greenhouse gases into the air: the United States.
In an article to be published later this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, geophysicist Noah Diffenbaugh and colleagues Jeremy S. Pal, Robert J. Trapp and Filippo Giorgi discuss the results of a five-month supercomputer simulation of global warming across North America over this century. This simulation exercise ranks as one of the most sophisticated ever run; the model was able to consider effects on individual regions 25 kilometers square, down from 50 square kilometers used in previous models.
(18 October 2005)
Related article from Purdue University: Climate model predicts dramatic changes over next 100 years.
EU Says It Will Not Weaken Drive for Action on Climate Change
Associated Press via ENN
LUXEMBOURG — Britain insisted Monday that the European Union must work with a wide range of countries to combat climate change, but said a flexible approach to win partners would not weaken the bloc’s determination to tackle the problem.
EU environment ministers were meeting in Luxembourg to discuss efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the 25-nation bloc, which hopes to take a lead in U.N. talks next month in Montreal, Canada, on cutting pollution beyond the 2012 target set by the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.
“Colleagues were keen to leave a certain amount of flexibility, and not to be too prescriptive,” said Margaret Beckett, Britain’s secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, said after chairing the meeting of EU environment ministers.
“It is not a sign that the European Union is in some way diminishing our strong pursuit of strong action to tackle climate change,” she told a news conference. “We have to engage with other players and we cannot simply dictate.”
(18 October 2005)
Climate change means big changes in Puget Sound
Craig Welch, Seattle Times
A new report says global warming could have a sweeping impact on life in and around Puget Sound, including seaweed and other nutrients along the shore in Elliott Bay, viewed here through a camera held inside a partially submerged aquarium. The Seattle skyline is in the background.
Rising global temperatures are taking their toll on Puget Sound, as less mountain snow funnels less freshwater into estuaries, rising oceans transform salt marshes, and changes to the food web alter life for everything from lingcod to orcas, a new study says.
The report released yesterday, the first serious attempt by University of Washington scientists and the state to gauge the impact of global warming on Puget Sound, suggests that climate change will continue to echo across the ecosystem, upsetting links between plants and animals and complicating efforts to manage the threat of a growing human population.
“It’s not like we’re going to wake up tomorrow and everything will be dead,” said Jan Newton, a UW oceanographer who contributed to the 35-page report by the Puget Sound Action Team, a state agency that monitors the Sound’s health.
“But we also know that when organisms experience catastrophe, it’s most often because they’re assaulted by more than one problem at a time. The sooner we recognize that things are under pressure because of climate change, we can look at the stressors we can do something about.”
(18 October 2005)
Related stories:
Sound Warning: Scientists say the region is already feeling climate change (Seattle P-I)
Climate forecast gloomy for Sound (Tacoma News Tribune)
‘Environmental Conscience’ Urges Canadians to Tread Softly
(Profile of David Suzuki)
Cornelia Dean, NY Times
When Prince Charles asked David Suzuki a few years ago about the state of the environment, Dr. Suzuki told him, “We are in a big car heading at a brick wall at 100 miles an hour.” The assessment he offered to the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment last month was just as gloomy. “We are going right down the chute,” he said.
Dr. Suzuki, a zoologist turned environmental activist, has been sounding this alarm for years – in books, on television and radio, in newspaper columns and in coast-to-coast campaigns in his native Canada. He has “seeped into the minds of virtually every one of the 31 million Canadians,” said Joseph R. Foy, campaign director for the Western Canada Wilderness Committee, a conservation group. “He is the environmental conscience of the people.”
(18 October 2005)
