Our Oceans are Under Attack

Grabbing Paddles in Seattle to Ward Off an Oil Giant

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/u...to-ward-off-an-oil-giant.html?ref=topics&_r=0

The standoff between Royal Dutch Shell, which proposes to lease a terminal in the Port of Seattle for its Arctic drilling fleet, and the opponents who want to block the company’s plans for environmental and other reasons, is going aquatic. The various groups organizing a “ShellNo Flotilla” for Saturday hope to attract 1,000 kayaks or other small boats, and are arranging temporary housing for people coming from elsewhere to train and participate.
Some talk of physically blocking Shell’s giant drilling rigs — a fairly dangerous idea for people in small boats in a busy port. But a generally stated goal at last week’s training session and on the main flotilla website is simply to make a grand statement of solidarity.
Dr. Laura Byerly, the medical director at a community clinic near Portland, Ore., is among the people planning to protest. She said it would be novel for her in two ways: She has spent her life “following the rules,” as a physician and a professional woman, with little experience in protests and not much in boats, either.

She has also become increasingly worried about climate change, so when a friend, Ken Ward, said he intended to drive the three hours up to Seattle this week with his 17-foot, green-and-white sailing dory on a trailer and invited her to come along, she immediately said yes.

“I’m going from inaction to action,” said Dr. Byerly, 53, who planned to train with Mr. Ward on a lake west of Portland.

Mr. Ward, 58, who described himself as a carpenter, handyman and climate volunteer, knows about protesting on water. In 2013, he and another man anchored a lobster boat in an industrial inlet near Providence, R.I., blocking a 40,000-ton shipment of coal to a power plant. They were charged with conspiracy, disturbing the peace and other violations, but the major charges were dropped.

This time, Mr. Ward said that he planned merely to participate in the flotilla, and that he and Dr. Byerly would hand out cups of tea to other boaters or kayakers from the dory.

He said that with planetary concerns in the balance — whether in burning fossil fuels or protecting the Arctic — no debate over energy was truly local anymore, and that he felt a need to respond to what he called “places of conflict,” wherever they might turn up.

“Seattle’s fight is everyone’s fight,” Mr. Ward said.

Another trainee, Sue Kay, 69, said that she and her friend Rosy Betz-Zall, 64, would try the kayaking for now, but that come flotilla day, they might well opt for a more stable perch, like a pontoon boat, depending on the weather.

 

Obama Administration Approves Shell's Drilling Plan For The Arctic

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/05/11/obama-shell-arctic-drilling_n_7259594.html

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration on Monday granted conditional approval to Shell to begin exploratory drilling in the Arctic, which the Department of the Interior's Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said would be "subject to rigorous safety standards.”

The approval will allow Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc. to begin drilling this summer in the Chukchi Sea, off the northwest coast of Alaska. Shell's drilling plan proposes up to six wells in an area about 70 miles offshore.

"We have taken a thoughtful approach to carefully considering potential exploration in the Chukchi Sea, recognizing the significant environmental, social and ecological resources in the region and establishing high standards for the protection of this critical ecosystem, our Arctic communities, and the subsistence needs and cultural traditions of Alaska Natives," BOEM Director Abigail Ross Hopper said in a statement.

Environmental groups, which have long protested drilling in the Arctic due to icy conditions and the distance from spill response resources, swiftly criticized the announcement.

“Instead of holding Shell accountable and moving the country towards a sustainable future, our federal regulators are catering to an ill-prepared company in a region that does not tolerate cutting corners," said Greenpeace Senior Research Specialist Tim Donaghy in a statement.

“Some ideas are just non-starters, like drilling for oil in the Arctic Ocean,” David Yarnold, president and CEO of Audubon, said in a statement. "Spills under ice sheets can’t be controlled, and America doesn’t need the oil in order to maintain its energy independence. So this is just cynical partisan politics, a public relations bone that the Obama administration is throwing to Shell."

 

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mary-...week_b_7261846.html?utm_hp_ref=climate-change

What Climate Change Looks Like: Beware The Blob - of warm air off the Pacific coast, that is - the blob that keeps diverting storms away from California, creating the worst drought in over 1,000 years, according to a recent tree ring study. Droughts aren't new - it's the extreme persistence and intensity that is. That's exactly what is predicted to happen under Climate Change. Check this out!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=166&v=R6RaAYA9OMA

 

Pope says environmental sinners will face God's judgment for world hunger

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/12/pope-environmental-sinners-will-face-god-judgment

Pope Francis has warned “the powerful of the Earth” they will answer to God if they fail to protect the environment to ensure the world can feed its population.

“The planet has enough food for all, but it seems that there is a lack of willingness to share it with everyone,” Francis said at a mass to mark the opening of the general assembly of the Catholic charitable organisation Caritas.

“We must do what we can so that everyone has something to eat, but we must also remind the powerful of the Earth that God will call them to judgment one day and there it will be revealed if they really tried to provide food for Him in every person and if they did what they could to preserve the environment so that it could produce this food.”

The striking comments from the Argentinian pontiff came ahead of the upcoming publication of a papal encyclical on the ethical aspects of environmental issues that is eagerly awaited by campaigners for action to address global warming.

An encyclical is a statement of fundamental principles designed to guide Catholic teaching on a subject. It is issued in the form of a letter from the pope to bishops around the world.

Campaigners on climate change believe that a signal from Francis that the church considers global warming a grave danger could influence the global discussion on the severity of the problem, what has caused it and what can be done.

Climate change sceptics have warned Francis not to take sides in the debate but all the signs so far are that he sees the problem as man-made and as one which can be alleviated by political action.

 

Solution to corrosive ocean mystery reveals future climate

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2015-05/uons-stc051115.php

Around 55 million years ago, an abrupt global warming event triggered a highly corrosive deep-water current to flow through the North Atlantic Ocean. The origin of this corrosive water has puzzled scientists for a decade.

Now, researchers have discovered this current and how it formed. The findings, published today in Nature Geoscience, also have profound implications for the sensitivity of our current climate to carbon dioxide emissions.

The researchers explored the acidification of the ocean that occurred during a period known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) when the Earth warmed 5°C in response to a rapid rise in CO2 in the atmosphere and one of the largest mass extinctions occurred in the deep ocean.

This period is considered to closely resemble the scenario of global warming we are experiencing today.

"There has been a longstanding mystery about why ocean acidification caused by rising atmospheric CO2 during the PETM was so much worse in the Atlantic compared to the rest of the world's oceans," said lead author from the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science, Ms Kaitlin Alexander.

"Our research suggests the shape of the ocean basins and changes to ocean currents played a key role in this difference. Understanding how this event occurred may help other researchers to better estimate the sensitivity of our climate to increasing CO2."

To get their results the researchers recreated the ocean basins and land masses of 55 million years ago in a global climate model.

At this time there was a ridge on the ocean floor between the North and South Atlantic that separated the deep water in the North Atlantic from the rest of the world's oceans. It has been described as being like a giant bathtub on the ocean floor.

"Using all sediments combined we can now estimate that the amount of greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere causing a temperature rise of 5°C was around the CO2 equivalent of 7,000 - 10,000 gigatons of carbon. This is similar to the amount of carbon available in fossil fuel reservoirs today."

The big difference between the PETM and the alteration to the current climate is the speed of the change, said lead author Kaitlin Alexander.

"Today we are emitting CO2 into the atmosphere ten times faster than the rate of natural CO2 emissions during the PETM," Ms Alexander said.

"If we continue as we are, we will see the same temperature increase that took a few thousand years during the PETM occur in just a few hundred years. This is an order of magnitude faster and likely to have profound impacts on the climate system."

 

Could this be the world's most efficient solar electricity system?

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...orlds-most-efficient-solar-electricity-system

A new solar electricity generation system that developers claim is the most efficient in the world, is being tested in South Africa’s Kalahari desert.

The Swedish company behind the project - which combines military technology with an idea developed by a 19th-century Scottish engineer and clergyman - says it is on the verge of building its first commercial installation.

In the remote Northern Cape province, huge mirrors reflect the sun across the brown Kalahari sand. This is the test site for Swedish company Ripasso, which is using the intense South African sun and local manufacturing know-how to develop their cutting-edge kit.

Jean-Pierre Fourie is Ripasso’s South African site manager. His crew has been testing the system in the Kalahari under harsh desert conditions for four years. “What we hope is to become one of the biggest competitors for renewable energy in the world.”

The massive 100 square metre dishes slowly rotate, following the sun. Light clicks and taps fill the still desert air as they constantly adjust to capture the maximum solar energy.

Independent tests by IT Power in the UK confirm that a single Ripasso dish can generate 75 to 85 megawatt hours of electricity a year - enough to power 24 typical UK homes. To make the same amount of electricity by burning coal would mean releasing roughly 81 metric tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere.

The technology works by using the mirrors as giant lenses that focus the sun’s energy to a tiny hot point, which in turn drives a zero-emission Stirling engine.

The Stirling engine was developed by Reverend Robert Stirling in Edinburgh in 1816 as an alternative to the steam engine. It uses alternate heating and cooling of an enclosed gas to drive pistons, which turn a flywheel. Because of the material limitations at the time, the engine was not commercially developed until 1988, when Swedish defence contractor Kokums started making them for submarines.
“When I founded the company in 2008 my youngest son came to me and said, wow daddy I am so proud of you, now I can tell everyone what you are doing, you are going to save the world instead of destroying it.”

 

Australia lobbies Unesco to stop it from listing Great Barrier Reef as 'in danger'

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...-stop-listing-great-barrier-reef-as-in-danger

The Australian government is undertaking frantic diplomatic efforts to avoid the Great Barrier Reef being listed as “in danger” by the UN, amid rising international concern over the opening up of a vast region in the state of Queensland for gigantic new coal mines.

A draft decision on the reef’s status is expected to be delivered by the end of this month ahead of a meeting of Unesco’s world heritage committee in Bonn, Germany in June. Unesco has already expressed its concern over erosion of the reef, which has lost 50% of its coral cover over the past 30 years.

It has emerged that Australian ministers and diplomats have visited 19 countries that provide committee members, including Portugal, Japan and Jamaica, in recent months in a desperate lobbying effort to avert an internationally embarrassing blacklisting for the ailing reef.

An “in danger” listing for the huge marine ecosystem, the world’s largest living entity, would prove highly problematic to mining companies attempting to open a massive fossil fuel frontier in Queensland’s Galilee basin, an area of underground coal the size of Britain.

Critics insist the Galilee basin projects would devastate global attempts to stay within a carbon ‘budget’ to avoid runaway climate change.

Scientists and green groups, as well as figures ranging from US president Barack Obama to Hollywood actor Leonardo di Caprio and businessman Richard Branson, have voiced concern over the threat posed by climate change to the reef.

Environmentalists also point out that the planned expansion of Abbot Point port on the Queensland coast to deal with the millions of tonnes of coal exports and the thousands of extra container ship journeys along narrow lanes will put pressure on the reef too.

Most major financial institutions are signed up to the Equator Principles, a set of standards that deter the funding of projects that harm world heritage sites.

The Great Barrier Reef remains a huge tourism draw card for Australia but scientists have declared it in poor and declining condition, with the coral ecosystem degraded by pollution, a series of cyclones and a plague of coral-eating starfish.

Climate change, however, is the reef’s largest long-term threat. Warming water will make it hard for many of the reef’s corals to survive, while the acidification of the oceans will hinder the ability of remaining corals to form their skeletons.

The government and the mining industry maintain that robust protections for the reef have been put in place and that any halt in coal mining would only harm Australia’s economy.

 

New Zealand`s sheep population has dropped from 75 Million to 30 million so I suppose we are making an attempt to combat Global warming but we are still polluting all of our ground water with dirty dairying.New Zealand`s animal population including Human must be one of the highest populated countries in the World. Another 56,000 immigrants being added each year, and the Refugee problem and rising sea levels will never be solved.

 

Vast Antarctic ice shelf a few years from disintegration, says Nasa

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/15/antarctic-ice-shelf-larsen-b-disintegration-nasa

The last intact section of one of Antarctica’s mammoth ice shelves is weakening fast and will likely disintegrate completely in the next few years, contributing further to rising sea levels, according to a Nasa study released on Thursday.


The research focused on a remnant of the so-called Larsen B Ice Shelf, which has existed for at least 10,000 years but partially collapsed in 2002. What is left covers about 625 sq miles (1,600 sq km), about half the size of Rhode Island.

Antarctica has dozens of ice shelves – massive, glacier-fed floating platforms of ice that hang over the sea at the edge of the continent’s coast line. The largest is roughly the size of France.

Larsen B is located in the Antarctic Peninsula, which extends toward the southern tip of South America and is one of two principal areas of the continent where scientists have documented the thinning of such ice formations.

“This study of the Antarctic Peninsula glaciers provides insights about how ice shelves farther south, which hold much more land ice, will react to a warming climate,” said Eric Rignot, co-author of the study and a glaciologist at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

Almost 200 countries have agreed to negotiate a United Nations (UN) pact by the end of 2015 to combat global climate change, which most scientists expect will bring about more flooding, droughts, heat waves and higher seas.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has cited a probability of at least 95% that accelerated warming of the planet has been triggered by human activities, led by atmospheric emissions of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels.
The study’s lead scientist, Ala Khazendar, said analysis of the data reveals that a widening rift in Larsen B will eventually break it apart completely, probably around the year 2020.

Once that happens, glaciers held in place by the ice shelf will slip into the ocean at a faster rate and contribute to rising sea levels, scientists say.

 

New Zealand news.
In preparation for the United Nations Framework Convention on climate Change the government is hosting public consultation meetings,to see Kiwi`s view on carbon emissions.
At the Hamilton New Zealand meeting, over 80 people turned up and the mood was tense,only 42 percent agreed that their actions could make a difference.

EL Nino possible,but experts say it`s to early for panic.

Large Antarctica ice shelf seems unstable.
The Larsen B ice shelf,3250 square Kilometers in area and 220 meters thick, underwent a sudden collapse in only 35 days.

Doors slam on Myanmar refugees.

 

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/future-wind-turbines-no-blades/

It’s no longer surprising to encounter 100-foot pinwheels spinning in the breeze as you drive down the highway. But don’t get too comfortable with that view. A Spanish company called Vortex Bladeless is proposing a radical new way to generate wind energy that will once again upend what you see outside your car window.

Their idea is the Vortex, a bladeless wind turbine that looks like a giant rolled joint shooting into the sky. The Vortex has the same goals as conventional wind turbines: To turn breezes into kinetic energy that can be used as electricity. But it goes about it in an entirely different way.

Instead of capturing energy via the circular motion of a propeller, the Vortex takes advantage of what’s known as vorticity, an aerodynamic effect that produces a pattern of spinning vortices. Vorticity has long been considered the enemy of architects and engineers, who actively try to design their way around these whirlpools of wind. And for good reason: With enough wind, vorticity can lead to an oscillating motion in structures, which, in some cases, like the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, can cause their eventual collapse.

Where designers see danger, Vortex Bladeless’s founders—David Suriol, David Yáñez, and Raul Ingeniero—sees opportunity. “We said, ‘Why don’t we try to use this energy, not avoid it,’” Suriol says. The team started Vortex Bladeless in 2010 as a way to turn this vibrating energy into something productive.

The Vortex’s shape was developed computationally to ensure the spinning wind (vortices) occurs synchronously along the entirety of the mast. “The swirls have to work together to achieve good performance,” Villarreal explains. In its current prototype, the elongated cone is made from a composite of fiberglass and carbon fiber, which allows the mast to vibrate as much as possible (an increase in mass reduces natural frequency). At the base of the cone are two rings of repelling magnets, which act as a sort of nonelectrical motor. When the cone oscillates one way, the repelling magnets pull it in the other direction, like a slight nudge to boost the mast’s movement regardless of wind speed. This kinetic energy is then converted into electricity via an alternator that multiplies the frequency of the mast’s oscillation to improve the energy-gathering efficiency.

Its makers boast the fact that there are no gears, bolts, or mechanically moving parts, which they say makes the Vortex cheaper to manufacture and maintain. The founders claim their Vortex Mini, which stands at around 41 feet tall, can capture up to 40 percent of the wind’s power during ideal conditions (this is when the wind is blowing at around 26 miles per hour). Based on field testing, the Mini ultimately captures 30 percent less than conventional wind turbines, but that shortcoming is compensated by the fact that you can put double the Vortex turbines into the same space as a propeller turbine.

 

U.S. Taxpayers Subsidizing World's Biggest Fossil Fuel Companies

http://www.alternet.org/environment/us-taxpayers-subsidizing-worlds-biggest-fossil-fuel-companies

The world’s biggest and most profitable fossil fuel companies are receiving huge and rising subsidies from U.S. taxpayers, a practice slammed as absurd by a presidential candidate given the threat of climate change.

A Guardian investigation of three specific projects, run by Shell, ExxonMobil and Marathon Petroleum, has revealed that the subsidizes were all granted by politicians who received significant campaign contributions from the fossil fuel industry.
The Guardian has found that:




•A proposed Shell petrochemical refinery in Pennsylvania is in line for $1.6bn (£1bn) in state subsidy, according to a deal struck in 2012 when the company made an annual profit of $26.8bn.
•ExxonMobil’s upgrades to its Baton Rouge refinery in Louisiana are benefitting from $119m of state subsidy, with the support starting in 2011, when the company made a $41bn profit.
•A jobs subsidy scheme worth $78m to Marathon Petroleum in Ohio began in 2011, when the company made $2.4bn in profit.

“At a time when scientists tell us we need to reduce carbon pollution to prevent catastrophic climate change, it is absurd to provide massive taxpayer subsidies that pad fossil-fuel companies’ already enormous profits,” said senator Bernie Sanders, who announced on 30 April he is running for president.

Sanders, with representative Keith Ellison, recently proposed an End Polluter Welfare Act, which they say would cut $135bn of US subsidies for fossil fuel companies over the next decade. “Between 2010 and 2014, the oil, coal, gas, utility, and natural resource extraction industries spent $1.8bn on lobbying, much of it in defense of these giveaways,” according to Sanders and Ellison.

In April, the president of the World Bank called for the subsidies to be scrapped immediately as poorer nations were feeling “the boot of climate change on their neck”. Globally in 2013, the most recent figures available,the coal, oil and gas industries benefited from subsidies of $550bn, four times those given to renewable energy.

 

Around 27bn tonnes of coal are thought to be locked under the ground of the Galilee Basin in the outback of Queensland. A huge proposed complex of coal mines is planned here, including the world’s largest thermal coal project.

So are railway lines and a massive expansion of the Abbot Point port on the Great Barrier Reef.

What will this mean for the Aboriginal community, the Great Barrier Reef and the world's climate?

http://www.theguardian.com/environm...5/carbon-bomb-australia-the-new-coal-frontier

drian Burragubba is a strong man. His people, the Wangan and Jagalingou, have called this flat, arid outback in central Queensland home for tens of thousands of years, but now all that is under threat.

When the white man first came here in his great-grandfather's time, Adrian, 54, a tribal elder and 'law man', says they were thought of as ghosts - strange, but welcome enough. But later generations were to bear the brunt of the interlopers' greed. His grandfather and his father were both removed from the land and put on church-run properties to make way for a gold rush.

“Those places were like concentration camps,” he explains. “They wanted Aboriginal people out of the way, so you couldn’t leave them. The police would take you back if you did.”

Now the rapacious outsiders are back. Massive mining operations are looking to plunder a gigantic new coal frontier in the Galilee Basin. There are 247,000 sq km (95,400 sq miles) of coal: a land mass the size of Britain.

This is a story about the indigenous people – and the loss of Aboriginal lands. It is about Queensland’s fragile environment and the damage a massive new port and thousands of coal container journeys exporting coal would cause to the Great Barrier Reef, one of the most precious ecosystems on earth.

And it is about the world’s climate – if the complex is fully developed, greenhouse gas emissions from the burned coal would top 700m tonnes a year, bringing irreversible climate change ever closer.

Were the Galilee Basin a country, it would be the seventh largest contributor of carbon dioxide in the world, just behind Germany.

Adrian, an accomplished didgeridoo player whose six children often perform traditional music alongside him, initially didn’t want to be drawn into the struggle. Now, he sees no choice but to lead the fight for his 400-strong tribe against what would be the world’s largest thermal coal project and second largest so-called carbon bomb.

 

Sea level rise accelerated over the past two decades, research finds | The Guardian

 

Have wind turbines ruined Britain’s prized lobster haul?

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/may/17/have-wind-turbines-ruined-britain-lobsters

In addition to Westermost Rough, which will supply enough energy to power 150,000 homes, another major farm in the Humber Gateway is due to go live soon. And there are plans to build two more, at Dogger Bank and Hornsea. But many people on the coast are worried about what a massive expansion in offshore energy means for the fishing industry. There used to be 70 boats fishing Westermost Rough, but many other industries – pot and rope making, boat painting, engineering and port maintenance – depend on it for a livelihood.

Cohen fears the lobster beds may have been “smothered” by sediment thrown up by the cable-laying. Other threats include vibrations, shadows and heat generated by the elecotromagnetic cables.

Some local skippers remember when gas pipes were laid in the area a few years ago and their pots were hauled up full of mud. The turbines also present navigation issues, and there are fears that the mile-long lines used to lay lobster pots could become snagged on the turbines and cause boats to capsize.

“Go back a generation and the only people using the seabed were fishermen,” Cohen said. “Now you’ve got gas rigs, windfarms, telecom cables, energy cables, carbon capture pipelines … The notion that the sea is free to travel through doesn’t exist any more.”