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One conclusion to be drawn from the Yale-Columbia project is the need for better data, which requires funds.

Experiences like the recent biofuels surge, which is driving up food prices, show how treacherous even well-intentioned decisions about the environment can be when they're uninformed.

The same holds for consumers, who sometimes think paying somebody to plant a few trees will compensate for flying around the world in airplanes.

For such decisions, data are essential. If we're going to avoid squandering our natural resources, the quicker we begin to rely more on facts and less on assumptions, the better.

Some countries simply lie or make up the facts.

Today's Russian bureaucrats may still be fudging its environmental figures.

Among the worst offenders were Japan, South Korea, Brazil, the United States, Italy and Paraguay.

(While there are good comparative data on ozone, smog also includes nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxides and other components that are poorly tracked in most nations.) Among the best industrial countries were Malaysia, the United Kingdom and all of Eastern Europe (a legacy of the Soviet nuclear program).

Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, which have more severe water problems.

Brazil is another country whose high rank—34th—is deceptive.

Brazil is a vast land blessed with an abundance of water, which yields energy relatively cheaply with no carbon emissions

Brazil is now the world's fourth biggest emitter of carbon, mainly due to the felling of trees.

By contrast, Belgium and the Netherlands, which share much in terms of population and geography with their neighbors, suffer from neglect of the environment—particularly in protecting native habitats.

Without an accurate assessment of the extent of the remaining oil, subsistence food-gatherers, consumers of commercial fish products from the area, and tourists have used mostly anecdotal evidence as the basis for economic decisions regarding resource utilization in the affected area.

Consequently, the Auke Bay Laboratory (ABL) with funding from the EVOS Trustee Council, took on the task of assessing the remaining oil along the shorelines of Prince William Sound during the summer of 2001

The primary objective of the project was to measure the amount of oil remaining in the intertidal zone of Prince William Sound.  Secondary objectives include determining the rate of decline of oil on these beaches, estimating the persistence of the remaining oil, and correlating the remaining oil with geomorphological features.

heavily and moderately oiled

The 2001 survey adopted a stratified random/adaptive sampling (SRAS) design. Two random pits were excavated to a depth of 0.5 m (1.6 feet) in every stratified block (0.5-m verticle drop in tide height) within a grid system established at each site. If subsurface oil was discovered in any of the randomly stratified origin pits, then additional adaptive pits were excavated above, below, to the right, and to the left of the origin pit until the extent of the oil patch was determined.

Buried or subsurface oil is of greater concern than surface oil.

Subsurface oil can remain dormant for many years before being dispersed and is more liquid, still toxic, and may become biologically available.

A disturbance event such as burrowing animals or a severe storm reworks the beach and can reintroduce unweathered oil into the water.

The toxic components of this type of surface oil are not as readily available to biota, although some softer forms do cause sheens in tide pools.

1) Surface oil was determined to be not a good indicator of subsurface oil. 2) Twenty subsurface pits were classified as heavily oiled.  Oil saturated all of the interstitial spaces and was extremely repugnant. These “worst case” pits exhibited an oil mixture that resembled oil encountered in 1989 a few weeks after the spill - highly odiferous, lightly weathered, and very fluid. 3) Subsurface oil was also found at a lower tide height than expected (between 0 and 6 feet), in contrast to the surface oil, which was found mostly at the highest levels of the beach (Table 3).  This is significant, because the pits with the most oil were found low in the intertidal zone, closest to the zone of biological production, and indicate that our estimates are conservative at best.

The possibility of continuing low level chronic effects of the Exxon Valdez oil spill seem very real now, although measurable population effects would be very difficult to detect in wild populations.

 Sea otters and harlequin ducks fall into this category

such as sea otters, harlequin ducks, and their intertidal prey.

The last beach assessment was completed in September 2001. Supporting chemical analyses will be completed in fall 2002, and a final report with statistical analyses and conclusions will be completed by April 2002.

Even though the Devils finished the 2002-03 regular season with 108 points, good for first-place in the Atlantic Division, they were never considered a favorite to win the Stanley Cup Championship.

Jean-Sebastien Giguere.

The Devils dispatched of the Ducks in seven games, winning the Cup on their home ice with a 3-0 decision on a game-winning goal by rookie right wing Mike Rupp and a pair from Jeff Friesen.

artin Brodeur had an unforgettable 2002-03 season, winning the Vezina Trophy, the Jennings Trophy and the Stanley Cup.