May 7, 2012, 12:20 pm By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Associated PressBirds like the Gurney’s pitta thrive in Myanmar’s rain forests.Activists in Myanmar, a biodiversity hot spot where environmental rules are practically nonexistent, worry that the country’s new openness could open the way for harmful exploitation by developers. [Associated Press]
Peru’s Health Ministry asks people to avoid beaches in Lima and north of the capital until officials can determine what has caused the deaths of hundreds of dolphins and pelicans. [CNN]
The Czech government plans a two-year moratorium on granting licenses for shale gas exploration because of unresolved environmental concerns. [Reuters]
Thousands of people around the world stage events to call attention to climate change and extreme weather in a campaign called “Connect the Dots.”[350.org]
350.orgNew Yorkers gathered at the southern tip of Battery Park in Manhattan on Saturday to draw attention to rising sea levels as part of a worldwide “Connect the Dots” rally. May 7, 2012, 7:57 am By JOANNA M. FOSTERWith spring in full swing, gardeners across the country have been gearing up for the planting season, pulling out the hose and unearthing shovels and trowels.
And while every experienced gardener knows that hoses and tools can trip up the unsuspecting lawnmower, there is evidence that they may pose risks to consumers as well.
Last week the Ecology Center, a nonprofit environmental organization based in Ann Arbor, Mich., that reviews consumer products, released a study at the Web site HealthyStuff.org on potentially hazardous chemicals in gardening tools.
The group tested nearly 200 gardening products, including hoses, gloves, kneeling pads and tools, for lead, cadmium, bromine, chlorine, phthalates and bisphenol A. Over all, they found that two-thirds of the products tested contained levels of one or more chemicals in excess of standards set for other consumer products.
Read more…
May 6, 2012, 9:15 am By MATTHEW L. WALD
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesAuditors found that the government’s cost estimate for decommissioning the Indian Point 3 reactor, right, in Buchanan, N.Y., was just 57 percent of the owner’s projection.The government does a poor job of estimating what it will cost to tear down a nuclear reactor, Congressional auditors say, and it may not be overseeing plant owners well enough to assure that they set aside enough money to do the job.
For a study it plans to issue on Monday, the Government Accountability Office scrutinized 12 of the nation’s 104 power reactors and found that for 5 of them, the decommissioning cost calculated by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission was 76 percent or less of what the reactor’s owner thought would be needed.
The most striking example was Indian Point 3 in Buchanan, N.Y., which could be forced to close by 2015 because of a licensing dispute. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission estimated the cost of decommissioning the reactor at $474.2 million, just 57 percent of the “site-specific” estimate made by Entergy, the owner, which put the figure at $836.45 million.
After reactors are retired, they must eventually be torn down and their radioactive components hauled away for burial, an expensive task. The process is full of uncertainties, including figuring out just when the plant will retire. So far reactors have generally shut down when the market for electricity softened or they ran into unexpected technical problems.
The study was requested by Representative Edward J. Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat who led a subcommittee with oversight over the commission when his party controlled the House. He pointed out that all of the 104 reactors now operating would eventually need to be decommissioned, and said that having enough money for the task was critical for protecting health and safety.
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May 5, 2012, 11:07 am By DOUGLAS M. MAINIt’s important to respect your elders, children are reminded. It seems that this goes for trees, too.
James A. Lutz/University of WashingtonResearchers surveyed a plot in Yosemite National Park, tallying above-ground biomass including live trees, snags and downed woody debris.Big, old trees dominate many forests worldwide and play crucial ecological services that aren’t immediately obvious, like providing habitat for a wide range of organisms, from fungi to woodpeckers.
Among their many other invaluable roles, the oldsters also store a lot of carbon. In a research plot in California’s Yosemite National Park, big trees (those with a diameter greater than three feet at chest height) account for only 1 percent of trees but store half of the area’s biomass, according to a study published this week in PLoS ONE.
A group led by the study’s author, James A. Lutz, a research scientist in forest ecology at the University of Washington, measured the diameter of every tree in the 63-acre plot of old-growth forest, the largest of its kind to be studied in North America. The researchers counted nearly 34,500 trees, only 489 of which were greater than one meter in diameter. “At 6 foot 2, I cannot reach all the way around a tree that big,” Dr. Lutz said.
The largest trees on site were sugar pines, followed by white firs. The champion sugar pine there is nearly 7 feet wide and 220 feet tall, and is probably 350 years old, Dr. Lutz said. Yet the site was selected because it was considered representative of average forests in the area and does not contain the most enormous individual trees.
Biomass was calculated by using species-specific equations worked out by past researchers measuring dead trees.
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May 4, 2012, 5:09 pm By THE NEW YORK TIMESThis week The Times invited readers’ questions on a long article exploring the possibility that clouds will offset some of the global warming being caused by the human release of greenhouse gases. The author of the article, Justin Gillis, responds to a sampling below. (Some of the questions have been combined or edited slightly for clarity.)
Q.
Asking as a nonexpert: how come clouds didn’t save our planet from massive warming from carbon dioxide on many occasions in the distant past?
A.
It’s an interesting question and gets at an issue I didn’t have room to cover in the article. The earth has in fact been considerably warmer in the past, and the best evidence suggests that higher levels of carbon dioxide were a central reason. Go back in time far enough and you can find eras when palm trees grew in what is now the Arctic.
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May 4, 2012, 4:01 pm By RACHEL NUWER
Heartland InstituteA billboard campaign: Ted Kaczynski, whose homemade bombs killed 3 people and wounded 23.
Drivers moving along Chicago’s inbound Eisenhower Expressway on Friday may have been surprised to see Ted Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, staring at them from a massive billboard. “I still believe in global warming. Do you?” the billboard read in large maroon letters. Just below was the Web address www.heartland.org.
Hours later, the digital billboard was gone. It seems that the ad campaign, sponsored by the conservative Heartland Institute, had bombed.
“We know that our billboard angered and disappointed many of Heartland’s friends and supporters, but we hope they understand what we were trying to do with this experiment,” the institute said late Friday afternoon said in a statement. “We do not apologize for running the ad, and we will continue to experiment with ways to communicate the ‘realist’ message on the climate.”
In opening the campaign, Heartland had said that Mr. Kaczynski would not be the only persona gazing down on Chicago’s commuters. Among his brethren would be Charles Manson, Fidel Castro, Osama bin Laden and James J. Lee, the institute said.
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May 4, 2012, 2:09 pm By MIREYA NAVARROIn a sign that New York City is getting serious about improving its poor recycling record, the city’s Department of Sanitation is appointing a recycling industry innovator as its new “deputy commissioner for recycling and sustainability.”
Department of SanitationRon GonenThe department plans to formally announce next week that Ron Gonen, 37, is assuming the newly created position to help the Bloomberg administration meet its goal of at least doubling the city’s recycling rate from the current 15 percent by the year 2017.
Mr. Gonen is a founder of Recyclebank, a company that awards points to consumers for recycling that they can redeem at local and national restaurants, stores and other retailers. He is also a co-founder of an environmental services firm that helps bring renewable energy to sport stadiums .
‘Ron’s years of work in the recycling and sustainability field perfectly matches the needs that we have at the D.S.N.Y. so that we can meet the mayor’s specific goals,” the city’s sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, said in a statement.
In an interview, Mr. Gonen said he would focus first on beefing up two areas in which New York lags other cities: the number of recycling bins placed alongside trash cans in public spaces and the curbside collections of food scraps for composting.
Read more…
May 4, 2012, 1:46 pm By DAVID JOLLYCountries have made little progress in meeting their obligations to protect fragile marine ecosystems under the international Convention on Biological Diversity, new United Nations data shows.
Chagos Conservation TrustThe Chagos Islands reserve, in the Indian Ocean, is currently the world’s largest marine protected area.Just 1.6 percent of the oceans has been set aside for marine protected areas, according to new data provided to The Times by the World Conservation Monitoring Center, part of the United Nations Environment Program. That is far below the 10 percent that nations had agreed to set aside by 2020 at a meeting in Japan in October 2010.
The latest data, while disappointing, could help to shape the debate next month at the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+20, in Rio de Janeiro. Ocean conservation will be an important topic at the conference, whose two main themes are ”a green economy in the context of sustainable development and poverty eradication” and an “institutional framework for sustainable development.”
If nations are going to keep their promises and the needs of a booming global population are to be met, the statistics ”point to an urgency of decisive and defining action now rather than in a few years’ time,” said Nick Nuttall, a spokesman for the United Nations Environment Program. The world population is expected to expand from seven billion now to nine billion by 2050.
Marine protected areas and other such reserves provide relief to ecosystems threatened by overfishing, habitat destruction, pollution and global warming. But creating them is a political challenge; closing an area to activities like fishing and oil exploration can have immediate effects on jobs and investment, even when the longer-term environmental argument is compelling.
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May 4, 2012, 12:00 pmThe Obama administration just issued a proposed rule governing hydraulic fracturing for oil and gas on public lands that will require disclosure of the chemicals used in the process for the first time, John M. Broder reports. But companies will have to reveal the composition of fluids only after they start drilling, not before, a sharp change from the government’s original proposal.
May 4, 2012, 11:15 am By THE NEW YORK TIMES
American Bird ConservancyAn interactive map shades areas where wind power is likely to pose an elevated risk to birds.Using Google Earth as a platform, the American Bird Conservancy creates an interactive Web-based map that highlights more than 2,000 places in the United States where birds are likely to be particularly vulnerable to impacts from wind energy development. [American Bird Conservancy]
A utility plans to shut down Japan’s last working nuclear reactor on Saturday, leaving the country without nuclear power for the first time in almost 50 years. [The Guardian]
Participants in an annual Kansas wheat tour find that most wheat crops are ripening two to three weeks early through the state. [Associated Press]
The governments of Kenya and Ethiopia agree to develop a new action plan to help protect the endangered Grevy’s zebra, whose population has declined from an estimated 15,000 in the 1970s to about 2,400 today. [Scientific American]
May 4, 2012, 7:39 am By MIREYA NAVARRO
Heather Ainsworth for The New York TimesTreatment tanks at a sewage plant in Auburn, N.Y. The town banned the treatment of wastewater from conventional natural gas drilling there, then thought better of it.As I report in Friday’s Times, disposing of the waste produced by natural gas drilling will become a larger and more contentious issue if New York State gives the go-ahead to horizontal hydraulic fracturing, which uses millions of gallons of fluids per well to release gas from the Marcellus Shale.
New York already deals with waste from about 6,800 active vertical and horizontal gas wells upstate. Although these wells require just a fraction of the water that would be needed for fracking in the Marcellus, they still produce waste that needs to go somewhere.
Officials with the New York Department of Environmental Conservation say that in 2010, New York’s gas wells produced more than 23 million gallons of waste, 17 million of which stayed in New York. Most of it went to sewage treatment plants or was used for de-icing roads.
Take the sewage treatment plant in Auburn, N.Y., near Syracuse. The sewage plant has treated industrial waste, including wastewater from natural gas wells, for about a decade. But last summer, a jittery city council voted to ban the practice after the state’s proposal to allow fracking brought more attention to the contamination risks of drilling in general.
Read more…
May 3, 2012, 2:01 pm By MATTHEW L. WALD As I reported in this article, two states with big volumes of military and civilian nuclear wastes are suing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to try to force it to adhere to the terms of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which called for the development of a waste repository at Yucca Mountain, near Las Vegas.
Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAn entrance to the scrapped Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada.The commission has discontinued work on evaluating the Energy Department’s onetime plan for a repository there since President Obama decided to kill the project. (The Energy Department has sought to withdraw its application for a license.)
Yucca Mountain was chosen by Congress as the repository site in 1987. Its chief backers were senators from other states that were also under consideration as waste sites, including Texas and Washington. Nevada, lacking allies, could not stop it.
The initial choice had a thin veneer of science to it – Yucca was one of several sites under consideration mostly because it was remote and the government already owned it. Further scientific and engineering work, though, exposed substantial problems with the site.
Still, the circumstances under which the project died were deemed political ones, even by the Government Accountability Office. Read more…
May 3, 2012, 1:28 pm By JUSTIN GILLIS
Josh Haner/The New York TimesIn a recent article, I mentioned that scientists are trying to use historical records and data sets to get a better handle on how clouds might respond to the warming of the planet.
It’s a crucial question because clouds are the biggest single uncertainty in the effort to forecast the future climate. Some contrarian scientists, as I wrote in my piece, assert that clouds will change in a way that largely offsets the human release of greenhouse gases. Most mainstream scientists are dubious that clouds could have such a large damping effect, but they do acknowledge substantial uncertainty. They say the bulk of the evidence suggests that clouds might have a neutral effect or might enhance planetary warming.
With the earth having already warmed modestly, scientists say it is a vexing problem to figure out whether anything has actually happened yet to clouds.
Our best observations of clouds, from a highly capable satellite now circling the Earth, go back only a bit longer than a decade. Many types of satellite and observational records stretch back well into the 20th century, but they are increasingly spotty as you go back in time. And scientists are trying to detect trends in cloud properties that are likely to be very small on a time scale of decades, so the short duration of the records really hobbles them.
Read more…
May 3, 2012, 11:04 am By BETTINA WASSENER
European Pressphoto AgencyThe 102-foot-long Turanor PlanetSolar departing from Monaco in September 2010.On Friday, if all goes well, a sleek spaceship-like catamaran will glide into Hercule Harbor in Monaco after a remarkable 19-month journey around the globe.
Since it set sail from Monaco in September 2010, the Turanor PlanetSolar, the world’s largest solar-powered boat has crossed the Atlantic and the Pacific, passed through the Panama and Suez canals and stopped in Miami; Cancún, Mexico; Brisbane, Australia; Singapore; Abu Dhabi and many places in between.
At 2.15 p.m. local time, it is expected to cross the official finish line, having proved that solar energy can power a boat all the way around the world.
PlanetSolar is the brainchild of Raphaël Domjan, who is Swiss and a former ambulance driver and mountain guide. He enlisted enough sponsors to finance the creation of the surreal vessel. The goal, he said in a telephone interview this week from aboard the ship, was to spread the message that solar power can be harnessed for far more than it is doing now.
Read more…
May 3, 2012, 7:50 am By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Bloomberg NewsConveyor belts for soft coal at a thermal power plant in Dangjin, South Korea.Blazing a trial for Asia, lawmakers in South Korea, the world’s seventh-biggest greenhouse gas emitter, approve a carbon emissions trading plan. [The Wall Street Journal]
Plants are flowering much faster than scientists had predicted in response to climate change, researchers report, with serious implications for nutrient cycles, pollination and the global food chain. [Science Daily]
A Greenpeace activist flies a paraglider over a nuclear power plant near Lyon, France, and drops a smoke bomb into a reactor to call attention to what the group sees as inadequate insecurity. [Bloomberg Businessweek]
Some 30,000 honeybees and a giant wax honeycomb are found in an attic crawl space in a 19th-century home in Cape May, N.J. Aware of the colony collapse phenomenon, the owners solicit help in getting the bees moved to a new location. [The Philadelphia Inquirer]
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