by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 3, 2012 | Climate Change
By The State Column
A new study conducted by NASA finds that Arctic ice is melting at a rate far faster than previously expected, increasing the rate of release of a number of deadly chemicals.
The study, published and conducted by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, finds the oldest and thickest arctic sea ice is disappearing faster than younger and thinner ice at the edges, leading to the release of certain chemicals.
The average thickness of the arctic sea ice cover is declining because it is rapidly losing its thick component, the multiyear ice,” said NASA scientists in a statement. “At the same time, the surface temperature in the arctic is going up, which results in a shorter ice-forming season.
NASA officials found that the extent of perennial ice, ice that has survived at least one summer, is shrinking at a rate of 12.2 percent per decade, while its area is declining at a rate of 13.5 percent per decade. The rate of melt is the highest yet recorded by NASA.
The study is the first to identify older sea ice as more vulnerable than new sea ice. Older sea ice usually survives the summer, rebuilding on itself as winter arrives.
Among the issues identified by NASA includes an accelerating release of chemicals into the atmosphere. Drastic reductions in Arctic sea ice in the last decade may intensify the chemical release of bromine into the atmosphere, resulting in ground-level ozone depletion and the deposit of toxic mercury in the Arctic, said NASA researchers.
The study was launched with the aim of examining the nature of bromine explosions, which were first observed more than 20 years ago in Canada’s Arctic regions. The scientists “wanted to find if the explosions occur in the troposphere or higher in the stratosphere,” said NASA scientists.
The climate scientists said that melting Arctic sea ice is being replaced by a thinner and saltier ice, which releases bromine into the air when it interacts with sunlight and cold. That in turn triggers a chemical reaction called a “bromine explosion” that turns gaseous mercury in the atmosphere into a toxic pollutant that falls on snow, land and ice and can accumulate in fish.
The study is likely to rekindle the debate on limiting carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air. Already a number of various international agencies have sought to curtail the release of deadly compounds related to global warming, warning that an increase in the average temperature of the earth could have unforeseen consequences.
“Shrinking summer sea ice has drawn much attention to exploiting Arctic resources and improving maritime trading routes,” said the U.S. space agency. “But the change in sea ice composition also has impacts on the environment. Changing conditions in the Arctic might increase bromine explosions in the future.”
Read more from The State Column
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 2, 2012 | Climate Change
By Agence France-Presse
High levels of pollution may be turning the planet’s oceans acidic at a faster rate than at any time in the past 300 million years, with unknown consequences for future sea life, researchers said Thursday.
The acidification may be worse than during four major mass extinctions in history when natural pulses of carbon from asteroid impacts and volcanic eruptions caused global temperatures to soar, said the study in the journal Science.
An international team of researchers from the United States, Britain, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands examined hundreds of paleoceanographic studies, including fossils wedged in seafloor sediment from millions of years ago.
They found only one time in history that came close to what scientists are seeing today in terms of ocean life die-off — a mysterious period known as the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum about 56 million years ago.
Though the reason for the carbon upsurge back then remains a source of debate, scientists believe that the doubling of harmful emissions drove up global temperatures by about six degrees Celsius and caused big losses of ocean life.
Oceans are particularly vulnerable because they soak up excess carbon dioxide from the air which turns the waters more acidic, a state that can kill corals, mollusks and other forms of reef and shell organisms.
“We know that life during past ocean acidification events was not wiped out — new species evolved to replace those that died off,” said lead author Barbel Honisch, a paleoceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.
“But if industrial carbon emissions continue at the current pace, we may lose organisms we care about — coral reefs, oysters, salmon.”
Honish and colleagues said the current rate of ocean acidification is at least 10 times faster than it was 56 million years ago.
From The Raw Story: http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/03/01/ocean-acidification-may-be-worst-in-300-million-years-study/
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 2, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Agence France-Presse
A major river in India’s northeast that originates in Tibet has suddenly dried up, triggering speculation that China might be responsible, a local official told AFP on Thursday.
The Brahmaputra has its source in China’s southwestern Tibet region where it is known as the Yarlung Tsangpo, and it enters India in the mountainous, remote northeastern state of Arunachal Pradesh, where it it is called the Siang.
The 1,800-mile (2,900 kilometre) river then descends into the plains of adjoining Assam state, where it is vital for agriculture, and ends in Bangladesh in the Bay of Bengal.
“It was shocking to find the Siang river drying up and patches of sand visible on its bed in a very large stretch close to Pasighat town,” local state lawmaker Tako Dabi told AFP by telephone, referring to a town in East Siang district.
“We suspect the sudden drying up of the Siang could be a result of China either diverting the river water on their side or due to some artificial blockades somewhere in the upper reaches,” added Dabi, an advisor to the state’s chief minister.
He estimated the flow was about 40 percent of its normal strength.
Video footage from the scene shows the Siang — which is normally a gushing torrent several kilometres (miles) wide at Pasighat, according to Dabi — reduced to flowing in narrow channels in the large sandy riverbed.
“Locals are worried as the river is a source of livelihood,” Dabi added.
The problem with the river came on the day the Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jeichi held talks in New Delhi with his Indian counterpart S.M. Krishna.
India is extremely nervous about the danger of its giant northern neighbour diverting rivers that originate in Tibet and flow into India, or disrupting their flow with hydroelectric plants.
The two countries have held frequent talks about the issue at the highest level and Indian Premier Manmohanh Singh assured as recently as last August that there was no danger.
“We have been assured that nothing will be done which affects India’s interests adversely,” Singh told the upper house of parliament.
Energy-hungry and water-deficient China is building a hydroelectric plant on the Yarlung Tsangpo, but the Indian government says it has been assured this is a “run-of-the-river” project rather than a dam which would disrupt the flow.
Read more from Physorg: http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-river-china-dries-india-lawmaker.html
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Mar 1, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction
By Fiona Harvey / The Guardian
The habitat of the endangered Sumatran tiger is being rapidly destroyed in order to make tissues and paper packaging for consumer products in the west, new research from Greenpeace shows.
A year-long investigation by the campaigning group has uncovered clear evidence, independently verified, that appears to show that ramin trees from the Indonesian rainforest have been chopped down and sent to factories to be pulped and turned into paper. The name ramin refers to a collection of endangered trees growing in peat swamps in Indonesia where the small number of remaining Sumatran tigers hunt.
Chopping down these trees is illegal under Indonesian law dating back to 2001, because of their status as an endangered plant species. But Greenpeace alleges that its researchers found ramin logs being prepared to be transported for pulping. The company tested logs in lumber yards belonging to the paper giant Asian Pulp and Paper, on nine separate occasions over the course of a year, and sent them to an independent lab to be tested. Out of 59 samples, 46 tested positive as ramin logs.
Asian Pulp and Paper denied wrongdoing. The company said in a statement: “Asia Pulp & Paper group (APP) maintains a strict zero-tolerance policy for illegal wood entering the supply chain and has comprehensive chain of custody systems to ensure that only legal wood enters its pulp mill operations. APP’s chain of custody systems are independently audited on a periodic basis. This ensures that we only receive legal pulpwood from areas under legal license that have passed all necessary ecological and social assessments.
“APP’s chain of custody system traces the origin of raw material, evaluates its legal and environmental status, to minimise the risk of contamination and to ensure that endangered species are protected – in accordance with the laws of Indonesia.”
The same hardwoods that grow in the Sumatran peat swamps where the tiger lives have also been independently verified to exist in paper products found on supermarket shelves, including photocopying paper, packaging for consumer products such as tissue paper.
Because the amounts of this pulp found in the paper samples are so small, it is impossible to say that they also contain ramin. However, independent lab tests confirmed the presence of “mixed tropical hardwoods” in paper samples from a wide variety of consumer outlets in the west. This shows that valuable rainforest trees are being turned into everyday items bought by unsuspecting consumers.
These fibres are highly likely to come from the same log yards examined by Greenpeace, because once pulped these rainforest trees are widely disseminated to packaging suppliers.
Read more from The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/01/indonesia-tiger-habitat-pulp-paper-greenpeace
by Deep Green Resistance News Service | Feb 29, 2012 | Biodiversity & Habitat Destruction, Mining & Drilling
By Jeremy Hance, Mongabay
In a bid to fast-track industrial projects, India’s Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) is opening up 25 percent of forests that were previously listed as “no-go” areas, reports the Hindustan Times. The designation will allow between 30 and 50 new industrial projects to go ahead rapidly, including road construction and coal mining.
Reportedly the changes came after industry representatives met with the Prime Minister’s Office, headed by Manmohan Singh, to complain that projects were being held up by environmental regulations, in some cases taking six years for approval. The industrial group was led by Ratan Tata, head of Tata Group, a massive conglomerate that works in steel, chemicals, solar power, energy transmission vehicles, and food products like tea and coffee among other industries. In response, the PMO not only removed protection for forest lands, but also promised approval for projects would be done in 60 days and forests would be cleared within 180 days.
“Based on the limited information we have, this is a very alarming development,” tropical ecologist William Laurance with James Cook University, who has recently spent time in India, told mongabay.com. “Infrastructure expansion—such as new roads, hydroelectric dams and mines—can have huge environmental impacts. They cause direct forest degradation and can also open up a Pandora’s Box of further problems—such as illegal land colonization and land speculation.”
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), around 19 percent of India is covered in natural forests, excluding monoculture plantations. Many of the remaining forests are degraded and fragmented. Since 2009 India has lost 36,700 hectares according to a recent assessment. The state of Andhra Pradesh saw the largest loss in forest, which government officials blamed on logging by the communist-Maoist group, the Naxals.
India has recently pledged to expand forest cover to around 33 percent of the country, however the Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, recently said such a target was “unrealistic.”
“India has already lost over 80 percent of its native forests and further forest loss and degradation are still advancing rapidly,” Laurace says. “The fast-tracking of big infrastructure projects can easily become a rubber stamp for bad development practices. Such ill-advised projects can have far greater environmental and human costs than the economic benefits they provide.”
India’s remaining forests are home to a wide variety of species, including Bengal tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Asian elephants (Elephas maximus), golden langurs (Trachypithecus geei), and the dhole (Cuon alpinus), each of which is listed as Endangered by the IUCN Red List. India is one of 17 countries in the world that is considered “megadiverse” for its spectacular wealth of biodiversity.
