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D'coda Dcoda

Paper: News blackout over mystery barrels in Lake Superior - Purplish ooze, bouncing Ge... - 0 views

enenews.com/ediate-health-threat-to-public

lake superior pollution

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 23 Feb 13 - No Cached
D'coda Dcoda

Forecast predicts biggest Gulf dead zone ever [16Jun11] - 0 views

news.yahoo.com/...llbmNlBHNsawNmb3JlY2FzdHByZWQ-

trends failure

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 16 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • Scientists predict this year's "dead zone" of low-oxygen water in the northern Gulf of Mexico will be the largest in history — about the size of Lake Erie — because of more runoff from the flooded Mississippi River valley.
  • Each year when the nutrient-rich freshwater from the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers pours into the Gulf, it spawns massive algae blooms. In turn, the algae consume the oxygen in the Gulf, creating the low oxygen conditions. Fish, shrimp and many other species must escape the dead zone or face dying
  • Federal and university scientists predict this year's zone will be between 8,500 square miles and about 9,400 square miles. The actual size of the dead zone will be measured over the summer.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • The largest recorded dead zone was found in 2002 when 8,400 square miles of the Gulf was found to lacking sufficient oxygen for most marine life.
  • Eugene Turner, an oceanographer at Louisiana State University, said the dead zone has continued to get larger since it was first noticed and measured in the 1970s. He said the dead zone is getting worse with time.
  • The biggest contributor is the amount of fertilizer — and the nitrates and phosphates in them — that wind up in the Mississippi River each spring and get flushed out to the Gulf.
D'coda Dcoda

Climategate part 2? A worrying conflict of interest [17Jun11] - 0 views

blogs.independent.co.uk/...-worrying-conflict-of-interest

shared by D'coda Dcoda on 18 Jun 11 - No Cached
  • a press release for the report which suggested that renewable sources alone, without nuclear power, could provide 77 per cent of the world’s energy supply by 2050.
  • The supporting documents, which weren’t released until over a month later, reveal that this claim was based on a large real-terms decline in worldwide energy consumption over the next 40 years (highly unrealistic as India and China grow their economies).
  • Now it appears that there are more apparent conflicts of interest in the IPCC’s energy report
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  • eter Bosshard, Policy Director of the campaign group International Rivers, contacted me to point out that the scenario for 77 per cent renewables included (against standard practice) large hydropower projects among the technologies to be promoted.
  • Most environmentalists believe that more large scale dams are not the right approach to generating electricity in a sustainable way.
  • While water is a renewable resource, the ecosystems that are destroyed by hydropower projects are not. Not least due to dam building, rivers, lakes and wetlands suffer from a higher rate of species extinction than any other major ecosystem.
  • Not only this but because of the decomposing organic matter found in reservoirs, dams emit greenhouse gases such as methane and CO2. In some cases, it is claimed, these emissions can be higher than those of thermal power projects with the same electricity output.
  • Ivan Lima of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research  estimate that the total methane emissions from large dams at 104 million tons per year.
  • Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas, and Lima’s figure amounts to more than 4 per cent of the total warming impact of human activities – roughly equal to the climate impact of the global aviation sector
  • So why is the IPCC contravening international standard practice to promote hydropower?
  • Well this may be total coincidence but in addition to several independent scientists, the IPCC selected a number of authors to write the section of hydropower who have a vested interest in growing the sector.
  • Of the nine lead authors there are representatives of two of the world’s largest hydropower developers, a hydropower consultancy, and three agencies promoting hydropower at the national level.
  • D'coda Dcoda on 18 Jun 11
     
    The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been compromised again.
Jan Wyllie

Water evaporated from trees cools global climate - 0 views

www.terradaily.com/..._cools_global_climate_999.html

transpiration forests climate significance

shared by Jan Wyllie on 20 Sep 11 - No Cached
  • New research from Carnegie's Global Ecology department concludes that evaporated water helps cool the earth as a whole, not just the local area of evaporation, demonstrating that evaporation of water from trees and lakes could have a cooling effect on the entire atmosphere
  • Globally, this cycle of evaporation and condensation moves energy around, but cannot create or destroy energy. So, evaporation cannot directly affect the global balance of energy on our planet.
  • It is well known that the paving over of urban areas and the clearing of forests can contribute to local warming by decreasing local evaporative cooling, but it was not understood whether this decreased evaporation would also contribute to global warming
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  • Increased evaporation tends to cause clouds to form low in the atmosphere, which act to reflect the sun's warming rays back out into space
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