The Great Beyond

2010 marks a fairly ambitious deadline for the globe: no more species going extinct. With six months to go, and human activities continuing their tear through wildlife-rich habitats like rainforests and oceans, it’s pretty clear that we’re going to need an extension. Now the world’s authority on species conservation, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), is waving the latest assessment of its venerable Red List around to raise the alarm.

The 2010 biodiversity target originated in 2001, when the European Council concluded that “biodiversity decline should be halted with the aim of reaching this objective by 2010.” In 2002, the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) softened the goal to “a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss,” and a few months later the World Summit on Sustainable Development echoed the CBD’s pledge. In celebration, the UN declared 2010 the International Year of Biodiversity.

But despite the nominal unity, things are looking pretty grim. On 2 July the IUCN released its assessment of threatened species, which looked at whether the statuses of threatened species were improving or deteriorating. In a laborious analysis, described by its authors as “a labour of love,” the group assessed 1,500 randomly selected species from each species group (e.g. dragonflies, freshwater crabs, gymnosperms). The conclusion: 2010 isn’t going to happen.

The lack of progress doesn’t come as a surprise, considering that the primary driver of species extinction — habitat destruction — continues to charge along, albeit at a slower clip in temperate regions. But the CBD notes that “this may not necessarily translate, however, into lower rates of species loss for all taxa because of the nature of the relationship between numbers of species and area of habitat, because decades or centuries may pass before species extinctions reach equilibrium with habitat loss, and because other drivers of loss, such as climate change, nutrient loading, and invasive species, are projected to increase."

Posted by Lizzie Buchen on July 02, 2009
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Posted on behalf of Lizzie Buchen

Six weeks ago, a 47-million-year-old, beautifully-preserved primate fossil named Ida swamped headlines in a media blitz, generating harsh criticism of the scientists’ publicizing strategies and the lemming-like media.

But before Ida’s fame tumbles too far, a new primate’s fossils are swooping in to ride in her media wake. And though the remains are no more than jaws and a handful of teeth, they’re bent on trumping the notorious Ida’s perch on our primate tree.

Continue reading "The latest fossil frenzy" »

Posted by Alex Witze on July 02, 2009
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New images of the Great Beyond’s volcano of the year (to date): Sarychev Peak in the Russian Kuril Islands.

Although not quite on a par with the awesome shot from last week (see: Picture post: BOOM!) this double act show the impact of an eruption like the one that Sarychev experienced beginning 12 June. The ‘before’, top, was taken 26 May while the ‘after’, below, is from 30 June.

Acquired by the ASTER instrument that graced this blog yesterday, these false-colour images show vegetation as red, water as dark blue, and bare rock as brown / gray. The white patches are either ice or clouds.

NASA notes:

The most striking difference between these two images is the cap of new volcanic rock coating the northwestern half of the island in June 2009. While vegetation on the rest of the island appears lush, little or no vegetation remains on the northwestern end. A close look at the top image also reveals that the recent volcanic activity appears to have expanded the island’s coastline on the northwestern end.

Hat tip: Eruptions blog

Image: created by Jesse Allen, using data from NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS/ASTER Science Team

Posted by Daniel Cressey on July 01, 2009
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Well, it's finally happened: a year and a half after denying California's petition to set its own greenhouse-gas emissions standards for vehicles, the US Environmental Protection Agency has reversed itself and granted the waiver request. That's what a change of administration will get you in Washington.

Lisa Jackson, the EPA's new administrator under President Barack Obama, said she had "decided this is the appropriate course under the law". The prior administrator, Stephen Johnson, rejected California's request and said that a national standard was needed, not a patchwork of state regulations. In April, the EPA declared carbon dioxide emissions a danger to human health.

California requested the waiver in 2005; it regularly asks for national standards to be waived so that it can set more stringent environmental standards.

Interest groups were split along predictable lines in their reaction. Reuters points out that the American Petroleum Institute argues that the waiver will "impose costly requirements" on businesses. David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council called the waiver granting "a win for everyone".

Posted by Alex Witze on June 30, 2009
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Duck-billed dinosaurs, the hadrosaurs, have puzzled palaeontologists for years. The puzzle? How did these, the dominant herbivores of their time, manage to chew their food with their funny-looking bills?

Mark Purnell of the University of Leicester Department of Geology, UK, has worked it out, and published it in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Press release).

Purnell and his colleagues looked at tiny microscopic scratches on the hadrosaur Edmontasurus’s teeth. They decided that rather than moving the bottom jaw like most living creatures today, it was their upper jaw that was hinged and moved up and down, and side to side.

The news has been chewed over (sorry) by a number of outlets, including MSNBC, Zee News and the AP, who get the prize for best headline with “Hadrosaur chowdown_grind, grind, grind”

The research also tells us that the hadrosaurs probably ate mainly leaves, because the scratches weren’t consistent with chomping on twigs or other tough treats.

Image: Vince Williams, University of Leicester

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 30, 2009
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NASA and Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry yesterday released what they say is the “most complete” topographic map of Earth.

Until now the most complete set of data available publicly to researchers covered 80% of the Earth’s landmass. Now new Aster (Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer) satellite data takes that up to 99%, says the American space agency (press release).

“Aster’s accurate topographic data will be used for engineering, energy exploration, conserving natural resources, environmental management, public works design, firefighting, recreation, geology and city planning, to name just a few areas,” says Mike Abrams, leader of the science team leader behind the new map.

Image: view of the Bhutan Himalayas generated by draping simulated natural colour image over data from the new ASTER Global Digital Elevation Model / NASA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 30, 2009
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The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is once again being accused of politicizing science, only this time conservatives are the ones crying foul.

At issue is a 98-page "comment" on the EPA's recent finding that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are endangering human health. The comment was authored by an EPA economist Alan Carlin, and claimed, among other things, that the EPA was relying on outdated data because it used the last assessment from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to help shape its finding. Carlin also echoes the old arguments of climate sceptics, which say that solar cycles, not human activity, are responsible for the recent increase in global temperatures.

Continue reading "Hot air and politics at the EPA" »

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 29, 2009
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The legislative process wasn't pretty, but the US House of Representatives voted 219-212 on 26 June to approve the most sweeping piece of energy and environmental legislation in history. (New York Times)

The predictable result is a bill that almost nobody likes. Greenpeace's opposition illustrates a general sentiment on the left side of the political spectrum that the bill's Democratic sponsors, Henry Waxman of California and Edward Markey of Massachusetts, compromised too much. The US Chamber of Commerce says they compromised too little. And even the American Farm Bureau, whose members sought and won massive concessions in a deal that secured enough votes for passage, maintained its opposition (for a rather scathing take on this issue, see Steven Pearlstein's column in the Washington Post).

What holds the current coalition together is a core group of seasoned legislators backed by pragmatic environmentalists and businesses who understand and are willing to play by the rules on Capitol Hill. And of course a president who supports the idea. In this respect, it's hard to imagine a more concrete example of the political transformation wrought by the past two elections (whether this momentum will carry through a third election in 2010 is an open question - and one that increases pressure on Democrats to get the job done this year).

At its core, the bill would create a cap-and-trade system that would reduce covered greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But the legislation contains a host of initiatives meant to boost things like energy efficiency and renewable power while controlling costs on industry and consumers. Nearly every one has its critics.

Continue reading "Climate bill clears US House, faces long road ahead" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 27, 2009
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EU environment ministers have agreed that more urgently needs to be done to stop European biodiversity from declining further.

Meeting in Luxembourg yesterday, the ministers stated they are "alarmed" by the threats to biodiversity posed by invasive alien species and "deeply concerned" by the European Commission's assessment that the EU is unlikely to meet its target of halting biodiversity loss by 2010.

Ministers called for the Commission to prepare by 2010 a new strategy to tackle invasive species, which the Commission estimates costs the EU over 12 billion euros per year. As well as setting out methods of detection, monitoring and containment, the strategy should include steps to establish a comprehensive inventory of invasive alien species, the ministers said.

Continue reading "EU environment ministers 'alarmed' by biodiversity threat" »

Posted by Ananyo Bhattacharya on June 26, 2009
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It’s been an up-and-down week for supporters of carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the technology that aims to capture carbon dioxide emitted from power plants and bury it underground.

The European Commission announced yesterday that it would put €50 million towards an investment scheme to co-finance a CCS demonstration plant in China (costing around €300-500 million), fulfilling an agreement made by the EU and China in 2005.

Earlier in the week, the New York Times noted a sea change in China’s attitude towards carbon capture. Noting China’s swift progress on its GreenGen project, Julio Friedmann, head of the carbon storage programme at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, told the paper: "Five years ago, you'd have a discussion [with China] on CCS and you'd meet the 'C' team. Now, you meet the 'A' team. They take this stuff seriously."

But in Germany, politicians dropped a pending national CCS legal framework, postponing agreement until after general elections in September. "It's really frustrating," Reuters quoted Staffan Goertz, Vattenfall's chief media officer for CCS. "It is the result of the local public having questions and hesitations about this."

And in the US, two companies said on Thursday they would withdraw from participating in the government-backed FutureGen CCS project in Mattoon, Illinois. American Electric Power and Southern said they’d rather spend the money on their own CCS projects instead (Reuters).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 26, 2009
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Jim Hansen has released a statement about his arrest earlier this week at a protest against coal mining by the company Massey Energy in West Virginia.

The NASA scientist and doyen of climate change protestors was arrested after those protesting against Massey’s mountaintop mining faced off against the company’s supporters. While Hansen describes local police as “courteous and professional”, he backs allegations made by some protestors that a supporter of the mining company assaulted one of their number. He also says that local man Larry Gibson, who has refused to sell his property for mining, has been the target of drive-by shootings.

However, he adds, “If Gandhi had the sequence right (first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win), we are already three-quarters of the way there. I noticed that it was only a handful of Massey people who were really vocal.”(PDF.)

Image: Hansen arrested at the protest / by Antrim Caskey for the Rainforest Action Network

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 26, 2009
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Scotland has set itself the world’s toughest climate change targets, in legislation passed yesterday. The country is looking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80% by 2050 and by 42% by 2020 (press release, bill pdf).

“Scotland can be proud of this Bill, the most ambitious and comprehensive piece of climate change legislation anywhere in the world,” says climate change minister Stewart Stevenson (press release).

Ministers in the ruling Scottish National Party have admitted this will make little difference to global emissions overall, but they hope it will set an example to other nations (BBC).

And here lies the catch. As passed, the bill gives the country the option to move rapidly backwards from its ‘Tartan Targets’ if the rest of the world doesn’t come up with similarly tough targets at the forthcoming global summit in Copenhagen (Reuters). Targets can also be downgraded if the UK government’s advisors say they are unrealistic (Guardian).

“We will be looking for any weakening of the position being slipped out during a summer or Christmas recess,” warned Duncan McLaren of Friends of the Earth (The Herald). “A key will be the international reaction to this. If it is well-received and there is praise for Scotland’s leadership in adopting the world’s best targets, it will be harder for Ministers to back down.”

McLaren take heart from one thing: Arnold Schwarzenegger is on his side.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 25, 2009
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Climate guru and NASA scientist James Hansen has been arrested after taking part in a protest against mountaintop coal mining.

Hansen, along with actress Daryl Hannah and other protesters, apparently planned to deliberately trespass on the property of mining company Massey Energy in the appropriately named Coal River Valley, West Virginia (press release).

However, a counter protest by miners and coal industry supporters forced them to change their plans. Instead, according to the Charleston Gazette, they sat down in the road outside Massey Energy's Goals Coal preparation plant in Raleigh County and were arrested for obstructing the police and impeding traffic.

Some reports say Hansen and other actually did trespass. Another account alleges a coal supporter assaulted members of the Hansen protest group.

Hansen, of course, has a long history of opposing coal power. He even appeared with Hannah before at a climate change protest, where Nature reporter Jeff Tollefson noted “Hansen says he is willing to get arrested”.

Willing and able, it seems.

More
Photos of the protest and arrests – RAN
A Plea To President Obama: End Mountaintop Coal Mining - Hansen on the Enivronment 360 blog

Image: Hansen at a previous protest / Jeff Tollefson

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 24, 2009
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Australia’s carbon emissions trading scheme has run into political squalls. Delaying tactics in the country’s upper house, the Senate, mean that a vote on the cap-and-trade legislation looks likely to be put off until August – when the bill in its current form will probably fail anyway.

Though the legislation passed through the Labor-controlled House of Representatives earlier this month, Conservative opposition in the Senate this week has proved less tractable. "They have been filibustering, wasting time, using every tactic they can to delay debate on this bill,'' climate change minister Penny Wong told reporters (Reuters, The Australian).

Now, in the last week of Parliament before the winter break, senators have voted to bring debate on nine unrelated bills, and it would be “very difficult” to find the time to debate the climate bill, Wong said (Bloomberg).

Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and its per-capita carbon emissions are among the highest in the world, and rising. Mindful of the effect of the scheme on the cost of coal and other energy-intensive exports, the Conservative opposition want the vote on legislation delayed until after the US passes its own bill, and until after a climate treaty is debated in Copenhagen in December (New York Times, Bloomberg).

Yet, as Wong told reporters on 30 March, "The best chance of an agreement at Copenhagen is for as many countries as possible to act – Australia is one of those." (Nature, 458, 554-555; 2009, subscription required.)

Continue reading "Australian carbon trading hits political wall" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 23, 2009
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It seems that everybody has a set of numbers to explain how climate legislation moving through the US House of Representatives could impact the economy, but it's the official Congressional Budget Office score that really counts. That document came out Friday, estimating net costs of the program at $22 billion annually, which translates to an average impact of $175 dollars per household.

It's a remarkably low number, ringing in around 48 cents per day (supporters of the legislation say it would cost households little more than a daily postage stamp). And it turns out even that is misleading: If you divide households up by income into five groups, the lowest quintile would actually save $40 annually while the second-lowest quintile would spend only $40 extra each year; for everybody else (those who can afford it most), the cost comes in between $235 and $340.

CBO director Douglas Elmendorf kindly provides a quick summary of how his organization arrived at these figures in his blog. Notably, although CBO's model is able to capture some savings (gross costs are higher than $22 billion), Elmendorf admits that the model doesn't pick up all of them.

Continue reading "Climate costs: What's in a number?" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 22, 2009
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A husband-and-wife team of British evolutionary biologists, Peter and Rosemary Grant, were on 19 June awarded the Kyoto prize in basic science for their studies, over more than three decades, documenting evolution by natural selection in finches on the Galapagos Islands.

"I can't think of any other scientists who deserve it more," Kenneth Petren, of the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, tells The Scientist.

In one typical paper, (Grant P. R., et al. Science, 313. 224 - 226; 2006), the Grants – both Professors Emeritus at Princeton University – described the struggle between the medium ground finch (Geospiza fortis) and the large ground finch (Geospiza magnirostris), in the harsh environment of the tiny Galapagos Island Daphne Major (see Nature, doi: 10.1038/news060710-11, subscription required).

Environmental changes, including a drought, caused the beak size of generations of medium finches to shrink through natural selection. Smaller-beaked medium finches were able to gobble up smaller seeds that the greater-beaked ground finches missed, and so survived longer to pass their traits to their offspring. The Grants starred in Jonathan Weiner’s book, The Beak of the Finch.

Isamu Akasaki won the Advanced Technology award, for his work on gallium nitride p-n junctions and related contributions to the development of blue light emitting devices. French composer and conductor Pierre Boulez won the Arts and Philosophy category. Each award is worth 50 million yen (US$520,000).

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on June 22, 2009
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The 2009 meeting of the International Whaling Commission has begun in Madeira, Portugal. Once again, participants are looking to construct a compromise between those who wish to hunt whales and those who think want to stop that sort of thing.

Earlier this year a key sub-committee of the IWC failed to agree a compromise between pro-whaling nations such as Japan and their opponents, chiefly Australia. This would have seen Japan resuming coastal whaling of its coasts but giving up its annual Antarctic hunt.

Now Japan has again indicated that it might be willing to put similar offers on the table (see meeting agenda, page 9).

UK environment minister Huw Irranca-Davies told the BBC this was not going to be uncontroversial.

Continue reading "Whaling meeting faces deadlock, again" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 22, 2009
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Peru's Congress has overturned two laws that would have allowed foreign companies to exploit mineral resources and gain mining rights in the Amazon forest, according to BBC News. The volte-face came after weeks of protests from Indigenous groups, who say they were not consulted about the laws which would threaten their way of life.

The laws were passed 2007 and 2008 under powers Congress had granted Peruvian president, Alan Garcia, to implement a free trade agreement with the US, the BBC News report says.

Continue reading "Peru overturns laws allowing exploitation of Amazon forest " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on June 19, 2009
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Since erupting on June 12 the Sarychev volcano continues to wreak havoc for air travellers.

According to CBC Canada, Air Canada, Air China, Asiana Airlines and Korean Airlines all cancelled or delayed flights in and out of Vancouver International Airport on Tuesday. These are all routes that would pass near to the volcano.

The dust plume has now spread as far as 1500 miles from the site.

The NASA Earth Observatory has a nice series of pictures that for the moment is updated daily.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 17, 2009
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Biologists need to take a more nuanced view of ‘same-sex behaviour’ in animals, say the authors of a new review article on the topic.

Male-male and female-female interactions have been “extensively documented in non-human animals”, write University of California, Riverside researchers Nathan Bailey and Marlene Zuk. However they want to see scientists looking more towards the evolutionary consequences of same-sex behaviour, not just on why it occurs.

“It’s clear that same-sex sexual behaviour extends far beyond the well-known examples that dominate both the scientific and popular literature: for example, bonobos, dolphins, penguins and fruit flies,” says Bailey (press release).

He adds that researchers may be looking at widely different behaviours under the same ‘same-sex behaviours’ banner. “For example, male fruit flies may court other males because they are lacking a gene that enables them to discriminate between the sexes. But that is very different from male bottlenose dolphins, who engage in same-sex interactions to facilitate group bonding, or female Laysan Albatross that can remain pair-bonded for life and cooperatively rear young.”

Continue reading "Birds do it, bees do it…" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 17, 2009
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The White House opened its gates to a gaggle of science reporters Tuesday as administration officials and scientists released a much-anticipated assessment of global warming's impacts on the United States. The message - global warming is upon us - was delivered clearly and forcefully, several times over.

Hardly a novel finding, but, in a sign of the times, the audience proved receptive. The report echoed over the wires (see the Washington Post, New York Times) and filled up email in-boxes as environmental groups and politicians put their seal on the document.

President Barack Obama's chief science adviser, John Holdren, called the report "the most up-to-date, comprehensive and authoritative assessment" of global warming in the United States. The document focuses on regional impacts, he added, "talking about climate where people actually experience it: in their back yards."

Continue reading "US releases assessment of climate impacts" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 16, 2009
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The research that allowed an endangered butterfly to be successfully reintroduced to the UK has finally been published this week.

The large blue butterfly (Maculinea arion) became extinct in the country in 1979. However, before this happened, Jeremy Thomas of the University of Oxford camped out with the last surviving colony to collect information that would be vital to their successful reintroduction.

Now he has published his research in Science (online Thursday).

“I was living with the last UK colony, measuring everything, including their behaviour, how many eggs they laid, the survival of individual eggs, how many caterpillars were in the plants. It was a bit like a detective story,” he says (press release).

“I’ve been saving this paper up, as it were, for 25 years.”

Continue reading "Saving the large blue butterfly" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 16, 2009
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

The American astronomer Jack Eddy, famed for his studies on the connections between solar activity and terrestrial climate, died last Wednesday in Tucson, Arizona.

Born John Allen Eddy in 1931 in Pawnee City, Nebraska, Eddy was in 1949 appointed to the US Naval Academy where he crawled out on the roof one night to look at the stars. After graduation, he served for four years in the Korean War. In 1957 he became the first student in the astro-geophysics graduate school at the University of Colorado in Boulder. After a period of teaching he joined the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). When laid off from NCAR’s High Altitude Observatory in 1973 he was hired by NASA.

In a famous study published in 1976 in Science, Eddy demonstrated a link between unusually low solar activity and the coldest period of the so-called little ice age.

Continue reading "Sunspot veteran dies at 78" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 15, 2009
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Sarychev Peak on Matua Island in the Russian Kuril Islands is blowing its top and the ash cloud is threatening aircraft flying over the area.

The volcano began spewing on June 12, and since then, according to US Air Force Weather Agency, that ash has now spread 700 nautical miles (1,300 kilometers) east-southeast and 400 nautical miles (740 kilometers) west-northwest of the volcano. The image was taken by the moderate resolution imaging spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite.

The plume reaches up 5 miles (8 kilometers) into the air, which is why air traffic controllers and ships in the locality have been warned, “The ash cloud presents a threat to aeroplane engines and may lead to communications systems failures,” Olga Shestakova, a spokeswoman for the Marine Geology and Geophysics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told the Telegraph.

The particles that can cause havoc are often too tiny to be picked up by weather monitoring systems (see "Volcanoes ignite monitoring efforts")

Volcano fans can keep up to date over at the blog Eruptions, where they will also find more details about this, and other volcanoes.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 15, 2009
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Alaska’s Rat Island needs a new name this week.

The US Fish and Wildlife service reports that a massive poisoning campaign appears to have rid the island, which is in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, of the rodents brought there by a shipwreck in 1780. Native bird populations were heavily damaged by the rampaging rats.

“After more than two weeks of intensive field monitoring … biologists have found no sign of the invasive rats that have decimated native bird populations for more than 200 years,” says the FWS.

However the poisoning may have had some sad side effects.

Continue reading "Rat Island now rat free" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 15, 2009
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Pack your bags and head for the hills. The end is near. That's what you might be led to believe if you read one of the many reports out today about a paper in Nature. A duo of French researchers has modeled the future of the solar system. They've shown that chaotic gravitational perturbations could lead Mercury to swing out of its normal orbit, and that in turn could cause Venus or Mars to smash into the Earth.

"Could" is the operative word here: the chances of it actually happening stand at well under 1%. There's no way to improve the odds because of the chaotic nature of the model, but whatever the outcome, don't panic. Any collision that might occur will happen over three billion years from now.

You can listen to an interview with one of the authors, Jacques Laskar, on this week's Nature Podcast.

Image: IMCCE-CNRS

Posted by Geoff Brumfiel on June 11, 2009
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Posted for Anjali Nayar
The international airline industry has pledged to curb growth in their carbon dioxide emissions by 2020 and reduce carbon emissions by 50% by 2050, the head of the global aviation association IATA said on Monday.

“No other industry is as ambitious,” said Giovanni Bisignani at the International Air Transport Association’s annual meeting in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. “Demand will continue to increase but any expansion of our carbon footprint will be compensated.”

Bisignani pointed out that international aviation emissions dropped by 7% this year. But only 2% of the drop is because of investments in technology and fuel efficiency; the other 5% drop is because of reduced capacity linked to the global recession.

Global aviation accounts for about 2% of all human-caused carbon dioxide emissions and this could rise to 3% by 2050, according to the International Panel on Climate Change. A system to keep the industry’s emissions in check was never included in the Kyoto Protocol climate deal because of the “special” international nature of the business: who is responsible for emissions reductions, for example, on an Air France flight from London to Madrid, using an American-made jet, with passengers and freight from around the world?

Continue reading "Airline industry to cut growth in carbon emissions by 2020" »

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 09, 2009
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Posted for Anjali Nayar
Last week Reuters and The Economist reported on corruption within a yet-to-start programme to save tropical forests and curb climate change. Allegedly, the government of Papua New Guinea has illegally sold the rights to at least 40 projects aimed at averting deforestation, each worth about 1 million tonnes of carbon.

A priority of December’s UN climate change negotiations in Copenhagen is to formulate a global agreement on cutting greenhouse gasses for the period after 2012, when the Kyoto Protocol expires.

Continue reading "Don’t count your carbon before it’s credited" »

Posted by Mark Peplow on June 09, 2009
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Do they wind up in a standoff, beating their chests as the other primates stand by angry and embarrassed? Or might they initiate an inspiring public display of mutual respect and cooperation, if not affection?

The United States' lead climate negotiator, Todd Stern, is hoping for the latter and will depart for China on Saturday in search of ways to make it happen. "We're the two gorillas in the room," Stern told a crowd gathered at the Center for American Progress in Washington this week. "If we can join hands, it will truly change the world."

Among those accompanying Stern will be White House Science Adviser John Holdren and David Sandalow, assistant secretary for policy and international affairs at the Energy Department. It is only the latest in a string of delegations shuttling back and forth between the two countries, and it comes at a potentially revealing time.

The rest of the international climate community will be focusing on Bonn, where the United Nations is currently holding the latest round of global warming talks. With 184 days before Copenhagen, where the talks are scheduled to come to a close, the two countries appear to be seeking a little quiet time together.

The US-China relationship has sparked a fair bit of speculation as of late, spurred in part by an article about "secret" bilateral talks in the Guardian last month. In truth, the talks weren't all that secret, and in any case it would have been surprising if such talks weren't under way. But the sense of optimism raised plenty of eyebrows.

Continue reading "Two gorillas walk into a UN climate meeting... " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 05, 2009
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The ‘White Nose Syndrome’ that has been devastating America’s bat populations since at least 2007 is “unprecedented” and could have economic and human health ramifications, a US House of Representatives hearing heard yesterday.

At a joint meeting of two subcommittees, experts lined up to warn of potential consequences not just for bats but also for human health and the economy.

Marvin Moriarty, Northeast Regional Director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said it is estimated that somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million bats have died so far as a result of the fungus-related syndrome, which is named for the white fungus build up on bat noses. “The rapid onset and high mortality associated with this disease is unprecedented, making WNS the greatest challenge to bat conservation we have ever faced,” he says.

He points out that bats eat vast numbers of insects, thus protecting both crops and reducing human disease transmission by these bugs. Less bats = more insects = potentially more disease.

Continue reading "Bat disease ‘threatens humans’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on June 05, 2009
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US energy secretary Steven Chu hasn’t ruled out the use of tar sands as an energy source, which has delighted Canadian oil producers.

Chu’s comments came at a Reuters energy summit . His message was that the tar sands issue (see here for some background, subscription required) is complicated, but hinted that he thinks technological advances might help to bring down the energy costs for extracting oil from the tar sands.

“It's a complicated issue, because certainly Canada is a close and trusted neighbor and the oil from Canada has all sorts of good things. But there is this environmental concern, so I think we're going to have to work our way through that," Chu said. "But I'm a big believer in technology."

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 03, 2009
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Good news for the great bustard, the heaviest flying bird in the world: Great bustards have nested and chicks hatched in the UK for the first time since 1832.

The secret location of the chicks, somewhere on the Salisbury Plain, is home to two nests, and three chicks, which are apparently about the same size as a blackbird. Occasionally great bustards have wandered over to the UK from the European continent since the last native birds died in 1840, but these chicks are the first home-grown great bustards.

The Great Bustard Group, which arranged the importing of great bustards from Russia, and their subsequent reintroduction to the UK, is delighted. “It has been a hard struggle to get this far. I am exhausted and nearly broke, but to see Great Bustards breeding after an absence of 177 years is brilliant,” says GBG’s founder and director David Waters.

The GBG started the reintroduction in 2004, with birds from Saratov Oblast in southern Russia. The birds, which lived on prairie land, were at risk from agricultural developments.

The Brit press has heralded the birth (The Register, Independent, BBC), which comes only days after beavers were reintroduced into the wilds of Scotland.

Welcome back to the great bustard!

Image: the Great Bustard Group

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on June 03, 2009
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For the first time in more than a decade, scientists have penetrated the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean's Mariana Trench.

Nobody's been to the Challenger Deep since 1998, when Japan's Kaiko submersible last visited the bottommost part of the ocean. On Sunday, a remotely operated vehicle called Nereus made it, clocking in at a dive depth of 10,902 meters, or nearly seven miles.

Nereus is an odd sort of beast called a 'hybrid remotely operated vehicle', or HROV (see earlier Nature feature on its development, subscription required). That means it can either be attached to shipboard scientists by a thin tether, or disconnect and 'fly' itself autonomously through the depths before returning to the surface.

At the Challenger Deep this weekend, researchers from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, which built Nereus, dropped it with a tether from the research vessel Kilo Moana. It spent 10 hours on the bottom, gathering samples and sending back video. What's it look like down there? Flat and mud-colored, apparently (see image).

Nereus is likely to be the only explorer of the briny deep anytime soon. Kaiko was lost at sea in 2003, and no nations are planning a repeat of the record-setting manned dive of the bathyscape Trieste, which took Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh to the bottom in 1960.

WHOI has more images and background here.

Image: WHOI

Posted by Alex Witze on June 02, 2009
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The Global Humanitarian Forum certainly attracted some publicity last week when it published a report suggesting that global warming kills 315,000 people each year and seriously harms another 300,000. Total price tag: $125 billion annually.

Such numbers are as appealing to journalists as they are to those who put them out, precisely because they are easy to understand and explain. They should also raise alarms, and for the very same reasons. It's not that anybody really doubts that global warming is impacting ecosystems and communities and thus affecting lives, but these are complex issues that resist quick attempts at quantification.

The New York Times published a quick story about the report while raising some basic questions about the estimations. The story quotes Roger Pielke Jr., who has been researching these issues for years, calling the report a "methodological embarrassment" that simply glosses over socioeconomic factors (like people moving into hurricane-prone coasts). For an in-depth discussion, check Pielke's blog.

Although the GHF didn't shy away from using the eye-catching estimates, the authors do explain their calculations in the report. Among other things, they cite data from Munich Re estimating that 40 percent of the increase in weather-related disasters from 1980 to present is due to climate change. As it happens, Pielke says Munich Re itself has come to the opposite conclusion when it comes to assessing the data and assigning blame.

Pielke's message appears to be getting out there. Reuters followed up its initial story with a second, more thematic piece raising various questions about this kind of research.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on June 01, 2009
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The US Forest Service (USFS) must halt road-building in 58 million acres of national forest for one year, according to a directive issued yesterday by the US agriculture secretary Tom Vilsack. The move is a reversal of a Bush-era environmental policy, which in turn undermined a rule Clinton instated late in his presidential term.

The Clinton and Bush rulings spawned numerous lawsuits, according to today's AP report. Vilsack, who oversees the USFS, said in a statement yesterday that "this interim directive will provide consistency and clarity that will help protect our national forests until a long-term roadless policy reflecting President Obama's commitment is developed."

Continue reading "End of the roads" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on May 29, 2009
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African countries are slow to address problems about who owns forested land, according to a report from the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).

The report, which was presented at an ITTO and RRI-organised forestry conference in Yaoundé, Cameroon, shows that “less than 2 percent of Africa’s tropical forests are owned by or designated for use by the region’s forest communities and indigenous groups compared to nearly one-third of all forests in Latin America, Asia and the Pacific.” (Press release).

By lagging behind in working out ‘tenure reform’ – ensuring land rights for local communities – Africa is not only threatening the planet but also putting local people at risk, the report says. “Inaction on land reform and the separation of forests into national parks or industrial concessions exacerbate civil strife and limit community development and conservation efforts,” so says RRI’s Andy White, who was an advisor for the study.

The news has travelled far, if not yet wide. The UN’s humanitarian news site IRIN, has it covered,
as does the BBC, and in the African press, of course, news of the report and the meeting is being reported (All Africa, Africa Science News).

The meeting runs until May 30, for a closer look at the agenda look here.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 27, 2009
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These shadowy images are snapshots from a short film that shows a sperm whale stealing black cod from a fishing ship's long line by tugging at one end until the fish comes off at the other.

The film is part of a study from Scripps Institution of Oceanography, San Diego, and is published in the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America.

In the video, the whale's clicking can be heard quite clearly, and it is this, rather than any sneaky fish-nicking, that the scientists were interested in.

"The sounds can be louder than a firecracker," said Aaron Thode, Scripps researcher. "But until this video recording was made, scientists had not been able to get a measurement of the size of the animal's head and the foraging sounds at the same time." (Press release)

Watch it for yourself, and try to work out if it's real, or just shadow puppetry.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 27, 2009
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Posted for Lucas Laursen

For a petrified primate with a broken wrist, Ida seems to get around. Last night, the History Channel premiered a 2-hour documentary about the fossil, which was unveiled last week at the American Museum of Natural History. Yesterday, Ida appeared at the Natural History Museum across the pond in London, and then spent the afternoon at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts in Picadilly, where a crowd of nearly 200 viewers gathered for an advance screening of the 1-hour British version of the film.

Jørn Hurum and Holly Smith, authors on the scientific study of the fossil which raised a media storm last week, were there, along with a handful of paleontologists from the Natural History Museum and University College London.

After the screening, the paleontologists chuckled about some of the technical errors in the documentary, including a claim that the common ancestor of modern-day lemurs and monkeys must have lived "hundreds of
millions of years ago" when in fact the common ancestor probably dates a mere fifty or sixty million years back. This version of the film, narrated by Sir David Attenborough, made a few other claims the scientists left out of the peer-reviewed PLOS One article, such as hinting that Ida belonged on the anthropoid branch of the family tree
because she lacks certain characteristics associated with the main alternative, the ancestors of modern-day prosimians such as lemurs.

"How lemur it is and how monkey it is is what we're trying to figure out," Philip Gingerich, another author on the study, told the cameras. That, perhaps, is the take-home message of most members of the research team, though it does not come across so clearly in the film, which made use of Matrix-like zooming shots, a relentless score, and shadowy reconstructions of the fossil's finding to suggest that much of the figuring out has already been done. "The next stage is for the experts to obsess over the details," says Christopher Dean of University College London.

Posted by Mark Peplow on May 27, 2009
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The European Union’s fishing quota system doesn’t work. Even the European Union appears to admit this, and released a green paper in April suggesting some serious reforms.

Yesterday, Europe’s fish ministers met in Brussels and had what the European Commission calls “frank and open discussion” and a “thorough and honest exchange of views”. Obviously this is normally diplomatic-speak for a stand up row.

Key to the Commission’s plans is eliminating ‘discards’, whereby caught fish that could be eaten are thrown back into the sea as they do not fit the quota of the fisherman who has hauled them in.

Danish Fisheries Minister Eva Kjer Hansen said yesterday that quotas should be based on how much fish is caught, rather than how much is landed and eventually sold.

“We should move from landing quotas to catch quotas -- meaning that everything that is caught is brought to land,” she said (Reuters).

This could even be monitored with video cameras on boats, a method piloted in Denmark. “You can clearly see what kind of fish are being caught and you can control what they are bringing back to land,” Hansen told the BBC.

Image: Punchstock

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 26, 2009
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A leading climate scientist from New Zealand is taking his claim for unfair dismissal against a government-owned environmental consultancy company to the country’s Employment Relations Authority.

Jim Salinger told Radio New Zealand that mediation with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research had failed. “Unfortunately, common sense did not prevail,” he said (NZPA).

Salinger claims he was sacked in April for unauthorised discussions with the media on issues related to climate change. “It was very shocking,” he told Nature at the time. “I was talking about my publicly funded science.”

According to Radio New Zealand, Salinger expects the authority to rule on his case in August or September.

Earlier this month NIWA claimed mediation was progressing positively, but could not comment further due to confidentiality agreements.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 26, 2009
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Posted for Rex Dalton

The royals of three Scandinavian nations are heralding the dangers of climate change.

The Royals from Denmark, Sweden and Norway will travel Wednesday 27 May to Greenland to see first hand through 1 June the impact of greenhouse gas warming on glaciers, industry and Arctic life.

Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden will be accompanied by six scientists, who will show the Royals direct evidence of climate change.

“We hope they will raise awareness about what is occurring,” says Minik Rosing, a geologist at the University of Copenhagen who helped organize the trip.

Continue reading "Scandinavian royals to visit Greenland " »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 26, 2009
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The storyline is familiar by now: US President Barack Obama overturns industry-friendly policy established by Bush administration, reaping praise from environmental groups. And so it was on Thursday, when the Environmental Protection Agency announced plans to reinstate an obscure-but-important component of the scientific review process within an equally obscure-but-important component of the air quality program.

The gist is that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has formally restored the role of its independent science advisors in producing a staff paper detailing recommendations on air quality standards. For a bit of history, check the Union of Concerned Scientists' website here and here.

The announcement even picked up some news coverage (Reuters, Philadelphia Enquirer), which is something given the flurry of energy and climate news coming out of Washington this week.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 22, 2009
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While British politicians engage in adult pursuits such as the acquisition of material wealth, across the pond the elected representatives of the people have been carrying on like a group of overgrown school kids.

Republicans and Democrats have been wrangling this week over proposed legislation to tackle climate change. In the course of this spat it emerged that the former were considering frustrating the latter by forcing the entire 900 page bill and its 400 amendments to be read aloud.

Faced with this perceived ‘delaying tactic’ Democrat Henry Waxman, the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, did what any self respecting person in his position would do … he hired someone who can read really, really fast.

Via TPM, here is a video of what happened next:

As Reuters notes:

The words flew by, sometimes almost unintelligible and too fast for even the most competent note-takers in the hearing room filled with lawmakers, lobbyists and journalists. … After about 40 seconds, Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the committee who played along with the moment of levity, signalled he had enough of the fast-talking Wilder.

While TPM sees this as “an extraordinary measure to combat nefarious Republican stall tactics”, the Weekly Standard disagrees:

Even if the reading of the bill is a partisan "stall tactic" on the part of the Republicans, intellectually honest folks who want government to function responsibly would have to admit it's a pretty benign one—beneficial, even. The brouhaha over reading the bill is an implicit, disturbing admission that—yes!— your Congress will enact a 900-page bill heavily regulating the fundamental engine of the American economy and your life in unprecedented ways without ever having read it. Feel good about that?

If only the same speed reader had been available in Manchester recently, it would have speeded up this art event, where members of the public were invited to read the entire IPCC Fourth Assessment Report on Climate Change. That was scheduled to take three days…

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 22, 2009
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...and it's not a director's cut of David Attenborough

According to a Nature paper that's receiving some pickup (Reuters, CSM ) the history of life on earth may just have got roughly 15% longer. That may not sound a huge difference, but a 15% extension on life's lease adds up to 600 million years -- roughly equivalent to the time taken for animals to get from creepy little things that couldn’t even crawl to your pet cat.

There were no animals on earth, though, during the 600 million years in question. The paper by Oleg Abramov and Stephen Mojzsis [link fixed] at the University of Colorado is about the earliest life, not the latest. Previous research has suggested that the heavy rain of asteroids, comets and the like that characterised the early solar system would have made the earth too hazardous a place for life to persist until after what is known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment" some 3.9 billion years ago. Impacts by large objects, it was thought, would vapourise whole oceans and wrap the earth in an atmosphere of superheated steam which would sterilise the planet.

The model developed by Abramov and Mojzis tells a different story. Pretty much everywhere on the planet gets zapped by a big rock, often more than once – but there are never any occasions where the whole planet including all the subsurface is simultaneously uninhabitable. If life had got started during this time, they argue, it could have persisted ever since.

At present the first evidence for life comes right after the Late Heavy Bombardment, about 3.8 million billion years ago. The speed with which that life developed after the bombardment has been seen by some as evidence that life is implicit in the way the universe is set up, and will arise spontaneously PDQ wherever it gets the chance. If it took 600 million years, though, then one would have to start thinking that life is relatively unlikely, which obvioulsy has implications for astrobiology.

It may still be the case that life arose as soon as it could, right at the beginning of the earth's history – but it is going to be harder to prove it. While bacteria may have been able to survive the horrible early history of the earth, rocks were not so lucky – there are no major bits of crust left over from back then.

In a related happy accident, this week Nature also has a fine feature on Mike Russell and his research on the metabolism-first approach to the origins of life.

Image: simulation of the state of the Earth at the end of Late Heavy Bombardment. Circles are crater locations; colors show temperature / Oleg Abramov

Posted by Oliver Morton on May 21, 2009
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

The Nigerian senate has set a new deadline for oil companies to end gas flaring; December 13, 2010, reports ThisDay, a daily Nigerian newspaper.

The deadline will be binding once a bill, called the Gas Flaring (Prohibition and Punishment) Bill 2009, is passed in the National Assembly.

It’s not the first time a date has been set for oil companies in the Niger Delta to clean up their act. Nigeria first outlawed gas flaring in 1979. Over the years, the main oil companies in the region – Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC), ExxonMobil and Chevron – have all set targets for the phase-out that didn’t materialize. The last deadline, in December 2008, also went by without action.

"It's a history of shifting goal posts, missing deadline after deadline,” Vivian Bellonwu, a local activist told the BBC in January.

The cheapest way to deal with gas, a byproduct from crude oil extraction, is by burning it. According to the World Bank’s Global Gas Flaring Reduction Partnership, Nigeria flared around 16.8 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2007, about 2.5% of the natural gas consumption in the US. Burning the gas also produces small amounts of over 250 toxins.

Of course, if the natural gas was allowed to seep out without burning, it would have a much greater environmental impact. Campaigners would like to see it captured instead.

Continue reading "An end to Nigerian gas flares?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 21, 2009
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The International Whaling Commission has yet again failed to reach an agreement between those nations that would hunt cetaceans and those that oppose all whaling. A key working group has failed to make a decision on Japan’s proposal that it phase out its controversial Antarctic hunts in return for being allowed to hunt minke whales in its own coastal waters.

The Small Working Group on the Future of the IWC is tasked with attempting to solve the issues related to Japanese coastal whaling, ‘special permit’ or ‘scientific whaling’ and sanctuaries. In the report of its 18 May meeting, it notes:

However, given the complexity and the sensitivity of the issues involved, it should not come as a surprise that it has thus far not been possible to secure agreement on key specifics ... . The inter-relatedness of the three issues singled out cannot be overemphasized; hence the importance of the principle that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed.

It notes that two working group members expressed concern that too much attention is being given to Japanese coastal whaling versus the more general issues of commercial whaling bans and management issues.

Although the report does not identify these members, Australia’s environment minister Peter ‘Burning Beds’ Garrett said, “We don’t consider a solution to this particular issue to be a reduction in whaling in one area and an increase in whaling in another. Until such time as the commission is able to reach a strong view about the appropriate ways of determining matters such as scientific whaling and other measures, then we will just continue to remain in the tough negotiation.” (The Age.)

Other coverage
Decision postponed on minke hunt off Japan – UPI
IWC delays decision on coastal whaling – Kyodo

Other whaling news
“The Federal Opposition has accused the [Australian] Government of secretly dropping its election promise to take Japan to the international court over its whaling program.” - ABC News

Image: Gulf of Maine Cod Project, NOAA National Marine Sanctuaries; Courtesy of National Archives

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 20, 2009
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Mockingbirds (Mimus polyglottos) can recognize humans who have threatened them before, and will divebomb them in self-defence, according to a new study whose echoes with Alfred Hitchcock’s horror movie The Birds have garnered news coverage aplenty.

Douglas Levey and colleagues from the University of Florida, Gainesville report that the mockingbirds very quickly learn to pick individual human threats out of the crowd. Although crows and parrots are known to recognise individual humans, mockingbirds were not thought to be as clever. And they remain a wild species, though one that has happily adjusted to the presence of people (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci., doi:10.1073/pnas.0811422106).

The birds in the study, nesting on the University of Florida campus, see hundreds of people walking past every hour. Most casual passers-by elicit no response, even if they touch the nest. But if a human stands close to them day after day – even wearing different clothing to vary their appearance – the mockingbirds attack, swooping down on the intruder.

"It's amazing what a bird brain can do," ornithologist John Fitzpatrick, of Cornell University, tells ScienceNOW.

"We don't believe mockingbirds evolved an ability to distinguish between humans. Mockingbirds and humans haven't been living in close association long enough for that to occur. We think instead that our experiments reveal an underlying ability to be incredibly perceptive of everything around them,” Levey tells the Guardian.

Image: A mockingbird prepares to divebomb an intruder /Louis Guillette.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on May 19, 2009
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The world’s largest nesting site for the critically endangered leatherback turtle has been identified by researchers aboard light aircraft over Africa. An international team worked out that between 15,000 and 41,000 Dermochelys coriacea females are breeding in Gabon, making this the world’s largest nesting aggregation.

Their results, published last month in Biological Conservation, should help draw up plans to preserve the species.

“We knew that Gabon was an important nesting site for leatherback turtles but until now had little idea of the size of the population or its global ranking,” says paper author Matthew Witt of the University of Exeter.

“We are now focusing our efforts on working with local agencies to coordinate conservation efforts to ensure this population is protected against the threats from illegal fisheries, nest poaching, pollution and habitat disturbance, and climate change.”

On the Dot Earth blog, Andrew Revkin writes:

As I wrote not long ago, there are growing threats to the turtles in parts of Gabon, even in places where beachfront development or poaching aren’t an issue. Thousands of stray logs drifting down the Congo River from clearing operations are cluttering some nesting beaches, forming deadly blockades that trap leatherbacks. But over all it’s clear that leatherbacks have a strong beachhead in this country, at least for now.

The leatherback is listed as ‘critically endangered’ by the IUCN, one step below ‘extinct in the wild’.

Image top: : J.G. Collumb / Image lower: D. Agambouet

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 19, 2009
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A senior official in the Obama administration held an anonymous background briefing with reporters Monday evening, confirming earlier reports that the administration plans to issue new regulations for automobiles tomorrow.

Given that the official largely confirmed everything that has already been written, it wasn't entirely clear why anonymity was required, but there you go. The new standard does indeed achieve the same requirement in 2016 as the California standard, although the ramp-up in the first three years is slightly slower. California has consequently agreed to drop its request for a separate standard, at least through 2016.

The proposed rule, to be filed jointly by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Transportation Department, would break vehicles into unspecified categories and require each category to increase in fuel-efficiency. This new system is designed to ensure that all vehicles improve, because companies can't simply make a few more fuel-efficient vehicles to offset their gas-guzzlers. Manufacturers would still be required to make sure that their entire fleet meets the average of 35.5 miles per gallon.

The official said the new proposal is expected to add $600 to the price of a new car on average, in addition to the $700 increase expected from the previous regulations. But once you factor in savings due to increased fuel efficiency, the official explained, 'it might end up being a wash."

Although the proposal must still negotiate the regular rule-making process, the administration seems confident that it will sail through as written, thanks to support from not only California but also the automobile manufacturers themselves.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 19, 2009
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The White House is poised to announce new federal standards for automobile manufacturers on Tuesday. Early news reports suggest that the deal will settle a long-standing dispute with California and create the first greenhouse gas standards for vehicles (Associated Press, Washington Post).

Indeed, reports suggest that the administration is going to essentially take the California standard and apply it across the nation. Such a move would reduce cumulative greenhouse gas emissions from new automobiles by nearly 30 percent by 2016. This translates into a mileage standard of about 35 miles per gallon (nearly 15 kilometers per liter) in 2016, which is in line with the standards that California had been proposing and four years ahead of the current schedule.

California proposed its greenhouse gas standards in 2004, but it needed a Clean Air Act waiver from the Environmental Protection Agency in order to institute the regulations. Automakers immediately sued, arguing that California was using the Clean Air Act to indirectly regulate fuel economy, which is something that only the federal government can do (the issue is still tied up in court).

EPA sided with automakers in December 2007, but Barack Obama pledged to reverse that decision during the presidential campaign. Now it looks like he will be able to fulfill that pledge, even as he overhauls the entire sector in an attempt to preserve some kind of future for beleaguered US auto companies.

The issue is also tied up with the Supreme Court decision granting EPA the authority to set greenhouse gas emissions for vehicles. EPA recently proposed a finding on that account, but it's not year clear how these two issues might play out in the current decision. Stay tuned.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 18, 2009
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The credit crunch claims another victim, this time it’s the algal-fuel hope of MIT and Harvard. The company GreenFuel Technologies promised to provide green energy from algae. “GreenFuel's high yield algae farms recycle carbon dioxide from flue gases to produce biofuels and feed, reducing net carbon dioxide production as waste becomes profit. Harvesting algae for biofuels enhances domestic fuel production while mitigating CO2,” reads their website.

Greentech media now reports that the company claims to have fallen victim to the economic times: "We are closing doors. We are a victim of the economy," the report has venture capitalist Duncan McIntyre saying.

GreenFuel has had problems in the past when its algae over ran and they couldn’t control production. But the company seems to have been adept at raising money, although the last round, $13.9 million came over a year ago.

The hopes of a world fuelled by green slime are not over, though. Plenty other algae projects are still in existence. In late April, the San Diego Center for Algae Biotechnology opened, an academic and commercial collaboration. In New Zealand Aquaflow continues its open-air production and in Colorado, Solix does the same in tanks. Both these companies, as well as GreenFuel were highlighted in an article from last year looking specifically at 15 algae companies.

It will be interesting to watch progress of these other companies in these challenging credit crunch times.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 18, 2009
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European Commission plans to create a new department for energy and climate change have been criticised by members of the European Parliament (MEPs), the European Voice reports.

In a letter to Jose Manuel Barosso, the president of the Commission, the MEPs say they are “astonished” that the new department may be established. They express concern that combining energy and climate change in one department presents “a risk that short term economic interest would interfere and conflict with the aim of designing effective and sustainable climate priorities”.

Currently energy and climate change are dealt with in separate directorates.

The MEPs also fear that “internal speculation” within the Commission about the new directorate and its responsibilities could be “highly damaging” to the EU’s preparations and performance in the climate change negotiations due to take in Copenhagen, Denmark in December this year.

Last year, the EU Observer reported that detailed proposals for the scope and structure for the new directorate would be expected by 1 May.

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on May 18, 2009
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

Volcanoes in Eastern Democratic Republic of Congo could erupt “any day now,” razing the city of Goma with lava and poisoning the air with methane and carbon dioxide, says Dieudonné Wafula, the head scientist at Goma’s Volcano Observatory (OVG).

In the last few weeks, the OVG has recorded a sharp increase in the activity of the Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo volcanoes (see USGS map), including increased local temperatures, tremors and larger than usual plumes of gas and volcanic dust.

The Nyamuragira and Nyiragongo volcanoes last erupted in 2002, forcing 300,000 people to flee lava flows in central Goma city, says Michel Halbwachs, a volcanologist from the University of Savoie, in an official report on the eruptions.

But the real worry is that an eruption could destabilize the deep waters of Lake Kivu, 18 km away on DRC’s border with Rwanda, releasing lethal doses of carbon dioxide and methane gas.

Continue reading "Deadly volcano threatens DRC" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 15, 2009
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1,227, or 12 percent, of all known bird species are threatened with extinction, and 192 are critically endangered, according to a 14 May update to the Red List of species at risk, which is produced by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).

There’s not much change on last year’s bird survey, which is performed for IUCN every year by BirdLife International. (The entire Red List is updated separately in the autumn). But in the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth, a Galapagos medium tree-finch (Camarhynchus pauper) has been upgraded to “critically endangered”, partly as a result of an introduced parasitic fly. Eight other species have also been uplisted to this category – two being the only novel additions to the list: the gorgeted puffleg (Eriocnemis isabellae, pictured), and the antioquia brush-finch (Atlapetes blancae), both from Colombia.

There were some conservation success stories, however.

Continue reading "Birds in trouble" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on May 14, 2009
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Russia is banging its Arctic war drums again this week, with the release of a report warning that it cannot rule out “problems that involve the use of military force” along its borders.

The strategy document was approved on Tuesday by President Dmitry Medvedev (Reuters, CanWest News).

Other nations, including Canada and the United States, are eyeing up potential oil resources under the Arctic. Thinning sea ice and a UN convention that allows countries to claim rights to the sea floor if they can fulfil certain criteria are also raising the frequency of sabre rattling over the cold region.

“The Russians have been talking very co-operatively, but they have been backing it up with an increasingly strong military set of actions,” Rob Huebert, a University of Calgary political scientist, told CanWest. “You mix uncertain boundaries with major powers and massive amounts of oil and gas, and you always get difficult international circumstances.”

The Times opines that “Unlike the Antarctic, there is still no international treaty governing the Arctic. There should be. What the Arctic urgently needs is a fleet of lawyers, not a fleet of gunboats.”

(From the Times, see also: Kremlin keeps up James Bond theme with talk of Arctic war.)

Previous Nature coverage of this topic
Norway’s undersea dominions just got larger – 16 April 2009
Europe crashes the Arctic party – 21 November 2008
Arctic cold war gets hotter again – 13 August 2008
Arctic mapping redraws borders – 15 February 2008
Mapping the Arctic dispute – 06 August 2008
Sea floor claims madness – 21 April 2008
Climate change ‘could lead to conflict with Russia’ – 10 March 2008
Russian pole stunt’s American origin – 19 February 2008
News Feature: The next land rush – 2 January 2008

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 14, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Policy | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

House Democrats announced Tuesday that they are close to a preliminary agreement on US climate legislation, meaning the Energy and Commerce Committee could complete its work on schedule next week.

Reuters reports, via the Washington Post, that the deal would ease the requirement for reducing overall emissions from 20 to 17 percent by 2020. The language would also allow upward of 35 percent of the emissions allowances to be given away for free to utilities in the early years.

Obama, Democratic leadership and most economists think a 100 percent auction is wisest because each company must then pays for the right to pollute, but news of a compromise on these principles is hardly surprising. This is one easy place for political bargains to be struck with lawmakers who want to protect one industry or another in their state.

Meanwhile, Greenwire is reporting that Committee Democrats have also reached a deal on a renewable electricity standard, long a top priority among environmentalists. Many set their sites on 25 percent by 2025, but the House language would apparently reduce that to 20 percent and allow a quarter of the requirement to be met through improvements in energy efficiency.

Continue reading "House Democrats report progress on climate" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 13, 2009
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Posted for Quirin Schiermeier

The World Ocean Conference in Manado, Indonesia, opened yesterday with an appeal to the world to act on climate change now. Climate change threatens ocean ecosystems, food security and economic development alike, Indonesia’s Minister of Maritime Affairs and Fisheries said in his opening speech (Xinhuanet).

But when it got down to the political nitty-gritty agreement wasn’t easy to find.

Indonesia hopes that under a new climate agreement it might get credit (and funding) for protecting its vast ocean territory, reports the German Press Agency DPA.

The idea failed to impress scientists. "To get credit for preserving the ocean or avoiding deforestation is like getting credit for not beating your wife," Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, California, told DPA.

Scientists and officials from over 70 countries have come to the Indonesian island of Sulawesi for the five-day meeting, touted as the first major global talks on the role of oceans in mitigating climate change and global warming.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 12, 2009
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Posted for Anjali Nayar

The EU signed a deal with the Republic of Congo last week to help fight illegal logging.

Starting in 2011, any timber or timber product entering the EU from Congo will need a licence showing it has been legally harvested, maintains the health of the forests and provides benefits to local forest communities. The agreement, called the Voluntary Partnership Agreement (VPA), is the second of its kind in Africa.

Ghana signed a similar deal with the EU in September 2008 and several other countries are in VPA negotiations, including Malaysia, Indonesia, Cameroon and Gabon and recently, Liberia.

Congo exports about USD $330 million of timber and timber products every year, about half of which is purchased by EU countries. Some estimates suggest that poor regulation costs the country millions in lost revenue though.

“With a total of 4,674,320 acres of certified forests as of March 2009, Congo has reached the highest echelon of tropical wood producing countries and is becoming a laboratory for sustainable forest management,” says Henri Djombo, Congo's Minister of Forest Economy (press release).

Although the VPA is relatively new, some environmentalists are already concerned that the agreement won’t be able to prevent illegal harvest from being sold to non-EU countries, processed, and re-sold to the EU.

Image: timber in the Republic of Congo / Mr. Moussoki

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 11, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

China is under attack from a battalion of mystery worms. The plague of hungry wigglers has devastated large areas of China’s Xinjian region, in the northwest of the country.

The worms are “2-cm (1 inch) long, thorny green worm with black stripes” according to Reuters.

These beastly creepy crawlies are crammed in, up to 3000 per square meter. They chomp through grass leaving behind them nothing but churned up soil. "The way they eat grass is like rolling a carpet," Zhang Xisham, a grassland management official told Xinhua. If you can bear to witness the sinister scene, look here.

The worms have not yet been identified, but could be moth larvae. They are currently being tested at Xinjiang Agricultural University on Friday. The devastation has forced 50 families to abandon their grassland where they herd livestock.

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 11, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Image courtesy of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

Despite pressure from many environmentalists, the Obama administration upheld a Bush administration rule limiting the regulatory impact of last year's decision to list the polar bear as a threatened species.

The rule would essentially prevent the Endangered Species Act from becoming a venue for arguments about greenhouse gas emissions. And the logic is simple enough: Bear biologists hopefully have better things to do than analyze greenhouse gases from, say, a cement plant in Georgia, even if emissions from that plant contribute to global warming and the retreat of sea ice, which ultimately translates into hungry bears.

"We already are doing everything we can to protect the polar bear," US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar told reporters Friday. "The Endangered Species Act, however, is not in my view the proper mechanism for controlling our nation’s carbon emissions."

This does not necessarily mean that the administration doesn't care about climate. Indeed, Salazar reiterated Obama's call for a comprehensive regulatory regime for greenhouse gases (and presumably one that would be enforced not by biologists but the Environmental Protection Agency, which has more expertise regulating industrial airborne pollutants).

But some environmentalist groups refused to let him off the hook. Greenpeace, for instance, went so far as to cite the decision as evidence of an "emerging willingness by the Obama administration to ignore clear scientific imperatives on global warming in the face of industry pressure."

Many viewed the environmentalists' polar bear strategy as part of a broad effort to apply regulatory pressure wherever possible in hopes of forcing action at the federal level. Whether or not they challenge the polar bear rule, there's no reason to think that this debate is going to end here.

The polar bear might be the first species to receive federal protection due primarily to long-term threats posed by global warming, but the US Fish and Willdife Service is already analyzing whether similar protection should be granted for the pika, a hardy rodent that typically lives among rocks high in the mountains. Indeed, there's no end to the list of plants and animals that stand to lose their homes as the world heats up.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 08, 2009
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Shell has pulled back its plans for drilling in the Arctic, but insists this does not mean the end of this controversial oil exploration.

In the face of huge opposition from environmentalists and native groups, the company has withdrawn its plans for drilling in Beaufort Sea in the 2007-2009 period and says it will be back with a more modest proposal for 2010.

“Over the last three years, Shell's Beaufort Sea drilling objectives have become more focused with the acquisition and analysis of additional seismic data,” says Pete Slaiby, Shell Alaska’s general manager (statement pdf, via KTVA). “As a result, the 2007-2009 plan no longer represents Shell’s current drilling approach.”

The NY Times Green Inc blog says the decision will be seen as a “costly setback” for the company, which spent $2.1 billion to obtain oil leases in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. However, the Financial Times Energy Source blog says:

The move is really only a formal acceptance of a position that was generally understood already: drilling this year was going to be too difficult. Shell insists, however, that this is a setback, not a defeat. In the Arctic, one of the last great frontiers for oil and gas exploration, it is playing the long game.

Last month a court ruled that the leases granted to oil companies in the Chukchi were invalid, as the US Minerals Management Service had failed to do proper environmental checks before issuing them. Slaiby said then that Shell still had “every intention of pursuing a drilling program in the Beaufort and the Chukchi” (Reuters).

Image: Beaufort Sea, by Kevin Raskoff / NOAA

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 08, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, Energy | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Selling ancient artifacts, fossils or meteorites on e-bay (like this really old mushroom) should be embraced instead of reviled, archaeologist and anthropologist Charles Stanish from the University of California, Los Angeles has decided. Fake and “missing” fossils and artifacts that occasionally show up in unexpected places have caused outcry on more than one occasion (see Paper sparks fossil fury).

In an article in Archaeology, Stanish explains how the advent of online auction houses struck fear into the heart of archaeologists because it was expected that the black market for antiquities would become huge, and looting would become rife. But, says Stanish, the opposite has happened. “A very curious thing has happened. It appears that electronic buying and selling has actually hurt the antiquities trade,” Stanish says.

At the low end of the market, he says, it began to make more sense to make fake artefacts than to go looting. These fakes would sell for a fraction of the price of the real thing, but a consequence of their presence on the market was that the real things went down in value too, making looting less lucrative. “The value of real antiquities is also impacted by the increased risk that the object for sale is a fake. The likelihood of reselling an authentic artifact for more money is diminished each year as more fakes are produced,” Stanish says, "the Web has forever distorted the antiquities trafficking market in a positive way."

When the article first came out this generated a bit of interest (New York Times blog) but has gathered more interest apace and has hit blogs and news desks elsewhere (Ars Technica , Information Week) As ever, the Register leads the headlines charge, with their Lara Croft attempt. The least catchy headline award might go to popsci.com’s Website Yields Unexpected Results in the Business of Artifacts.

Image: A forger's daughter in Peru with an example of a fake antiquity. Credit: UCLA/Charles Stanish

Posted by Katharine Sanderson on May 07, 2009
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The World Meterological Organization yesterday retired Ike, Gustav, Paloma, and Alma as hurricane names, following the deaths and damage they caused in 2008.

Eastern North Pacific and Atlantic hurricane names are held on a six-year rotation, so these soubriquets would have emerged again in 2014, had they not been taken off the list. Instead, we'll see hurricanes Gonzalo, Isaias, Paulette and Amanda.

The complete list of hurricane names shows that we can expect hurricanes Claudette, Kevin, Olaf and Mindy in 2009, among others. While tropical cyclones in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea have names quite unfamiliar to Western ears. "The main purpose of naming a tropical cyclone or hurricane is basically for people easily to understand and remember it in a region," the WMO explains.

The National Hurricane Center, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, has a comprehensive list of retired hurricane names, beginning with Carol and Hazel in 1954.

Image: Hurricane Ike in 2008 / NASA / JPL

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on May 06, 2009
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Two of the world’s biggest players on the biotech scene look set for a vicious court fight over their GM crops.

Monsanto has filed suit against DuPont in a row over the former company’s ‘Roundup Ready’ GM products, which are resistant to the Roundup herbicide.

“As the saying goes, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. However, unlawfully taking technology is neither imitation nor flattery; it is unethical and wrong,” says Hugh Grant (not that one), Monsanto’s Chief Executive Officer (press release).

DuPont’s subsidiary Pioneer Hi-Bred is allowed to sell Roundup Ready soybeans and corn. Monsanto though is unhappy that Pioneer is planning on combining Roundup Ready genes with its own ‘Optimum GAT’ modifications.

Continue reading "Monsanto and DuPont trade harsh words, legal allegations" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on May 06, 2009
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Following up on California's announcement last week, the US Environmental Protection Agency proposed the nation's first greenhouse gas standards for biofuels on Tuesday (AP)

The much-anticipated analysis confirms that corn ethanol often increases greenhouse gas emissions compared to gasoline, largely due to the impact of indirect emissions. These result from foreign farmers cutting down forests and planting new crops in response to rising grain prices. That said, the analysis suggests that there is plenty of room for improvement in the production of corn ethanol (for instance, by switching to natural gas or biomass as a heat source during production). Corn ethanol also performs better over the long haul, gradually overcoming the initial spike in emissions due to deforestation.

EPA will use these standards to implement the US biofuels mandate, which requires companies to meet various greenhouse gas requirements as they ramp up production in the coming years. It came as part of a broader set of White House initiatives that seem to offer up a little something for everybody. The administration underscored its support for the industry by creating a high level biofuels working group, while announcing $786.5 million in stimulus funding to promote a range of biofuel research and development activities.

Environmentalists are pleased to see that the administration isn't ignoring the latest science regarding ethanol's unintended impacts. The Renewable Fuels Association, an ethanol trade group, is pleased to see ample wiggle room in the way the numbers work out. And according to Reuters, investors are pleased to see that the administration isn't turning its back on biofuels altogether.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on May 05, 2009
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Major league carbon emitter Australia has delayed the introduction of a cap-and-trade scheme to regulate its greenhouse gas emissions.

In order to ‘manage the impacts of the global recession’, prime minister Kevin Rudd announced on Monday 4 May, the system will be phased in from 1 July 2011, a year later than planned. Rudd had introduced draft legislation of the carbon pollution reduction scheme in March, but it has faced mounting criticism from opposition politicians.

What's more, until July 2012 permits to emit carbon dioxide will be sold at the fixed price of AU$10 (US$ 7.4) a tonne – and companies will be able to buy an unlimited number of them, so there will be no 'cap' involved.

Rudd said he still hopes to push the necessary legislation through parliament this year. He also revised the upper limit on Australia’s emissions reduction target to 25% below 2000 levels by 2020, up from 15%, depending on agreements reached at December’s UN summit in Copenhagen.

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on May 05, 2009
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This week’s issue of Nature looks in detail at “the coming climate crunch”.

As my colleague Quirin Schiermeier explains on the Climate Feedback blog, “What’s it all about then? Well, Gavin Schmidt and David Archer, in their news and views piece, get to the heart of it: “Dangerous climate change, even loosely defined, is going to be hard to avoid.’”

The Real Climate blog focuses on two papers which look at the chances of staying below 2°C warming. “Both find that the most directly relevant quantity is the total amount of CO2 ultimately released, rather than a target atmospheric CO2 concentration or emission rate,” the blogging team writes. “This is an extremely useful result, giving us a clear statement of how our policy goals should be framed.”

Much of the coverage focuses on the suggestion in one of these papers that once humanity has added a trillion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere 2°C is inevitable (eg: Wired).

In the Guardian, Myles Allen, author of one of the papers, writes:

Like all scientists, most of what I do is arcane and technical and of very little interest to outsiders. For once, however, I'm involved in a couple of studies (published today in Nature), that my fellow parents might just find interesting. The headline result of both papers is that the risk of dangerous climate change is primarily determined by the total amount of carbon dioxide that we, the human race, release into the atmosphere over all time, not by emissions in any particular year.

Joseph Romm, of the Climate Progress blog, is unimpressed though. He writes that our issue “fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:

-A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.
-A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.”

Make up your own mind: all the content is here.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 30, 2009
Categories: Earth, environment & ecology, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It's getting to be old-hat. Following up on an earlier promise, US President Barack Obama has formally reversed yet another of his predecessor's policies, this one focusing on the institutional role of science in protecting endangered species (AP).

The rule in question was targeted at the so-called "Section 7 consultations" under the Endangered Species Act. Current regulations require the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to review all projects involving federal government for potential impacts to endangered species. The Bush administration's rule would have allowed other federal agencies to skip that review process if their own experts determined that it wasn't necessary.

In theory, such a system might improve things on the front end. The idea is that other federal agencies would have an incentive to integrate biology into the planning process rather than simply passing the environmental review to Fish and Wildlife, which comes in on the tail end and tries to straighten things out. For those worried about whether these initial agency reviews would be sufficient, the argument goes, lawsuits remain as a critical backstop.

Continue reading "Interior revokes Bush rule on endangered species" »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 29, 2009
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Posted for Rex Dalton

A uranium-rich peak in New Mexico that is sacred to 30 Native American tribes was named this week as an endangered historic place by the US Natural Trust for Historic Preservation.

The 3,450-meter Mount Taylor is known as Tsoodzil, or turquoise mountain, to the Navajo; it also has deep significance for tribes like the Zuni and Acoma. With uranium prices high in recent years, the historic classification is seen as an attempt to save or limit the culturally rich volcano from further mining.

The highest point in the Cibola National Forest, the mountain was named in 1949 1849 after General Zackary Taylor, president at the time. Studies show the majestic volcano that dominates horizon west of Albuquerque was active 1.5 million to 3.3 million years ago.

The trust listed 11 sites in total:

Ames Shovel Shops, Easton, Mass.
Cast-Iron Architecture of Galveston, Texas
Century Plaza Hotel, Los Angeles, Calif.
Dorchester Academy, Midway, Ga.
Human Services Center, Yankton, S.D.
Lāna‘i City, Hawai‘i
The Manhattan Project’s Enola Gay Hangar, Wendover Airfield, Utah
Memorial Bridge, Portsmouth, N.H. to Kittery, Maine
Miami Marine Stadium, Virginia Key, Fla.
Mount Taylor, near Grants, N.M.
Unity Temple, Oak Park, Ill.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 29, 2009
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Following the collapse on April 4 of a narrow ice bridge that had connected the Wilkins ice shelf with a small island off the Antarctic Peninsula, the northern ice front of the ice sheet is beginning to disintegrate.

A high-resolution radar image taken on April 20 by the German TerraSAR-X satellite shows large icebergs being released from a rift zone near Latady Island. Scientists expect up to 3,400 square kilometretres of the Wilkins Ice Sheet to break into icebergs before a new stable ice front will form.

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 29, 2009
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The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, not to be confused with the Major Economies Meeting (also known as the Major Emitters Meeting) of yesteryear, wrapped up with little fanfare at the U.S. State Department in Washington Tuesday.

A holdover from the administration of George W. Bush, the meeting serves as a venue for less formal global warming talks among 17 countries accounting for some 75 percent of global emissions. Many accused Bush of using the process to undercut the United Nations process, but even critics acknowledged that the idea - bringing key players together for parallel talks on the big issues - was sound.

No major news has come from the meeting, but then again nothing was really expected. Jake Schmidt, international climate policy director for the Natural Resources Defense Council in Washington, says the closest the parties ever got to actual numbers - representing emissions cuts and monetary commitments - was a presentation by Obama's science advisor, John Holdren, regarding emissions trajectories and potential scenarios for stabilzing carbon dioxide levels.

But by all accounts the administration is taking the process seriously. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton kicked things off on 27 April, and President Barack Obama himself reportedly visited with the foreign delegations.

"The fact that he took time out of his schedule to actually do that is important symbolically," Schmidt says. "He didn’t talk too much, mostly listened. He mostly wanted to kind of hear their perspective, and I think that’s an important way to reach out to these countries and build some trust."

It's still early in the year, and so far international delegates are pleased to report that trust is indeed building (for a sampling, check the Washington Post's coverage). But clearly negotiators have a long way to go if they are to sign any meaningful agreement in Copenhagen this December.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 28, 2009
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People in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia, together with the rest of the world, are commemorating the 23th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster, the worst nuclear power plant disaster in history.

At 1:23 a.m. on 26 April 1986 reactor number four exploded at the Chernobyl plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, spreading radioactive fallout across Europe. But not until three days later, when the fallout was detected in Sweden, would the Soviet authorities admit that there had been an accident.

The series of explosions killed more than fifty people. Around 4,000 are believed to have died of cancer in the aftermath of the disaster, and millions across Europe have been exposed to harmful nuclear radiation of different degrees.

Chernobyl ruined the reputation and public acceptance of nuclear power for years to come. But with growing concern over global warming and energy security nukes seem staged for a comeback. Meanwhile, the world’s twelve leading nuclear technology nations and the European Union have joined forces to develop a new generation of nuclear reactors for safer, cheaper and cleaner power generation.

But Chernobyl is not forgotten. British no nukes campaigners protesting against plans to build new nuclear reactors, used a two-day camp-out this weekend in Sizewell to mark the 23rd anniversary of the disaster. In Minsk, meanwhile, Gay activists were told they are not wanted in the annual Chernobyl remembrance march – one of few public occasions allowed by the Belarusian authorities in which the political opposition can take part.

Quirin Schiermeier

Posted by Quirin Schiermeier on April 27, 2009
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There's no doubt that forest fires release enormous amounts of carbon dioxide and soot into the atmosphere. There's also no doubt that fire is every bit as natural as rain and snow, which in theory means that forest regeneration would balance things out over time. The question facing researchers is to what extent global warming might fuel this natural trend with droughts and heat waves.

A group of scientists penned a review article in this week's edition of Science calling for a more aggressive research agenda on these questions. Exhibit number one: Although the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change highlighted the issue and suggested that the fire cycle could become more active in a warmer climate, no attempt was made to quantify this effect. The article has gotten considerable press (see here and here), mostly focusing on the top-line assessment that fires will beget more fires.

Not surprisingly, the researchers suggest that by far the biggest impact of fire in terms of carbon dioxide emissions is from the slash-and-burn techniques for clearing forest. From this perspective, fire is a surrogate for deforestation, and they estimate this effect at 19 percent of human greenhouse gas emissions.

That is broadly in line with the notion that deforestation is responsible for a fifth of emissions, but as Thomas W. Swetnam, a University of Arizona researcher and one of the authors, suggests in this story on mongabay.com, that number is more likely to go up than down as the science comes in.

The National Science Foundation has a quick post here, linking to a teleconference with three of the scientists.

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 24, 2009
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Have you ever wondered what the most important scientific questions for biodiversity conversation are?

Well, wonder no longer. The journal, Conservation Biology, yesterday published online the top 100 questions, which were contributed by conservation experts from around the world.

The questions include: How does biodiversity shape social resilience to the effects of climate change, and how effective are different types of protected areas, such as natural parks, at conserving biodiversity?

William Sutherland, a conservation biologist at the University of Cambridge, who led the project to come up with the questions, says, “With the current crisis in the loss of habitats and species it is important that we ensure we are carrying out the most important research.”

The aim behind the project was to address a mismatch between the conservation topics that academics study and the information conservationists need to help them preserve biodiversity, says the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council, which funded the project.

A group of 761 conservationists and 12 academics contributed a long list of 2291 questions, which were eventually whittled down to the top 100 questions by a group of 44 experts at a two day meeting at the University of Cambridge.

Image: the endangered Pine Barrens Tree Frog / USFWS

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on April 24, 2009
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The UK government has pressed ahead in its support for carbon capture and storage (CCS), but appears to be relying on electricity consumers to fund the technology.

Following Wednesday's budget announcement that the government would fund up to four demonstration CCS projects, energy secretary Ed Miliband added yesterday that any new coal-fired power station built in the UK must demonstrate CCS on 400MW of its output. (E.ON's proposed coal plant in Kingsnorth, which may be built by 2014, will generate about 1600MW in total).

And by 2025, if the technology is "proven" - a judgement to be made by the Environment Agency - new coal-fired power stations would have to retrofit CCS across their entire output.

Continue reading "The UK's carbon capture contretemps" »

Posted by Richard Van Noorden on April 24, 2009
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Afghanistan has established its first national park, known as Band-e-Amir, which will protect six deep blue lakes separated by natural dams made of travertine, a mineral deposit. The park is near the Bamyan Valley, where the 1500-year-old Buddha statues destroyed by the Taliban once stood (BBC News).

Travertine systems are found in only a handful of places around the world, most of which are protected on the world heritage list drawn up by the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. Afghanistan’s National Environmental Protection Agency, which will help manage the park, hopes it will encourage tourism to the war torn country.

Continue reading "Afghanistan establishes its first national park" »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on April 23, 2009
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US Energy Secretary Steven Chu found himself on the hot seat once again Wednesday, as congressional Republicans pinned him down about past comments on the value of higher energy prices (previously it was coal). Representative Cliff Stearns (Republican, Florida) asked Chu about a remark he made last year suggesting that the United States would benefit from European gasoline prices. It's worked for Europe, but gas prices are a touchy issue on Capitol Hill.

In light of the current economic crisis, Stearns asked, would Chu still seek to raise gas prices on American families? Chu said such a policy would be "unwise."

"You can't honestly believe that," Stearns pressed. "You want Americans to pay for gasoline at European prices?"

"No."

"Doesn't that sound a little bit silly, in retrospect?"

"Yes."

The exchange came as Chu and two of President Barack Obama's other top environmental appointees, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson and Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, testified before the House Energy and Commerce Committee on Wednesday. At issue was the leading climate bill, spearheaded by Chairman Henry Waxman (Democrat, California), which would reduce US greenhouse gas emissions by roughly 80 percent below 2005 levels by mid-century.

Continue reading "Chu " »

Posted by Jeff Tollefson on April 22, 2009
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Today is eco-awareness time! Yes people, it is once again Earth Day. So who is up to what? Here are some of the stories that have caught our collective eye.

CNN says one billion people will celebrate Earth Day, although it’s not clear where that figure came from.

NASA has a whole Earth Day Page, complete with images of our fair planet (including the photo used right) and features on the space agency’s green work.

American politicians are getting on the bandwagon too. President Obama is visiting a facility in Iowa that manufactures towers for wind power generation (Christian Science Monitor).

Continue reading "Earth Day roundup" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 22, 2009
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Tourists may need to stretch their arms and legs at little further to straddle Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico and Utah all at once. A report in the Deseret News claims that modern surveys put the US monument marking the geographical union of the four western states in the wrong place.

The error is due to subtle effects such as imperfect bulges on the Earth's surface which were difficult to incorporate in 1868, when the US government first surveyed the site, the chief geodetic surveyor for the National Geodetic Survey told Colorado's Channel 9 news:

"The 2.5 mile discrepancy that was originally reported is not accurate... At most, the difference between the location of the monument and where the actual four states should meet geographically is approximately 1,800 feet."

Google Map:

View Larger Map

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 22, 2009
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Aid charity Oxfam is warning that the number of people impacted by climate-related disasters will rise 54% in the next six years, reaching 375 million.

Using data on 6,500 droughts, floods and other disasters dating back to 1980, Oxfam predicts another 133 million people will be in peril by 2015. Dealing with this will require an increase in aid spending from 2006 levels of $14.2 billion to £25 billion a year.

“Any such projection is not an exact science, but what is clear is that substantially more people may be affected by disasters in the very near future, as climate change and environmental mismanagement create a proliferation of droughts, floods and other disasters,” says the new report. “And more people will be vulnerable to them because of their poverty or location.”

In addition to those people directly impacted by disasters, others will be put at risk by climate-related conflicts when climate change exacerbates more traditional security threats, says the ‘Right to Survive’ report. The projections are made by smoothing out the extremes of the historical disaster data and fitting a straight trend-line up to 2015 (graph below).

Continue reading "Climate disasters increasing with waistlines?" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 21, 2009
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The outlook for Shell's carbon sequestration plans is not rosy in the town of Barendrecht in the Netherlands. The town's council recently said that it had "numerous reservations" about the demo project, according to a Wall Street Journal report.

Shell hopes to compress 400,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and inject it into aging natural gas beds a kilometre and a half below Barendrecht. Because Dutch gas beds are running out of natural gas, there could be room for storing up to 30 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year by 2020, according to the Journal. But last month, 1,300 residents protested the proposal, which was commissioned by the Dutch government.

Continue reading "Dutch protest carbon-trapping demo project" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 21, 2009
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Further details of what is expected in the UK’s budget on Wednesday are leaking out into the press. The Independent first reported the government’s plans for a green budget on 8 April (The Great Beyond).

Alastair Darling, the chancellor, is expected to announce a £500 million green stimulus package, including £200 million for wind turbines, hydro-electric power and other renewable energy technologies, says a report in the Times

The BBC reports that the chancellor will announce two carbon capture and storage demonstration projects. It is unclear if funding will be earmarked for these projects, though.

Continue reading "Hundreds of millions for green technology expected in UK budget " »

Posted by Natasha Gilbert on April 20, 2009
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A 3,000 year record of African climate holds warnings of devastating droughts yet to come, say US researchers.

Using lake sediments from Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana, a team led by Jonathan Overpeck and Timothy Shanahan reconstructed the variability of the African monsoon for nearly every year of the past three millennia. Dire droughts appear to be unavoidable in West Africa, and there are worrying implications related to the Sahel drought in the 60s, 70s and 80s that killed thousands.

“What’s disconcerting about this record is that it suggests that the most recent drought was relatively minor in the context of the West African drought history,” says Shanahan, of the University of Arizona, Tucson (press release 1).

And while some droughts – like the one in Sahel – lasted for decades, the sediment record shows some lasted for centuries.

Continue reading "Africa ‘must brace for mega-droughts’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 17, 2009
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The earthquake in L'Aquila, Italy, has changed the lay of the land, according to blended satellite imagery from the European Space Agency. Geologists used the images to identify the fault line that caused the 6 April earthquake and its aftershocks, which so far have killed 294 people according to an AP report.

Italian research groups have released three images created by blending radar satellite data taken before and after the earthquake. The images, called interferograms, show changes in the distance from the observing satellite to the ground. This means they can only detect displacement along the axis to the satellite, so the Italian team used ground-based GPS stations in the region to confirm their findings, which indicate that the ground has moved as much as 25 cm in some places.

Continue reading "ESA releases L'Aquila before and after satshots" »

Posted by Lucas Laursen on April 17, 2009
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A controversial study of ancient corals published this week suggests that sea levels can rise rapidly under global warming-type scenarios.

Paul Blanchon, of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, and his colleagues report in Nature that fossilized coral reefs uncovered during excavations for a Mexican theme park show that a sea-level leap of 2 to 3 metres occurred in the space of about 5 decades some 121,000 years ago. This was during the last interglacial period, when temperatures were higher than they are today.

“In our warming world, the implications of a rapid, metre-scale sea-level jump late during the last interglacial are clear for both future ice-sheet stability and reef development,” the researchers write.

“Given the dramatic disintegration of ice shelves and discovery of rapid ice loss from both the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, the potential for sustained rapid ice loss and catastrophic sea-level rise in the near future is confirmed by our discovery of sea-level instability at the close of the last interglacial. Furthermore, the inhibition of reef development that this instability caused has negative implications for the future viability of modern reefs, which are already being impacted by anthropogenic activity on a global scale.”

However a number of other researchers seem sceptical of the claims.

Continue reading "Ancient seas ‘rose fast’" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2009
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As if the White House wasn’t enough, US President Barack Obama now has a lichen of his own. Kerry Knudsen, the lichen curator at the University of California, Riverside Herbarium, has named a newly discovered species Caloplaca obamae.

In his paper in Opuscula Philolichenum, Knudsen writes:

The species is named in honor of Barack Obama, President of the United States. The final collections of this species were made during the suspenseful final weeks of Obama’s campaign for president and this paper was written during the international jubilation over his election. The final draft was completed on the day of his inauguration. He is honored for his support of science and scientific education.

C. obamae was discovered in 2007 on Santa Rosa Island in California. Knudsen says it was nearly wiped out by cattle ranching on the island, but is now recovering (press release).

Image: J. C. Lendemer / UCR

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2009
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Norway has successfully claimed a huge swathe of seabed in the North Sea.

The United Nations has gifted the country the rights to an additional 235,000 square kilometres of seabed – potentially including lucrative oil reserves.

Under rules set down in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea countries can claim seabed beyond the standard 200 nautical mile range if this is a natural extension of their territory. The Arctic has been a controversial area for such claims, with Russia and Canada also seeking seabed rights (see Nature’s 2008 feature ‘The next land rush’ for more on this).

Now the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, which is responsible for assessing such claims, has accepted Norway’s rights to an area that extends nearly to the North Pole (UN pdf).

Continue reading "Norway’s undersea dominions just got larger" »

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 16, 2009
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Climate change could force birds to migrate hundreds of extra miles, according to new research. The extra distance might even be deadly.

Modelling by Stephen Willis, of Durham University, and his colleagues shows that the breeding ranges of Sylvia warblers will shift consistently north as the Earth warms. Non-breeding ranges showed no consistent directional shift, meaning longer migrations.

“From 2071 to 2100, nine out of the 17 species we looked at are projected to face longer migrations, particularly birds that cross the Sahara desert,” says Willis (press release). “Our findings show that marathon migrations for some birds are set to become even longer journeys. ... The added distance is a considerable threat.”

According to the team’s paper in Journal of Biogeography, trans-Saharan migrants face an average extra flight of 413 km. The researchers write that the challenge facing many species is “unprecedented”:

The future for many migratory species will depend not only upon their ability to adapt, but also critically upon our success in meeting the challenge of ensuring that conservation strategies are designed to facilitate changes in breeding and non-breeding ranges, changes in stopover requirements and adaptation of migration routes, all of which are likely to form part of the response of these species to future climatic changes.

Coverage
Tiny warbler at risk from longer African migration – Independent
Birds face longer migrations due to climate change – Reuters
Warming pushes bushed birds to migrate farther – AFP

Image: Common whitethroat Sylvia communis / copyright RSPB Images

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 15, 2009
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UPDATE – Current Nature editor Philip Campbell’s tribute, John Maddox 1925–2009, is now on our website:

It was with great sadness that I and my colleagues at Nature learned of the death on Sunday of Sir John Maddox — or 'JM', as his colleagues always referred to him.

There was puzzlement, too. Yes, John had been looking frail recently, but, well, this was JM — the perpetually restless, irresistible, unstoppable force. The editor who conducted some gatherings with 'shock and awe' as some recall. The 'man with a whim of iron' as others used to call him. And the man who survived countless cigarettes and glasses of red wine, many consumed late into the night as he wrote the week's Editorials at the last possible moment.

As Walter Gratzer, of King’s College, London, wrote recently, “John Maddox brought an old-fashioned Nature into the modern age from the mid-1960s.” (History of Nature feature.)

A full appreciation from Nature will follow shortly. Meanwhile, here is what the world is saying.

Without too much trouble I could probably fill blogs for a month with tales of John: of waiting at the typesetter while he finished an editorial way beyond deadline; of a plan to visit Mexico together when we wined and dined the very attractive press attache at the Mexican Consulate; of how he regularly set fire to his waste-paper basket. Of being sent to the wine bar with a fiver for a bottle of Chateau Thames. Of him disappearing on a Friday night and saying, as the door closed, that he wanted a thousand words from me by Monday for the following week’s issue – on anything I pleased. Of many cases of exasperation and irritation, and many more acts of kindness.

- Henry Gee, Nature editor

He was one of those fellows who shaped the direction of science for quite a long period of time with the power of one of the most influential science journals in the world. I suspect every scientist of my generation read his editorials in our weekly perusal of the journal.

- PZ Myers, Pharyngula

One of the toughest adversaries I’ve ever wrangled with is Sir John Maddox. He was hard-headed, scarily knowledgeable, hyper-articulate, unfailingly gracious even as he ripped you a new one.

- John Horgan, Director of the Center for Science Writings at Stevens Institute of Technology

As Editor of Nature, he restored the journal to an unchallenged position as the place to publish interesting research quickly, and did so at a time when Britain’s influence in world science was otherwise declining. His judgments, sometimes quirky but never dull, were always backed by persuasive argument and a sense of humour.

- The Times

It was a mark of his skilled editorship that Nature could publish a paper on, say, the Loch Ness monster without sacrificing its authority.

“He took command of Nature in a big way,” the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins said. “He had a tremendous grasp of science in the full range, from physics to biology to public affairs as they affected the world of science.”

Martin Rees, the president of the Royal Society and Britain’s astronomer royal, called Mr. Maddox “a dominant figure,” adding that “he helped establish Nature’s status internationally and built it up by developing supplements to increase its coverage.” After retiring as editor in 1995, he assumed an influential elder statesman role, acting, Mr. Rees said, “as a general guru of science and scientific policy.”

- NY Times

"He adored science and talked about it all the time," she [his daughter, Bronwen Maddox] says. "He was enormously enthused by it. He was a physicist, and took to the biological sciences with enthusiasm, but I think his heart stayed in physics."

- Scientific American

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
Categories: Chemistry, Earth, environment & ecology, Energy, Financial Crisis, Health and medicine, Neat technologies, On Nature News | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Over 100 suspected climate change protesters have been released by the police after they were arrested over an alleged plot to shut down a coal power station near Nottingham.

“Police have gathered a large amount of evidence which they are now reviewing,” says a Nottinghamshire police statement. “From the information gathered police believe those arrested were planning a period of prolonged disruption to the safe running of Ratcliffe-on-Soar Power Station.”

The UK has seen a series of power station protests in the last year but this operation was unusual both for the number of arrests and the fact these arrests occurred before the protest. The arrests come after wider controversies over policing including the death of a man who became caught up in protest around the G20 meeting in London. The Guardian newspaper obtained a video showing that the man was handled roughly by police just moments before his death.

There have also been complaints about policing of past climate change protests.

Shami Chakrabarti, director of civil rights group Liberty, says “In the light of the policing of the G20 protests, people up and down the country will want to be confident that there was evidence of a real conspiracy to commit criminal damage by those arrested and that this was not just an attempt by the police to disrupt perfectly legitimate protest.” (Guardian, Daily Mail.)

Police say they recovered “specialist equipment” after the raid on a school. Some papers say this included bolt cutters and locks.

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
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The lives of four African elephants have been explored through the unusual medium of their hair, researchers report this week.

The History of Animals using Isotope Records (HAIR) project tracked four elephants from the Samburu National Reserve in Kenya and used differences in isotopes in their tail hair to gain insights into their eating and drinking.

Differences between amounts of heavier carbon 13 isotopes and lighter carbon 12 in the tail hair show whether the beasts have been dining on trees and shrubs or grasses. Certain grasses have higher C13 to C12 ratios.

Similarly, changes in hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios can show where the elephants are drinking, as dry season rivers are highly evaporated and have a different composition to rainy season rivers, says researcher Thure Cerling.

“Now, we have a long-term record so we can really see what one normal family is doing over a long period of time,” Cerling, of the University of Utah, told the BBC.

This type of data can also show when things are not going well for the elephants. “We have this one incident where they apparently missed an entire good season of grass resource; the GPS data shows that they were outside [the Samburu National Reserve] in a community area where it appears that they had to compete with cattle,” says Cerling. “They got out-competed in that situation.”

Cerling et al’s paper will be available soon when it is published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

See also
University of Utah press release
Hairs Provide Clues to Shifts in Elephant Diet – NY Times
University of Utah study identifies threats to elephants - Deseret News

Image: Mahala Kephart, University of Utah

Posted by Daniel Cressey on April 14, 2009
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A shortage of nickel in the oceans of ancient Earth may be the push that gave oxygen-producing bacteria a competitive edge over their methane-producing counterparts. The long-term result: an oxygen-rich atmosphere, and life as we know it.

The findings, reported yesterday in Nature, provide a new answer to the long-