October 2008

According to the following articles, we are seeing a rapid decline in population of honey bees. Like many other research reports, these articles suggest that the mysterious disappearance of honey bees is due to sprayed pesticides, disease and/or poor weather conditions. But according to my source, their disappearance is mainly due to the increase in concentration of methane. My source warns that honey bees will go extinct.:

http://www.paisleydailyexpress.co.uk/renfrewshire-news/school-reports/2008/10/27/bee-busy-teaching-87085-22120861/ 

http://www.siouxcityjournal.com/articles/2008/10/26/news/top/93278a954cfce2e6862574eb006ecd03.txt

Any thought?

The Living Planet has in October, 2008 published a report suggesting that the world is heading for an "ecological credit crunch" far worse than the current financial crisis because humans are over-using the natural resources of the planet. According to the following news article from Guardian, the report warns that humans are using 30% more resources than sustainable, and, at this consumption rate, two planets will be needed by 2010. The report is here:

"* Juliette Jowit

"* The Guardian,

"* Wednesday October 29 2008

"The world is heading for an "ecological credit crunch" far worse than the current financial crisis because humans are over-using the natural resources of the planet, an international study warns today.

"The Living Planet report calculates that humans are using 30% more resources than the Earth can replenish each year, which is leading to deforestation, degraded soils, polluted air and water, and dramatic declines in numbers of fish and other species. As a result, we are running up an ecological debt of $4tr (£2.5tr) to $4.5tr every year - double the estimated losses made by the world's financial institutions as a result of the credit crisis - say the report's authors, led by the conservation group WWF, formerly the World Wildlife Fund. The figure is based on a UN report which calculated the economic value of services provided by ecosystems destroyed annually, such as diminished rainfall for crops or reduced flood protection.

"The problem is also getting worse as populations and consumption keep growing faster than technology finds new ways of expanding what can be produced from the natural world. This had led the report to predict that by 2030, if nothing changes, mankind would need two planets to sustain its lifestyle. "The recent downturn in the global economy is a stark reminder of the consequences of living beyond our means," says James Leape, WWF International's director general. "But the possibility of financial recession pales in comparison to the looming ecological credit crunch."

"The report continues: "We have only one planet. Its capacity to support a thriving diversity of species, humans included, is large but fundamentally limited. When human demand on this capacity exceeds what is available - when we surpass ecological limits - we erode the health of the Earth's living systems. Ultimately this loss threatens human well-being." Speaking yesterday in London, the report's authors also called for politicians to mount a huge international response in line with the multibillion-dollar rescue plan for the economy. "They now need to turn their collective action to a far more pressing concern and that's the survival of all life on planet Earth," said Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the president of WWF International.

"Sir David King, the British government's former chief scientific adviser, said: "We all need to agree that there's a crisis of understanding, that we're removing the planet's biodiverse resources at a rate which is as fast if not faster than the world's last great extinction."

"At the heart of the Living Planet report is an index of the health of the world's natural systems, produced by the Zoological Society of London and based on 5,000 populations of more than 1,600 species, and on an "ecological footprint" of human demands for goods and services.

"For the first time the report also contains detailed information on the "water footprint" of every country, and claims 50 countries are already experiencing "moderate to severe water stress on a year-round basis". It also shows that 27 countries are "importing" more than half the water they consume - in the form of water used to produce goods from wheat to cotton - including the UK, Switzerland, Austria, Norway and the Netherlands.

"Based on figures from 2005, the index indicates global biodiversity has declined by nearly a third since 1970. Breakdowns of the overall figure show the tropical species index fell by half and the temperate index remained stable but at historically low levels. Divided up another way, indices for terrestrial, freshwater and marine species, and for tropical forests, drylands and grasslands all showed significant declines. Of the main geographic regions, only the Nearctic zone around the Arctic sea and covering much of North America showed no overall change.....

TO VIEW THE WHOLE ARTICLE, CLICK HERE 

This entry is about Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking detected by Nasa scientists. What follows are paragraphs extracted from the article entiled "Sun's protective 'bubble' is shrinking" by Richard Gray, Science Correspondent, Telegraph

"The protective bubble around the sun that helps to shield the Earth from harmful interstellar radiation is shrinking and getting weaker, Nasa scientists have warned.

"New data has revealed that the heliosphere, the protective shield of energy that surrounds our solar system, has weakened by 25 per cent over the past decade and is now at it lowest level since the space race began 50 years ago.

"Around 90 per cent of the galactic cosmic radiation is deflected by our heliosphere, so the boundary protects us from this harsh galactic environment."

"The heliosphere is created by the solar wind, a combination of electrically charged particles and magnetic fields that emanate a more than a million miles an hour from the sun, meet the intergalactic gas that fills the gaps in space between solar systems.

"At the boundary where they meet a shock wave is formed that deflects interstellar radiation around the solar system as it travels through the galaxy.

"Without the heliosphere the harmful intergalactic cosmic radiation would make life on Earth almost impossible by destroying DNA and making the climate uninhabitable.

"Measurements made by the Ulysses deep space probe, which was launched in 1990 to orbit the sun, have shown that the pressure created inside the heliosphere by the solar wind has been decreasing.

"If the heliosphere continues to weaken, scientists fear that the amount of cosmic radiation reaching the inner parts of our solar system, including Earth, will increase.

"This could result in growing levels of disruption to electrical equipment, damage satellites and potentially even harm life on Earth.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SOURCE 

Methane gas is now bubbling from the Artic ocean. It is now unclear if the recent volcano eruption in Iceland would accerlate the methane rellease from the ocean bed. While methane is a heat-trapping greenhouse gas, it is also a toxin. Its presence in the atmosphere will displace the oxygen which survives all the animal species on the planet. Most articles, like the following one, only highlight the issue of global warming:

"Rising Arctic methane threatens efforts to reverse global warming

"GWYNNE DYER

"Article Last Updated: 09/29/2008 12:12:16 AM MDT

"Scientists have their own way of putting things. This is how Dr Oerjan Gustafsson of Stockholm University announced the approach of a climate apocalypse in an e-mail sent last week from the Russian research ship "Jakob Smirnitskyi" in the Arctic Ocean.

""We had a hectic finishing of the sampling program yesterday and this past night. An extensive area of intense methane release was found. At earlier sites we had found elevated levels of dissolved methane. Yesterday, for the first time, we documented a field where the release was so intense that the methane did not have time to dissolve into the seawater but was rising as methane bubbles to the sea surface."

"Gustafsson's preliminary report, published in The Independent of Sept. 23, is a development far more frightening than the current financial crisis, although it will get only one-thousandth of the coverage. The worst that the financial crisis can bring is some years of recession. The worst that massive methane releases in the Arctic can bring us is runaway, irreversible global warming.

"Molecule for molecule, methane gas is 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a warming agent. However, since methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere as long - around 12 years, on average, compared to a hundred years for CO2 - and human activities do not produce all that much of it, concerns about climate change have mostly been focused on carbon dioxide. The one big worry was that warmer temperatures might cause massive releases of methane from natural sources.

" There are thousands of megatons of methane stored underground in the Arctic region, trapped there by the permafrost (permanently frozen ground) that covers much of northern Russia, Alaska and Canada and extends far out under the seabed of the Arctic Ocean. If the permafrost melts and methane escapes into the atmosphere on a large scale, it would cause a rapid rise in temperature - which would melt more permafrost, releasing more methane, which would cause more warming, and so on.

"Fear of this runaway feedback is why most climate scientists (and the European Union) have set a rise of 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the average global temperature as the limit which we must never exceed. Somewhere between 3.5 and 5.2 degrees, they fear, and massive feedbacks like methane release would kick in and take the situation out of our hands.

"Unfortunately, the heating is much more intense in the Arctic region. The average global temperature has only risen 1.1 degrees so far, but the average temperature in the Arctic is up by 7 degrees. So the permafrost is starting to melt and the trapped methane is escaping.

"That is what the research ship "Jakob Smirnitskyi" has just found: areas of the Arctic Ocean off the Russian coast where "chimneys" of methane gas are bubbling to the surface. What this may mean is that we have no time left if we hope to avoid runaway global warming - and yet it will obviously take many years to get our own greenhouse gas emissions down. So what can we do?

"There is a way to cheat, for a while. Several techniques have been proposed for holding the global temperature down temporarily in order to avoid running into the feedbacks. They do not release us from the duty of getting our emissions down, but they could win us some time to work on that task without running into disaster.

"The leading candidate, suggested by Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen in 2006, is to inject sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere in order to reflect some incoming sunlight. (This mimics the action of large volcanic eruptions, which also lower the global temperature temporarily by putting huge amounts of sulphur dioxide into the upper atmosphere.

"Another, less intrusive approach, proposed by John Latham of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., and Prof. Stephen Salter of Edinburgh University, is to launch fleets of unmanned, wind-powered vessels, controlled by satellite, that would spray seawater up into low-lying marine clouds in order to increase the amount of sunlight that they reflect. The great attraction of this technique is that if there are unwelcome side effects, you can turn it off right away.

"These techniques are known as "geo-engineering," and discussing them has been taboo in most scientific circles because of the "moral hazard": the fear that if the public knows you can hold the global temperature down by direct intervention, people will not do the harder job of cutting their emissions. But if large-scale methane releases are getting under way, the time for such subtle calculations is past.

"Starting now, we need a crash program to investigate the feasibility of these and other techniques for geo-engineering the climate. Once the thawing starts, it is hard to stop, and we may need them very soon.

* GWYNNE DYER is an independent, London-based journalist.

Article source: http://www.sltrib.com/opinion/ci_10586023