environment
gregladen | February 28, 2008
A flourishing wetland on Kenya's northern coast is under serious threat from plans to grow vast amounts of sugarcane, partly for biofuel production. Developers want to transform nearly 20,000 hectares of the spectacular Tana River Delta, into sugarcane plantations with other parts of the Delta earmarked for rice.
"This development would be a national disaster, wreaking havoc with the area's ecosystem and spelling the end for wildlife across much of the Delta", said Paul Matiku, Executive Director of NatureKenya. "Large areas would become ecological deserts. The Delta is a wildlife refuge…
gregladen | February 28, 2008Almost half of the world's oceans have been ruined to some degree ... often very severely ... by human activity. You've heard a lot on the news and in the blogosphere about this lately. This increased interest is in part because of the recent production (Feb 15th Science) of a map of the ocean showing these impact.
Here is the map:
Click Here to View Larger Image
The work, published in the Feb. 15 issue of Science and presented at a press conference Thursday, February 14 at 1 pm EST at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) meeting in Boston, MA, was conducted at…
pharyngula | February 28, 2008A few weeks ago, you may have heard about that interesting study that showed that using cropland to produce biofuels was actually more damaging to the atmosphere than using fossil fuels — among the reasons was that tying up productive cropland to produce alcohol meant other land had to be deforested/plowed/burned to produce food. It turns out that a couple of University of Minnesota faculty were involved in that study. Their reward? Agriculture groups that had funded them to the tune of about $1.5 million suspended their grants.
The Minnesota Soybean Growers Association and the Minnesota…
pharyngula | February 28, 2008This is something that will cause a few heart palpitations at UMM — we've begun this big push towards being a green university, exploring alternative energy and conservation, and we are very proud of our campus wind turbine, with plans to build more. This story of a wind turbine that lost a rotor and exploded in a storm is a wee bit unsettling.
However, I've never seen our turbine blades move that fast, even in the high winds we sometimes get around here, so I suspect we must be working with a newer and I hope better design here, unlike the ten-year old turbine in the video.
Oh, and our…
grrlscientist | February 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, endocrine disruptors, environmental pollutants, DDT metabolites, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, birdsong, physiology, behavior
European Starling, Sturnus vulgaris.
Image: Gerd Rossen [larger view].
An elegant but disturbing paper was just published that documents that biologically relevant concentrations of endocrine disrupting pollutants are affecting the quality and quantity of song produced by male songbirds, which in turn, influences female mate choice. According to the research team, not only do these pollutants influence behavior, but they also affect…
gregladen | February 26, 2008Hunting Wolves; Killing Elephants
The Bush administration on Thursday announced an end to federal protection for gray wolves in Montana, Wyoming and Idaho, concluding that the wolves were reproductively robust enough to survive.
"Wolves are back," said Lynn Scarlett, the deputy secretary of the Department of the Interior, in a telephone conference call with reporters. "Gray wolves in the northern Rocky Mountains are thriving and no longer need
A coalition of wildlife and environmental groups dismissed the government's claims and announced plans for a lawsuit to reverse the decision, which is…
revere | February 26, 2008As I write this I am at 30,000 feet winging my way to Montreal, Canada, where the temperature is below freezing. So what more appropriate topic than microbial hazards of bathing beaches? Maybe it was my foray into the wonderful world of fecal accidents that prompted me to look further into the subject but I found a couple of papers from last year by a groups at Johns Hopkins about the effect of bather density on levels of parasites pathogenic for humans at one particular beach in Maryland, the Hammerman area of Gunpowder Falls State Park in Chase, Maryland in mid to late summer of 2006 (here…
edyong | February 25, 2008Humans have explored the entire face of the planet, but we haven't done so alone. Animals and plants came along for the ride, some as passengers and other as stowaways. Today, these hitchhikers pose one of the greatest threats to the planet's biodiversity, by ousting and outcompeting local species.
Islands are particularly vulnerable to invaders. Cut off from the mainland, island-dwellers often evolve in the absence of predators and competitors, and are prone to developing traits that make them easy pickings for invaders, like docile natures or flightlessness.
Two years ago, I wrote about…
mikethemadbiologist | February 25, 2008
This is really cool: a building that is not only environmentally friendy (low energy use, low impact building materials, passive heating and cooling, and so on), but also comes with its own hydroponic garden system.
What's neat is that this isn't vaporware--China is in the process of building a bunch of these. Here's how much green stuff the building will have:
Look hydroponicy stuff:
Some more:
And:
It's got all sorts of convection air current stuff:
And the apartments look nice too:
I wonder if it will have termite problems though....
clock | February 21, 2008Greensboro is the only North Carolina town on the 'Popular Science' list of the America's 50 Greenest Cities. We still have a lot of work ahead of us until we catch up with the West Coast.
(Hat-tip)
grrlscientist | February 20, 2008tags: environment, commercial fishing industry, bottom trawling, orange roughy, Chilean sea bass, seafood
Landsat satellite image, Gulf of Mexico (mouth of Vermillion Bay, Louisiana), taken on 10/12/92. Note the abundant narrow sediment trails, most in shallow water (<20m), possibly caused by trawling.
Image: SkyTruth [larger view].
Ain't technology grand? Thanks to Landsat satellite images, which are available on the internet, the ordinary citizen can now see what is happening to our planet -- but sadly, much of it is not good. For example, the above image of the Gulf of Mexico was…
clock | February 19, 2008There is a lot of stuff one hears about food, sustainability, environment, etc., and it is sometimes hard to figure out what is true and what is not, what is based on science and what is emotion-based mythology.
For instance, some things I have heard over the years and have no means to evaluate if they are even close to plausible:
Claim #1: if we used every square inch of arable or potentially arable land, clearing the rainforest, turning deserts into fields, removing cities, malls and highways, killing all the animals, destroying all natural ecosystems, moving all humans to the Moon and…
clock | February 19, 2008...from different points of view:
Anne-Marie: Culinary revelation
Mark Powell: Saving the ocean with guilt or desire? and Does the sustainable seafood movement rely on guilt? (blogfish poll)
Miriam Goldstein: Guilty as charged
Amanda Marcotte: Save your soul with recycling
grrlscientist | February 15, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, climate change, global warming, oceanic dead zones, west coast, North America, Oregon state, Washington state
Millions of dead crabs are washing up onto Oregon and Washington state beaches from the offshore "dead zone".
Ever since it was first noticed by crab fishermen who hauled up hundreds of dead and dying crabs in 2002, the "dead zone" that popped up in the waters along the northwestern coastal shelf just off the coast of Oregon has claimed unknown millions of lives. This oxygen-depleted region has transformed formerly rich seafloor communities teeming with…
skookumchick | February 14, 2008Guess who we've been invited to have dinner with on Tuesday night? Think super famous American scientist who the administration tried to muzzle...
The answer below the fold... tee hee!
It's James Hansen! Yeah, that James Hansen, the top scientist at NASA who the Bush II administration tried to silence on global warming, but who then went and called the New York Times instead!! OMG!!!
A snippet from the New York Times article from January of 2006:
The fresh efforts to quiet him, Dr. Hansen said, began in a series of calls after a lecture he gave on Dec. 6 at the annual meeting of the…
clock | February 10, 2008As I promised the other day, I went to Carrboro Century Center this afternoon (right after meeting with Anton around the corner) to see the Island Projects designed by the Chapel Hill High School students of Rob Greenberg.
I did not see all of them - they were doing this in "shifts" throughout the afternoon and I could only stay for an hour - but I saw several of the projects and talked to a number of students (and to Rob himself). I have to say I was really, truly impressed with their work, as well as with their enthusiasm as they explained the details of their projects to me and other…
clock | February 9, 2008Obligatory Readings of the Day: Jennifer Ouelette and Chris Clarke explain everything you need to know.
clock | February 8, 2008I mentioned before that Carrboro Citizen is my favourite newspaper, the only one I read in hardcopy. Perhaps I like it because it is hyperlocal. Perhaps that is why I have this mindset that those who live in Carrboro already read it and those who don't will have no interest. So, I rarely blog about their articles. But sometimes something jumps at me as worthy of mention as interesting to anyone anywhere. This week's edition has one such article - School project an atypical lesson in problem solving - which describes a science project led by Chapel Hill High School Earth and environmental…
vhughes | February 7, 2008(This guest post was written by Chris Rowan)
It is always a pleasure to welcome a new Scibling into the fold, but I am particularly pleased to celebrate the addition of a fellow rock-hound to the Collective. Maria Brumm of Green Gabbro has used the move as an opportunity to throw off her cloak of pseudonyminity, but despite her claims to the contrary, the blogger formerly known as Yami McMoots will surely continue to provide the geologically flavoured wit and wisdom that we have come to know and love at her old site.
Maria was actually a big factor in inspiring me to blog in the first place…
gregladen | January 31, 2008
Proposals to give the latter part of the present geological period (the Holocene) a new name ... the Anthropocene ... are misguided, scientifically invalid, and obnoxious. However, there is a use for a term that is closely related to "Anthropocene" and I propose that we adopt that term instead.
The pithy title of the paper making this proposal is "Are we now living in the Anthropocene" (sic: no question mark is included in this title, enigmatically).
It is not an entirely stupid idea. The paper argues that there are major changes of the type often used to distinguish between major…