Swarms of Octopus Are Taking Over the Oceans: That is interesting. I had not heard Octopuses (octopi) were the “weeds” of the oceans. But it is interesting to find larger animals that can be a litmus test of the ocean environment. Oceans are not sucking up CO2 at the same rate as they used to. Acidification is moving up quickly. Reefs are under massive threat. Weeds are mother natures way of getting something growing in…
There are several scenarios that jump out at you. Hall and Knab (2012) outlined 11 or so items that were non-sustainable trends/practices that appeared to have compounding and accelerating forces. Those items get worse in a wicked bad way when they go unattended. Therefore, they are wonderful areas to generate scenarios. Here’s a few: US Debt deficit, US Trade deficit, the interest rate bomb, Life-style bomb, the compounding healthcare costs escalation bomb, the fossil fuel…
Okay, we all know how biomagnification works. Pollutants including heavy metals such as mercury are absorbed at the bottom of the food chain, and then they are amplified all the way to the top of the food chain. at the top of the chain are such animals as sharks at sea and lions on land. In terms of mercury biomagnification (wikipedia) works like this. Organisms absorb mercury very efficiently, but it takes far longer to…
You’ve heard that there ain’t no such thing as “Clean” Coal. Maybe scrubbing some of the sulpher and removing some of the heavly metals. But certainly not clean. And then there’s the dirty little secret of Coal Ash!. But this article sums up the current research related to fracking. Ouch. Evidense keeps mounting about the down-side of oil fracking. This article really sums it up. Link to the Ecologist article on Fracking. Of course, our…
BAMS State of the Climate | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) formerly known as National Climatic Data Center (NCDC): State of the Climate: Earth fails another annual physical. Or, maybe better stated, human activity resulted in another horrible annual reading of Earths temps. Beyond time to move Earth from a Private room to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Unfortunately, 2015 blasted past all records set in 2014. The El Nino effect help somewhat, and…
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/06/28/3792829/ocean-clean-up-project-unveiled/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=cptop3&utm_term=1&utm_content=22 Cleaning up our (garbage patch) act is going to take some work. It takes a 21 year old… see the refs to new studies. 700 pieces of plastic in the ocean for every man woman and child on Earth! And the problem is, that there will never be an end to the plastic until we stop producing it and shipping it off to Sea… Everyone being simply more aware of the problem, that’s actually…
