And the Nobel Peace Prize goes to … Al Gore?

I thought this would be a good article since we have just recently seen Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, in class. The article indicates that former Vice President Al Gore was nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, for doing exactly what we saw him doing in the movie…travelling around the world to bring attention to the dangers of global warming. As we have looked into, climate change is often looked over in the government due to the wrong people in power and the influence of big companies. To counteract this, Al Gore has done everything his power to put climate change on the agenda, and he was successful.

As Vice President to Bill Clinton, Gore had also done much to push for climate measures, including the familiar Kyoto Treaty. Since then, as we know, he has campaigned worldwide, and his documentary even has an oscar nomination.

I am very glad that Gore is being considered for this nomination, for he has put so much of his energy voluntarily into such a good cause, and it’s about time he received a little something else as a reward and as something he will be remembered by. Also, if Gore is to win, this will put even more attention and media on him and his causes, hopefully to tilt people and the government into drawing up climate saving acts. And, as we all know, for Gore, the thing that would be much more rewarding than the Nobel Peace Prize would be a cured, safe, and lasting environment. It’s going to take some time, but it’s definitly achievable.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16920923/

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Warming Seas Send Big-Headed Fish Deeper

Once again another negative effect of global warming has surfaced in an article I read today.  Global climate change, as we have discovered, warms oceans which declines fish stock.  However, the eelpouts, an eel like fish that was used in this new study to get more information, are the first to go deeper and see how warmer seas are linked to how fishes take in oxygen.

A study was recently done to see the relationship between sea temperatures and eelpouts which uncovered that the oxygen levels of the North and Baltic Seas have dropped due to increasing temperatures over the past 50 years, reducing fish populations.  They also found out in the study that eelpouts need more oxygen in warmer waters, reducing the number of eelpouts as well.  In a summary, scientists observed that

Difficulty in taking up oxygen via respiration and blood circulation, caused by the warming waters, proved to be the key factor in diminishing the size of the fish stock.

Further studies showed that global climate change effected fish by finding that as average summer temperatures increased, the fish population decreased.

This problem isn’t going to get any better if something is not done.  We need to get a firm hold on this issue to more effects don’t keep arising and this one doesn’t get worse, or even lead to species of fish extinction.  For animals are delicate and tolerate a limited range of environmental conditions, and once out of this range the effects are catastrophic.  Fish in the North Sea have evolved to tolerate a wider range of temperatures than fish elsewhere due to the large seasonal fluctuations there. However, warming waters and their impact on oxygen supply can stress fish to the point that their thermal tolerance range is thrown off and they perish, the scientists said.   Fish can’t just keep adapting to the different ways we effect the environment forever, some stability needs to be achieved.

Image Credits: Wikipedia

Sweden Hopes To Be Totally Green By 2020

As gas prices are at record level and we continue to diminish our world’s fossil fuels, Sweden has taken a step up in a bold move to hopefully pave the way for the rest of the world.  Sweden has made an amazing pledge to phase out fossil fuel use by 2020.  The country currently uses renewable resources for 26% of its energy, but now with hard work from Sweden’s government and consumers they hope to reach 100%.

In place of gasoline, Sweden has strongly adopted the use of methane made from garbage to run their vehicles, a great way to use waste.  A remarkable fifteen percent of all cars in Sweden currently run on this new energy source, in large part thanks to the environmentally aware government of Sweden, that gives out numerous incentives lessening your impact on the environment.  The automobile industry is helping as well, as

Volvo Trucks intends to be the first non-polluting heavy industry by later in 2007. If all goes as planned, the factory will emit no greenhouse gases.

Some of the things Sweden has adopted to stay away from fossil fuels is using wood pellets to heat their homes and recycling even what goes down the toilet to go through machines and be transformed to warm city apartments.

It is very warming to hear that a government has finally stepped up and made a drastic change in their country’s way of doing this to better help the environment and make it more sustainable.  Hopefully, Sweden will be an example for all, and other countries will take note of Sweden’s move and adopt something similar for themselves.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16455271/

Image Credit: Wikimedia

 

Chicken Fat May Be Next Biofuel Golden Goose

I read an encouraging article in the Sun Times today that shows that we starting to turn to a cheap waste product as a possible fuel option.  In part thanks to the efforts of Jerry Bagby, chicken fat will now be a more abundant biofuel. 

Bagby found a well that no one else was using and gathered up $5 million with a friend to build a new biodiesel plant on the lonely croplands outside the southeast Missouri town of Dexter.  Bagby and his friend hope to exploit the overlooked natural resource chicken fat because of it’s local abundance due to the nearby Tyson Foods Inc. poultry plant.  The fat used to be shipped out of state to used as a cheap ingredient in pet food, soap, and other products.  Now, Bagby and his partner plan to refine the substance, mix it with soybean oil, and produce about three million gallons of biodiesel annually. 

This would have a strong impact on the biodiesel industry, as today only a tiny fraction of biodiesel is made from chicken fat, for most is made from soybean oil, about 90%.  The new use of chicken fat is a result from the high cost of soybean oil, about 33 cents a pound while chicken fat is a mere 19 cents a pound.  This would be very profitable for our nation, and is becoming more popular as more and more meat corporations join the deal.  Tyson announced it has established a renewable energy division that will begin functioning this year, and Perdue Farms Inc. and Smithfield Foods Inc. are taking similar actions.  Within no time it will become a major part of the economy, and in fact, the professor of economics at the University of Minnesota, Vernon Eidman:

..estimates that within five years, the U.S. will produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel, and half of it will be made from animal fat.

It is very promising to see this big change, for the shift to animal fat as a fuel stock could make the biodiesel industry a reliable fuel source for U.S. trucking fleets.  This is great for the environment, and very profitable for the economy. 

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Researchers Say Warming May Change Amazon

If something is not done to stop or slow down global warming, the world’s largest rainforest could turn into a grassy savannah before the end of the century.  This will be a result of substantially higher temperatures, between five and eight degrees, and substantially lower rainfall, decreasing about fifteen and twenty percent, all until 2100. 

Fortunately, these are extreme conditions, and indicate what will happen if governments don’t do anything to slow down global warming and if deforestation continues spreading as it does now.  With action taken and deforestation reduced, the temperature will only rise about three to five degrees, and the rainforest will remain. 

To achieve this goal, researches have made it clear that we all need to work together to lower our emissions of greenhouse gases.  This includes the slowing of deforestation as well, which is also a major factor that is bringing down the Amazon and mainly an issue in Brazil.  As scientists say:

Destroying trees through burning contributes to global warming, releasing about 370 million tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year — about 5 percent of the world total… 

Therefore, the preservation of beautiful land that makes up 60% of Brazil, contains one-fifth of the world’s freshwater, and about 30% of the world’s plant and animal species, many that still need to be discovered, will be only one large benefit of slowing global warming.  

http://www.enn.com/today.html?id=11952

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Study: Louisiana Slipping Slowly Into Gulf

A study done by scientists studying the coasts of Louisiana report that Louisiana is not only sinking, but slowly sliding into the Gulf of Mexico.  This will effect the city of New Orleans’ plans and force them to create bigger and better levees, and change the ways engineers will have to build the levees and draw lines across the coast to identify areas that should and shouldn’t be protected.

As outrageous and catastrophic as this sounds, the people of Louisiana don’t have much to worry about yet, as it is sinking at an extremely slow speed.  The movement is triggered by

by deep underground faults slipping under the enormous weight of sediment dumped by the Mississippi River.

The data that proves this has been collected by GPS’s over the past 20 years, and the data collected from this year indicate that it has moved the distance of about two credit cards.  Scientists are still trying to fully understand this new theory, and their is much debate on exactly what is happening.

Some scientists believe oil and natural gas extraction in the middle and late 20th century caused much of the sinking; others say the land is caving in because the Mississippi River and other waterways were straightjacketed by levees, which stopped floodwaters from replenishing the soil.

And some scientists have suggested the debate over subsidence is overstated.

As seen, it is still unclear what exactly is happening, but it is evident that indeed something is happening.  And until scientists gain a full understanding of the situation will engineers be able to start incorporating this new threat into thier construction.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16435425/

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Ancient Ice Shelf Breaks Free In Canadian Artic

It was pretty discouraging to here yet another story of a bad effect of global warming.  In this article, scientists have discovered that a giant shelf of ice has snapped free from Ellesmere Island, an island about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Artic.  The Ayles Ice Shelf as it is called broke off about 16 months ago, with climate change the leading cause.  Picked up by satellite imaging, the aftermath was that:

Within one hour of breaking free, the shelf had formed as a new ice island, leaving a trail of icy boulders floating in its wake.

The ice shelf had been in place for thousands of years, and was one of six major ice shelves remaining in Canada’s Artic.  The event is considered to be one of the biggest of its kinda in Canada in the past three decades.  All this, as best summed up by Luke Copland, head of the new global ice lab at the University of Ottawa, as he said:

….the break was likely due to a combination of low accumulations of sea ice around the mass’s edges as high winds blew it away, as well as one of the Arctic’s warmest  temperatures on record. The region was 5.4 degrees F above average in the summer of 2005.

This is way too high, and only continues to rise.  Something needs to be done to slow down these bad effects of global warming before the rest of the ice shelves are broken off.  For the ice shelves have decreased by as much as ninety percent in only the past one-hundred years, so the risk is very high.  If something is not done, this feature of the landscape is in danger of altogether disappearing from Canada, and the floating shelves will drift into busy shipping routes.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16390346/

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Australia Wages War on Cane Toads

I thought this would be an interesting article because we just saw a movie in class on the cane toad problem.  However, in the movie, the cane toad problem was only beginning to erupt, and things didn’t seem to be too bad.  But now the problem is spreading and its going to take Australia’s military to handle it.

About seventy years ago 101 of the toads were brought in from Hawaii in an attempt to control the cane beetle which was hurting the efficiency of the sugar cane industry.  However, the invasive species failed to complete its task, and its population began growing in large amounts, spreading 1900 miles from northeast Queensland to Darwin, amounting to a whopping current 200 million.

Small groups in Darwin have taken up the task in catching them and stopping them, and many individuals have taken it upon themselves to kill as many as they can find with as much as a golf club.  As Rob said in his similar article, many of the residents would decorate the carcasses and sell them to the tourists.  However the toads continue to grow in great numbers and even become stronger, as the article says:

Since their introduction cane toads have evolved bigger legs to help them move faster, expanding their territory westward by around 40 kilometers (25 miles) a year.

Therefore, former small and not very efficient methods are no longer acceptable, and Australia has decided to use their military to now take out the toads and stop them from covering any more of the continent.  Because of their poisonous skin, they are killing off more and more of Australia’s native species, including snakes and goanna lizards, because the native animals weren’t bred to adapt to the toad.   As we have learned in class, the introduction of an invasive species as a control is very dangerous and risky, and damage is almost always done to the environment.  This proves as another example, for now the entire continent of Australia has a large issue in their hands, all in an attempt to make more money in their industry.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16361758/

Image Credit: Wikimedia

Borneo Rainforests Yield Secrets of New Species

It is very encouraging to hear that yet another highly biodiverse area of the world is going to be strongly conserved again in an article i read the other day.  Here, in Borneo, a southeast Asian island, a new species of a very tiny fish was discovered in Borneo’s acidic blackwater peat swamps, only one of 52 new species of plants and animals that scientists have identified in this area threatened by habitat destruction.  And the number does not stop there as scientists continue to discover more and more. 

The Heart of Borneo, where most of the new species are being found, is a 220,000 square kilometer mountainous region covered with equatorial rainforest in the center of the island.  It is very important to the environment as Stuart Chapman, WWF international coordinator of the Heart of Borneo Programme says,

These forests are also vital because they are the source of most of the island’s major rivers, and act as a natural “fire-break” against the fires that have ravaged the lowlands this year.

However, this island is at great risk, and conservationists have been warning for years that Borneo could lose almost all its lowland forest and that the need to conserve the habitat and species of the world’s third largest island is urgent.  The threat comes about as large areas of its rainforest are cleared for rubber, oil palm, and pulp production.  The clearing is occuring at a great speed, leaving only about half of the orginal forest left.  The land is very important to the world, and if something is not done, we will lose a great opportunity.  As Chapman says,

The remote and inaccessible forests in the Heart of Borneo are one of the world’s final frontiers for science and many new species continue to be discovered here. We are just waiting for the next surprise.

Some of the new species that have been found within the last decade are a new type of catfish with a sticky stomach, six new species of Siamese fighting fish, 260 insects, 30 freshwater fish, seven frogs, six lizards, five crabs, two snakes and a toad and 50 new plant species, and many more.  However, the government is finally taking action to slow down the island’s urbanization and habitat destruction, for:

At a meeting of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity held last March in Curitiba, Brazil, the three Bornean governments – Brunei Darussalam, Indonesia and Malaysia – declared their commitment to support an initiative to conserve and sustainably manage the Heart of Borneo.  Conservationists now hope that they will finalize a formal joint declaration to put the Heart of Borneo on the their list of top conservation priorities.

Image Credits: Wikimedia

  

Britain To Construct World’s Largest Offshore Wind Farm

Two gigantic offshore wind farms, the London Array, which will be the world’s largest when completed, and the Thanet are to be built in the outer Thames Estuary.  The energy generated from them both, about 1.3 gigawatts, will be enough to power one million of London’s three million homes.  This is very encouraging that our world is starting to more strongly acquire other means of obtaining energy that are sustainable and much less harmful to the environment.  This is a clear step that we are beginning to move in the right path.  Environment Secretary David Miliband said on the subject:

By issuing the licences to build the world’s largest offshore wind farms in the Thames Estuary we are re-enforcing the UK’s commitment to renewable energy and combating climate change and ocean acidification.

Over a four year period, the wind farms will rise from the sea 20 kilometers off the Kent and Essex coasts, and consist of over 400 turbines, each with the potential to generate anywhere from three to seven megawatts of power.  At completion, they will occupy an area 232 square kilometers in size stretching between Margate and Clacton.  The development is also planned in two phases to allow bird impacts from the first phase to be assessed before confirmation of the second phase is given, because everyone knows the impact windfarms can unfortunately have on birds.  The two windfarms will have a profound impact on London and its energy, and:

The two projects will contribute to the government’s stated ambition – set out in the Energy Review – to deliver a five-fold increase in the UK’s renewable energy resource by 2020.

This huge plan for offshore windfarms is proving thusfar to be a great success, and was welcomed by tons of environmentalists around the globe, including Friends of the Earth.  However, this great replacement growth for other forms of energy isn’t just stopping here, there is a lot more to come.  It will hopefully be an example to the rest of the world that we can live off other forms of energy, especially those lasting and good for our environment.  As Miliband says again:

We expect this announcement will be the first of a number of large-scale offshore wind farms in the UK and will provide real impetus for the continued developments in the offshore renewable energy sector that will benefit generations to come

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/dec2006/2006-12-20-03.asp

Image Credit: www.greenpeace.org.uk