by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Jan 30, 2013 | Obstruction & Occupation
By Agence France-Presse
Anti-whaling activist group Sea Shepherd said Wednesday it had intercepted the Japanese fleet in its annual Southern Ocean hunt “before a single harpoon has been fired”.
Sea Shepherd claims to have saved the lives of 4,000 whales over the past eight whaling seasons with ever-greater campaigns of harassment against the Japanese harpoon fleet.
The militant environmentalist group said the Brigitte Bardot, a former ocean racer, had intercepted the harpoon ship Yushin Maru No. 3 in the Southern Ocean at a relatively northern latitude.
“Given that the large concentrations of whales are found further south, closer to the Antarctic continent where there are high concentrations of krill, this would indicate that they have not yet begun whaling,” said Brigitte Bardot captain Jean Yves Terlain.
Former Australian politician Bob Brown, who assumed leadership of the anti-whaling campaign from fugitive Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson due to legal issues earlier this month, said it was welcome news.
“It is likely that we have intercepted these whale poachers before a single harpoon has been fired,” said Brown.
Watson is wanted by Interpol after skipping bail last July in Germany, where he was arrested on Costa Rican charges relating to a high-seas confrontation over shark finning in 2002.
He is on board Sea Shepherd’s main ship, Steve Irwin, but has stepped down as skipper and has vowed to abide by a US court ruling in December banning the group from physically confronting any vessel in the Japanese fleet.
The ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit requires Sea Shepherd to stay at least 500 yards (metres) from whaling vessels and prohibits “navigating in a manner that is likely to endanger the safe navigation of any such vessel”.
The whaling fleet left Japan for the Southern Ocean in late December, planning to catch up to 935 Antarctic minke whales and up to 50 fin whales.
Tokyo claims it catches whales for scientific research — a loophole in the international ban on whaling — but makes no secret of the fact that they ultimately end up on dinner plates.
Sea Shepherd’s campaign this year is its biggest yet, involving four ships, a helicopter, three drones and more than 100 crew members.
Read more from The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/01/29/anti-whaling-group-intercepts-japanese-fleet/
Photo by Phillip Flores on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Dec 27, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Agence France-Presse
China’s economic boom has seen its coral reefs shrink by at least 80 percent over the past 30 years, according to a joint Australian study, with researchers describing “grim” levels of damage and loss.
Scientists from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and the South China Sea Institute of Oceanology said their survey of mainland China and South China Sea reefs showed alarming degradation.
“We found that coral abundance has declined by at least 80 percent over the past 30 years on coastal fringing reefs along the Chinese mainland and adjoining Hainan Island,” said the study, published in the latest edition of the journal Conservation Biology.
“On offshore atolls and archipelagos claimed by six countries in the South China Sea, coral cover has declined from an average of greater than 60 percent to around 20 percent within the past 10-15 years,” it added.
Coastal development, pollution and overfishing linked to the Asian giant’s aggressive economic expansion were the major drivers, the authors said, describing a “grim picture of decline, degradation and destruction”.
“China’s ongoing economic expansion has exacerbated many wicked environmental problems, including widespread habitat loss due to coastal development, unsustainable levels of fishing, and pollution,” the study said.
Coral loss in the South China Sea — where reefs stretch across some 30,000 square kilometres (12,000 square miles) — was compounded by poor governance stemming from competing territorial claims.
Some marine parks aimed at conservation had been established but study author Terry Hughes said they were too small and too far apart to arrest the decline in coral cover.
“The window of opportunity to recover the reefs of the South China Sea is closing rapidly, given the state of degradation revealed in this study,” he said.
The South China Sea is strategically significant, home to some of the world’s most important shipping lanes and believed to be rich in resources.
China claims most of the sea including waters close to the shores of its neighbours. Rival claimants include Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam, and tensions over the issue have flared in recent years.
From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/12/26/study-coral-reefs-decimated-by-chinese-economic-boom/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 30, 2012 | NEWS, Toxification
By Georgia Institute of Technology
If the 4.9 million barrels of oil that spilled into the Gulf of Mexico during the 2010 Deep Water Horizon spill was a ecological disaster, the two million gallons of dispersant used to clean it up apparently made it even worse – 52-times more toxic. That’s according to new research from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Aguascalientes (UAA), Mexico.
The study found that mixing the dispersant with oil increased toxicity of the mixture up to 52-fold over the oil alone. In toxicity tests in the lab, the mixture’s effects increased mortality of rotifers, a microscopic grazing animal at the base of the Gulf’s food web. The findings are published online by the journal Environmental Pollution and will appear in the February 2013 print edition.
Using oil from the Deep Water Horizon spill and Corexit, the dispersant required by the Environmental Protection Agency for clean up, the researchers tested toxicity of oil, dispersant and mixtures on five strains of rotifers. Rotifers have long been used by ecotoxicologists to assess toxicity in marine waters because of their fast response time, ease of use in tests and sensitivity to toxicants. In addition to causing mortality in adult rotifers, as little as 2.6 percent of the oil-dispersant mixture inhibited rotifer egg hatching by 50 percent. Inhibition of rotifer egg hatching from the sediments is important because these eggs hatch into rotifers each spring, reproduce in the water column, and provide food for baby fish, shrimp and crabs in estuaries.
“Dispersants are preapproved to help clean up oil spills and are widely used during disasters,” said UAA’s Roberto-Rico Martinez, who led the study. “But we have a poor understanding of their toxicity. Our study indicates the increase in toxicity may have been greatly underestimated following the Macondo well explosion.”
Martinez performed the research while he was a Fulbright Fellow at Georgia Tech in the lab of School of Biology Professor Terry Snell. They hope that the study will encourage more scientists to investigate how oil and dispersants impact marine food webs and lead to improved management of future oil spills.
“What remains to be determined is whether the benefits of dispersing the oil by using Corexit are outweighed by the substantial increase in toxicity of the mixture,” said Snell, chair of the School of Biology. “Perhaps we should allow the oil to naturally disperse. It might take longer, but it would have less toxic impact on marine ecosystems.”
From Georgia Institute of Technology
Photo by Kevin Harris on Unsplash
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Nov 28, 2012 | Climate Change
By Institute of Physics
Sea-levels are rising 60 per cent faster than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) central projections, new research suggests.
While temperature rises appear to be consistent with the projections made in the IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4), satellite measurements show that sea-levels are actually rising at a rate of 3.2 mm a year compared to the best estimate of 2 mm a year in the report.
These findings, which have been published today, 28 November, in IOP Publishing’s journal Environmental Research Letters, are timely as delegates from 190 countries descend on Doha, Qatar, for the United Nation’s 18th Climate Change Conference this week.
The researchers, from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, Tempo Analytics and Laboratoire d’Etudes en Géophysique et Océanographie Spatiales, state that the findings are important for keeping track of how well past projections match the accumulating observational data, especially as projections made by the IPCC are increasingly being used in decision making.
The study involved an analysis of global temperatures and sea-level data over the past two decades, comparing them both to projections made in the IPCC’s third and fourth assessment reports.
Results were obtained by taking averages from the five available global land and ocean temperature series.
After removing the three known phenomena that cause short-term variability in global temperatures – solar variations, volcanic aerosols and El Nino/Southern Oscillation – the researchers found that the overall warming trend at the moment is 0.16°C per decade, which closely follows the IPCC’s projections.
Satellite measurements of sea-levels showed a different picture, however, with current rates of increase being 60 per cent faster than the IPCC’s AR4 projections.
Satellites measure sea-level rise by bouncing radar waves back off the sea surface and are much more accurate than tide gauges as they have near-global coverage; tide gauges only sample along the coast. Tide gauges also include variability that has nothing to do with changes in global sea level, but rather with how the water moves around in the oceans, such as under the influence of wind.
The study also shows that it is very unlikely that the increased rate is down to internal variability in our climate system and also shows that non-climatic components of sea-level rise, such as water storage in reservoirs and groundwater extraction, do not have an effect on the comparisons made.
Lead author of the study, Stefan Rahmstorf, said: “This study shows once again that the IPCC is far from alarmist, but in fact has under-estimated the problem of climate change. That applies not just for sea-level rise, but also to extreme events and the Arctic sea-ice loss.”
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Oct 25, 2012 | Toxification
By Leo Hickman / The Guardian
Oil companies operating in the North Sea have been fined for oil spills on just seven occasions since 2000, even though 4,123 separate spills were recorded over the same period, the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) has confirmed.
The disclosure came as Decc said on Thursday that the government had offered a “record-breaking” 167 new licences to oil and gas companies seeking to drill in the North Sea. A further 61 “blocks”, or licences, are under environmental assessment.
Total fines resulting from prosecutions between 2000 and 2011 came to just £74,000 and no single oil company had to pay more than £20,000.
Two companies received fines of £20,000: BP, for causing 28 tonnes of diesel to spill into the sea in 2002 from the Forties Alpha platform, and, a year later, Total E&P, for causing six tonnes of diesel to enter the sea during a transfer between fuel tanks on the Alwyn North platform.
Information about the fines was released by Decc after a freedom of information request and further inquiries by the Guardian.
The smallest fines over this period were those imposed on two companies, Venture North Sea Oil and Knutsen OAS Shipping, of £2,000 each, after 20 tonnes of crude oil was spilt during a tanker transfer on the Kittiwake platform.
In total, 1,226 tonnes of oil were spilt into the North Sea between 2000 and 2011, according to Decc’s archives. Decc said there is no “volume threshold” determining whether a company will be prosecuted over a spill at sea, although a spill of less than five tonnes is unlikely to go to court.
A tonne of crude oil is broadly equivalent to seven barrels, or, more precisely, 1,136 litres.
Decc said its inspectors, all of whom have enforcement powers, judge each case separately to assess the circumstances and the seriousness of the alleged offence.
Slightly different arrangements exist in Scotland from those in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, for pursuing a prosecution.
A Decc spokesman said: “The UK has one of the toughest and most successful oil and gas regimes in the world and we work closely with industry to ensure the highest standards of environmental protection are in place and enforced.
“There are a number of enforcement options available to Decc, with court action reserved for serious offences. On the rare occasions legal proceedings have been deemed necessary, it is for the court to decide the level of fines to hand down.”
Environmental campaigners said it was worrying that Decc viewed itself as operating the global gold standard of offshore regulation, especially as oil companies were now pressing for permission to drill in extreme and vulnerable environments such as the Arctic.
Vicky Wyatt, a Greenpeace campaigner, said: “Ministers and oil companies can spout all the carefully crafted quotes they like to tell us how safe drilling at sea is. But while they’re spouting these words, their rigs are all too often spouting oil into our oceans. The government should hit these companies who pollute the oceans in this way with meaningful fines.
“A few grand is not even a slap on the wrist for companies who pocket millions of pounds every hour.
“It’s both staggering and wrong that some of these companies are now also drilling in the fragile and pristine Arctic, where a similar oil leak would be catastrophic.”
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/25/oil-companies-north-sea-spills
