Topic: WE'RE STUFFED!!!

[erik]

Very true - nuclear industry produces incredibly toxic waste that is very difficult to process and store. Power plants are the safest and least polluting part of it.

[erik]

The Sermilik fjord in Greenland: a chilling view of a warming world

'We all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate'

Patrick Barkham at Sermilik fjord, Greenland
The Guardian, Tuesday 1 September 2009

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/01/sermilik-fjord-greenland-global-warming

It is calving season in the Arctic. A flotilla of icebergs, some as jagged as fairytale castles and others as smooth as dinosaur eggs, calve from the ice sheet that smothers Greenland and sail down the fjords. The journey of these sculptures of ice from glaciers to ocean is eerily beautiful and utterly terrifying.

The wall of ice that rises behind Sermilik fjord stretches for 1,500 miles (2,400km) from north to south and smothers 80% of this country. It has been frozen for 3m years. Now it is melting, far faster than the climate models predicted and far more decisively than any political action to combat our changing climate. If the Greenland ice sheet disappeared sea levels around the world would rise by seven metres, as 10% of the world's fresh water is currently frozen here.

This is also the season for science in Greenland. Glaciologists, seismologists and climatologists from around the world are landing on the ice sheet in helicopters, taking ice-breakers up its inaccessible coastline and measuring glaciers in a race against time to discover why the ice in Greenland is vanishing so much faster than expected.

Gordon Hamilton, a Scottish-born glaciologist from the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute, is packing up equipment at his base camp in Tasiilaq, a tiny, remote east coast settlement only accessible by helicopter and where huskies howl all night.

With his spiky hair and ripped T-shirt, Hamilton could be a rugged glaciologist straight from central casting. Four years ago he hit upon the daring idea of landing on a moving glacier in a helicopter to measure its speed.

The glaciers of Greenland are the fat, restless fingers of its vast ice sheet, constantly moving, stretching down into fjords and pushing ice from the sheet into the ocean, in the form of melt water and icebergs.

Before their first expedition, Hamilton and his colleague Leigh Stearns, from the University of Kansas, used satellite data to plan exactly where they would land on a glacier.

"When we arrived there was no glacier to be seen. It was way up the fjord," he says. "We thought we'd made some stupid goof with the co-ordinates, but we were where we were supposed to be." It was the glacier that was in the wrong place. A vast expanse had melted away.

When Hamilton and Stearns processed their first measurements of the glacier's speed, they thought they had made another mistake. They found it was marching forwards at a greater pace than a glacier had ever been observed to flow before. "We were blown away because we realised that the glaciers had accelerated not just by a little bit but by a lot," he says. The three glaciers they studied had abruptly increased the speed by which they were transmitting ice from the ice sheet into the ocean.

Raw power

Standing before a glacier in Greenland as it calves icebergs into the dark waters of a cavernous fjord is to witness the raw power of a natural process we have accelerated but will now struggle to control.

Greenland's glaciers make those in the Alps look like toys. Grubby white and blue crystal towers, cliffs and crevasses soar up from the water, dispatching millenniums of compacted snow in the shape of seals, water lilies and bishops' mitres.

I take a small boat to see the calving with Dines Mikaelsen, an Inuit guide, who in the winter will cross the ice sheet in his five-metre sled pulled by 16 huskies.

It is not freezing but even in summer the wind is bitingly cold and we can smell the bad breath of a humpback whale as it groans past our bows on Sermilik Fjord. Above its heavy breathing, all you can hear in this wilderness is the drip-drip of melting ice and a crash as icebergs cleave into even smaller lumps, called growlers.

Mikaelsen stops his boat beside Hann glacier and points out how it was twice as wide and stretched 300 metres further into the fjord just 10 years ago. He also shows off a spectacular electric blue iceberg.

Locals have nicknamed it "blue diamond"; its colour comes from being cleaved from centuries-old compressed ice at the ancient heart of the glacier. Bobbing in warming waters, this ancient ice fossil will be gone in a couple of weeks.



The blue diamond is one vivid pointer to the antiquity of the Greenland ice sheet. A relic of the last Ice Age, this is one of three great ice sheets in the world. Up to two miles thick, the other two lie in Antarctica.

While similar melting effects are being measured in the southern hemisphere, the Greenland sheet may be uniquely vulnerable, lying much further from the chill of the pole than Antarctica's sheets. The southern end of the Greenland sheet is almost on the same latitude as the Shetlands and stroked by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream.

Driven by the loss of ice, Arctic temperatures are warming more quickly than other parts of the world: last autumn air temperatures in the Arctic stood at a record 5C above normal. For centuries, the ice sheets maintained an equilibrium: glaciers calved off icebergs and sent melt water into the oceans every summer; in winter, the ice sheet was then replenished with more frozen snow. Scientists believe the world's great ice sheets will not completely disappear for many more centuries, but the Greenland ice sheet is now shedding more ice than it is accumulating.

The melting has been recorded since 1979; scientists put the annual net loss of ice and water from the ice sheet at 300-400 gigatonnes (equivalent to a billion elephants being dropped in the ocean), which could hasten a sea level rise of catastrophic proportions.

As Hamilton has found, Greenland's glaciers have increased the speed at which they shift ice from the sheet into the ocean. Helheim, an enormous tower of ice that calves into Sermilik Fjord, used to move at 7km (4.4 miles) a year. In 2005, in less than a year, it speeded up to nearly 12km a year. Kangerdlugssuaq, another glacier that Hamilton measured, tripled its speed between 1988 and 2005. Its movement – an inch every minute – could be seen with the naked eye.

The three glaciers that Hamilton and Stearns measured account for about a fifth of the discharge from the entire Greenland ice sheet. The implications of their acceleration are profound: "If they all start to speed up, you could have quite a large rise in sea level in the near term, much larger than the official estimate by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) would project," says Hamilton.

The scientific labours in the chill winds and high seas of the Arctic summer seem wrapped in an unusual sense of urgency this year. The scientists working in Greenland are keen to communicate their new, emerging understanding of the dynamics of the declining ice sheet to the wider world. Several point out that any international agreement forged at the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December will be based on the IPCC's fourth assessment report from 2007. Its estimates of climate change and sea-level rise were based on scientific research submitted up to 2005; the scientists say this is already significantly out of date.

The 2007 report predicted a sea level rise of 30cm-60cm by 2100, but did not account for the impact of glaciers breaking into the sea from areas such as the Greenland ice sheet. Most scientists working at the poles predict a one metre rise by 2100. The US Geological Survey has predicted a 1.5 metre rise. As Hamilton points out: "It is only the first metre that matters".

Record temperatures

A one metre rise – with the risk of higher storm surges – would require new defences for New York, London, Mumbai and Shanghai, and imperil swaths of low-lying land from Bangladesh to Florida. Vulnerable areas accommodate 10%of the world's population – 600 million.

The Greenland ice sheet is not merely being melted from above by warmer air temperatures. As the oceans of the Arctic waters reach record high temperatures, the role of warmer water lapping against these great glaciers is one of several factors shaping the loss of the ice sheet that has been overlooked until recently.

Fiamma Straneo, an Italian-born oceanographer, is laboriously winding recording equipment the size of a fire extinguisher from the deck of a small Greenpeace icebreaker caught in huge swells at the mouth of Sermilik fjord.

In previous decades the Arctic Sunrise has been used in taking direct action against whalers; now it offers itself as a floating research station for independent scientists to reach remote parts of the ice sheet. It is tough work for the multinational crew of 30 in this rough-and-ready little boat, prettified below deck with posters of orang-utans and sunflowers painted in the toilets.

Before I succumb to vomiting below deck – another journalist is so seasick they are airlifted off the boat – I examine the navigational charts used by the captain, Pete Willcox, a survivor of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior in 1985. He shows how they are dotted with measurements showing the depth of the ocean but here, close to the east coast of Greenland, the map is blank: this part of the North Atlantic was once covered by sea ice for so much of the year that its waters are still uncharted.

Earlier in the expedition, the crew believe, they became the first boat to travel through the Nares Strait west of Greenland to the Arctic Ocean in June, once impassable because of sea ice at that time of year. The predicted year when summers in the Arctic would be free of sea ice has fallen from 2100 to 2050 to 2030 in a couple of years.

Jay Zwally, a Nasa scientist, recently suggested it could be virtually ice-free by late summer 2012. Between 2004 and 2008 the area of "multiyear" Arctic sea ice (ice that has formed over more than one winter and survived the summer melt) shrank by 595,000 sq miles, an area larger than France, Germany and the United Kingdom combined.

Undaunted by the sickening swell of the ocean and wrapped up against the chilly wind, Straneo, of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, one of the world's leading oceanographic research centres, continues to take measurements from the waters as the long Arctic dusk falls.

According to Straneo, the rapid changes to the ice sheet have taken glaciologists by surprise. "One of the possible mechanisms which we think may have triggered these changes is melting driven by changing ocean temperatures and currents at the margins of the ice sheet."

She has been surprised by early results measuring sea water close to the melting glaciers: one probe recovered from last year recorded a relatively balmy 2C at 60 metres in the fjord in the middle of winter. Straneo said: "This warm and salty water is of subtropical origin – it's carried by the Gulf Stream. In recent years a lot more of this warm water has been found around the coastal region of Greenland. We think this is one of the mechanisms that has caused these glaciers to accelerate and shed more ice."

Straneo's research is looking at what scientists call the "dynamic effects" of the Greenland ice sheet. It is not simply that the ice sheet is melting steadily as global temperatures rise. Rather, the melting triggers dynamic new effects, which in turn accelerate the melt.

"It's quite likely that these dynamic effects are more important in generating a near-term rapid rise in sea level than the traditional melt," says Hamilton. Another example of these dynamic effects is when the ice sheet melts to expose dirty layers of old snow laced with black carbon from forest fires and even cosmic dust. These dark particles absorb more heat and so further speed up the melt.

After Straneo gathers her final measurements, the Arctic Sunrise heads for the tranquillity of the sole berth at Tasiilaq, which has a population of fewer than 3,000 but is still the largest settlement on Greenland's vast east coast. Here another scientist is gathering her final provisions before taking her team camping on a remote glacier.

Invisible earthquakes

Several years ago Meredith Nettles, a seismologist from Colombia University, and two colleagues made a remarkable discovery: they identified a new kind of earthquake. These quakes were substantial – measuring magnitude five – but had been invisible because they did not show up on seismographs. (While orthodox tremors registered for a couple of seconds, these occurred rather more slowly, over a minute.)

The new earthquakes were traced almost exclusively to Greenland, where they were found to be specifically associated with large, fast-flowing outlet glaciers. There have been 200 of them in the last dozen years; in 2005 there were six times as many as in 1993.

Nettles nimbly explains the science as she heaves bags of equipment on to a helicopter, which will fly her to study Kangerdlugssuaq glacier. "It's quite a dramatic increase, and that increase happened at the same time as we were seeing dramatic retreats in the location of the calving fronts of the glaciers, and an increase in their flow speed," she says. "The earthquakes are very closely associated with large-scale ice loss events."

In other words, the huge chunks of ice breaking off from the glaciers and entering the oceans are large enough to generate a seismic signal that is sent through the Earth. They are happening more regularly and, when they occur, it appears that the glacier speeds up even more.

The scientists rightly wrap their latest observations in caution. Their studies are still in their infancy. Some of the effects they are observing may be short-term.

The Greenland ice sheet has survived natural warmer periods in history, the last about 120,000 years ago, although it was much smaller then than it is now. Those still sceptical of the scientific consensus over climate change should perhaps listen to the voices of those who could not be accused of having anything to gain from talking up climate change.

Inuit warnings

Arne Sorensen, a specialist ice navigator on Arctic Sunrise, began sailing the Arctic in the 1970s. Journeys around Greenland's coast that would take three weeks in the 1970s because of sea ice now take a day. He pays heed to the observations of the Inuit. "If you talk to people who live close to nature and they tell you this is unusual and this is not something they have noticed before, then I really put emphasis on that," he says. Paakkanna Ignatiussen, 52, has been hunting seals since he was 13. His grandparents travelled less than a mile to hunt; he must go more than 60 miles because the sea ice disappears earlier – and with it the seals. "It's hard to see the ice go back. In the old days when we got ice it was only ice. Today it is more like slush," he says. "In 10 years there will be no traditional hunting. The weather is the reason."

The stench of rotting seal flesh wafts from a bag in the porch of his house in Tasiilaq as Ignatiussen's wife, Ane, remarks that, "the seasons are upside down".

Local people are acutely aware of how the weather is changing animal behaviour. Browsing the guns for sale in the supermarket in Tasiilaq (you don't need a licence for a gun here), Axel Hansen says more hungry polar bears prowl around the town these days. Like the hunters, the bears can't find seals when there is so little sea ice. And the fjords are filled with so many icebergs that local people find it hard to hunt whales there.

Westerners may shrug at the decline of traditional hunting but, in a sense, we all live on the Greenland ice sheet now. Its fate is our fate. The scientists swarming over this ancient mass of ice, trying to understand how it will be transformed in a warming world, and how it will transform us, are wary of making political comments about how our leaders should plan for one metre of sea level rise, and what drastic steps must be taken to cut carbon emissions. But some scientists are so astounded by the changes they are recording that they are moved to speak out.

What, I ask Hamilton, would he say to Barack Obama if he could spend 10 minutes with the US president standing on Helheim glacier?

"Without knowing anything about what is going on, you just have to look at the glacier to know something huge is happening here," says the glaciologist. "We can't as a scientific community keep up with the pace of changes, let alone explain why they are happening.

"If I was, God forbid, the leader of the free world, I would implement some changes to deal with the maximum risk that we might reasonably expect to encounter, rather than always planning for the minimum. We won't know the consequences of not doing that until it's way too late. Even as a politician on a four-year elected cycle, you can't morally leave someone with that problem."

[Firestarter]

Mexico evacuates thousands ahead of hurricane
         
By MARK STEVENSON, Associated Press Writer Mark Stevenson, Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 49 mins ago

LOS CABOS, Mexico – Tourists fled resorts at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula as Hurricane Jimena roared their way Tuesday, but many slum dwellers concerned about looting refused to leave their imperiled shanties.

Jimena, a Category 4 hurricane with winds of near 145 mph (230 kph), could rake the region of harsh desert fringed with picturesque beaches and fishing villages by Tuesday evening.

Police, firefighters and navy personnel drove through shantytowns, trying to persuade some 10,000 people in the Los Cabos area to evacuate shacks made of plastic sheeting, wood, reeds and even blankets.

"For the safety of you and your family, board a vehicle or head to the nearest shelter," firefighter Ricardo Villalobos bellowed over a loudspeaker as his fire truck wound its way through the sand streets of Colonia Obrera, a slum built along a stream bed that regularly springs to life when a hurricane hits.

While the storm's eye was forecast to pass west and north of the city, another 20,000 were expected to evacuate elsewhere in the peninsula.

The Mexican government declared a state of emergency for Los Cabos and the Baja California Sur state capital of La Paz and schools, many ports and most businesses were closed. Rescue workers from the Red Cross and the Mexican military prepared for post-hurricane disaster relief, and two Mexican Army Hercules aircraft loaded with medical supplies arrived.

Children ran through strong gusts of wind Tuesday waving pieces of paper and trash bags under bands of intermittent rain. Forecasters expect the hurricane to leave between 5 and 10 inches of rain in Baja, but already the dry stream beds had turned into gushing torrents.

Hank and Maureen Butt, from Los Gatos, California, snapped photos outside their Cabo San Lucas Hotel, enjoying the driving winds.

"The waves have been great," said Maureen Butt, an intensive care nurse.

"I think we're going to be out of harm's way as far as major damage," her husband said. "We're in a very good structure here."

In a nearby shantytown, Marco Nina, 24, a bricklayer, warily eyed a growing stream that rushed past his plywood and sheet metal home.

"We are here with our nerves on edge," he said. "If this hits, the roof is not going to hold. Other storms have passed but not this strong."

Local officials say Hurricane Juliet, a Category 4 hurricane that killed several people and caused $20.5 million in September 2001, was the most damaging hurricane in the storm-prone state's history. That 145-mph storm made a raging 12-day trip through Mexico and the southern United States.

Many tourists rushed to leave this vacation town, a playground for Hollywood stars where timeshares and condominiums are built up along the coast.

Hotels, which ordinarily have low occupancy this time of year, reported just a 25 percent occupancy rate. The local hotel association estimated 7,000 tourists were left in Los Cabos, a town of 58,000 residents.

But on Cabos' famous beaches, some tourists were doing just the opposite, jumping into the Pacific to play in the hurricane's big waves.

Tuesday morning, Jimena was a Category 4 storm that weakened slightly as it moved north-northwest near 12 mph (19 kph), a path expected to continue for several days, the U.S. National Hurricane Center in Miami reported. It was centered about 140 miles (225 kilometers) south of Cabo San Lucas.

Hurricane force winds extended as far as 45 miles (75 kilometers) and tropical storm force winds extended 140 miles (220 kilometers).

Hurricanes reach Category 5 at 156 mph (250 kph).

Farther out in the Pacific, Tropical Depression Kevin had top winds of 35 mph (55 kph) and was expected to weaken to a remnant low later in the day or Monday night.

[erik]

How global warming sealed the fate of the world's coral reefs

David Adam
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 September

Destroyed by rising carbon levels, acidity, pollution, algae, bleaching and El Niño, coral reefs require a dramatic change in our carbon policy to have any chance of survival, report warns

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/02/coral-catastrophic-future


An aerial view of the coastline along Hawaii Kai on the Hawaiian Island of Oahu where organic sediment is one of the major threat to the reef. Photograph: Ed Darack/Corbis

Animal, vegetable and mineral, a pristine tropical coral reef is one of the natural wonders of the world. Bathed in clear, warm water and thick with a psychedelic display of fish, sharks, crustaceans and other sea life, the colourful coral ramparts that rise from the sand are known as the rainforests of the oceans.

And with good reason. Reefs and rainforests have more in common than their beauty and bewildering biodiversity. Both have stood for millions of years, and yet both are poised to disappear.

If you thought you had heard enough bad news on the environment and that the situation could not get any worse, then steel yourself. Coral reefs are doomed. The situation is virtually hopeless. Forget ice caps and rising sea levels: the tropical coral reef looks like it will enter the history books as the first major ecosystem wiped out by our love of cheap energy.

Today, a report from the Australian government agency that looks after the nation's emblematic Great Barrier Reef reported that "the overall outlook for the reef is poor and catastrophic damage to the ecosystem may not be averted". The Great Barrier Reef is in trouble, and it is not the only one.

Within just a few decades, experts are warning, the tropical reefs strung around the middle of our planet like a jewelled corset will reduce to rubble. Giant piles of slime-covered rubbish will litter the sea bed and spell in large distressing letters for the rest of foreseeable time: Humans Were Here.

"The future is horrific," says Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist who is widely regarded as the world's foremost expert on coral reefs. "There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise. If, and when, they go, they will take with them about one-third of the world's marine biodiversity. Then there is a domino effect, as reefs fail so will other ecosystems. This is the path of a mass extinction event, when most life, especially tropical marine life, goes extinct."

Alex Rogers, a coral expert with the Zoological Society of London, talks of an "absolute guarantee of their annihilation". And David Obura, another coral heavyweight and head of CORDIO East Africa, a research group in Kenya, is equally pessimistic: "I don't think reefs have much of a chance. And what's happening to reefs is a parable of what is going to happen to everything else."

These are desperate words, stripped of the usual scientific caveats and expressions of uncertainty, and they are a measure of the enormity of what's happening to our reefs.

The problem is a new take on a familiar evil. Of the billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide spewed from cars, power stations, aircraft and factories each year, about half hangs round in the thin layer of atmosphere where it traps heat at the Earth's surface and so drives global warming. What happens to the rest of this steady flood of carbon pollution? Some is absorbed by the world's soils and forests, offering vital respite to our overcooked climate. The remainder dissolves into the world's oceans. And there, it stores up a whole heap of trouble for coral reefs.

Often mistaken for plants, individual corals are animals closely related to sea anemones and jellyfish. They have tiny tentacles and can sting and eat fish and small animals. Corals are found throughout the world's oceans, and holidaymakers taking a swim off the Cornish coast may brush their hands through clouds of the tiny creatures without ever realising.

It is when corals form communities on the sea bed that things get interesting. Especially in the tropics. Yes, Britain has its own rugged coral reefs, but such deep-water constructions are too remote, cold and dark to really fire the imagination. It is in shallow, brightly light waters, that coral reefs really come to life. In the turquoise waters of the Caribbean, Indian Ocean and Pacific, the coral come together with tiny algae to make magic.

The algae do something that the coral cannot. They photosynthesise, and so use the sun's energy to churn out food for the coral. In return, the coral provide the algae with the carbon dioxide they need for photosynthesis, and so complete the circle of symbiotic life.

Freed of the need to wave their tentacles around to hunt for food, the coral can devote more energy to secreting the mineral calcium carbonate, from which they form a stony exoskeleton. A second type of algae, which also produces calcium carbonate, provides cement. Together, the marine menage-a-trois make a very effective building site, with dead corals leaving their calcium skeletons behind as limestone. For all their apparent beauty and fragility, just think of coral reefs as big lumps of rock with a living crust.

A fragile crust too. The natural world is a harsh environment for coral reefs. They are under perpetual attack by legions of fish that graze their fields of algae. Animals bore into their shells to make homes, and storms and crashing waves break them apart. They may appear peaceful paradises, but most coral reefs are manic sites of constant destruction and frantic rebuilding. Crucially though, for millions of years, these processes have been in balance.

Human impact has tipped that balance. Loaded with the agricultural nutrients nitrates and phosphates, rivers now spill their polluted waters into the sea. Sediment and sewage cloud the clear waters, while over-fishing plays havoc with the finely tuned community of fish and sharks that kept the reef nibbling down to sustainable levels. All of this is enough to wreck coral without any help from climate change.

Global warming, predictably, has made the situation worse. Secure in their tropical currents, coral reefs have evolved to operate within a fairly narrow temperature range, yet, in the late 1970s and 1980s, coral scientists got an unpleasant demonstration of what happens when the hot tap is left on too long. "The algae go berserk," said Rogers. Scientists think the algae react to the warmer water and increased sunlight by producing toxic oxygen compounds called superoxides, which can damage the coral. The coral respond by ejecting their algal lodgers, leaving the reefs starved of nutrients and deathly white. Such bleaching was first observed on a large scale in the 1980s, and reached massive levels worldwide during the 1997-98 El Niño weather event.

On top of a human-warmed climate, the 1997-98 El Niño, caused by pulses of warming and cooling in the Pacific, drove water temperatures across the world beyond the coral comfort zone. The mass bleaching event that followed killed a fifth of coral communities worldwide, and though many have recovered slightly since, the global death toll attributed to the 1997-98 mass bleaching stands at 16%. "At the moment the reefs seem to be recovering well but it's only a matter of time before we have another [mass bleaching event]," says Obura.

With its striking images of skeletal reefs stripped of colour and life, coral bleaching offers photogenic evidence of our crumbling biodiversity, and has placed the plight of coral reefs higher on the world's consciousness. Head along to your local swimming pool for diving lessons these days, and chances are that you will be offered a coral conservation course as well.

Katy Bloor, an instructor at Sub-Mission Dive School in Stoke-on-Trent, says many divers are not aware of the problems corals face, particularly as holiday operators tend to visit reefs in better condition. "Most have probably dived on a coral reef that they thought was a bit rubbish, but they haven't considered why," she said.

If anyone knows what they are missing out on, it should be Charlie Veron. So what does it feel like to dive on a pristine reef? "I have not seen many reefs that can be called pristine, and none exist now," he says. "But if I had to take a punt, I was diving on the Chesterfield Reefs, east of New Caledonia [in the southwest Pacific] about 30 years ago and was staggered by the wealth of life, especially big fish which were so thick that I was hardly ever able to photograph coral. That place made even remote parts of the Great Barrier Reef look second rate.

"I can only describe it like walking through a rainforest dripping with orchids, crowded with birds and mammals of bewildering variety and trees growing in extreme profusion."

Can the coral be helped? If planting more trees can regrow a forest, can coral be introduced to bolster failing reefs? There are a handful of groups working on the problem, many of which have reported encouraging results. Off Japan, scientists are farming healthy coral on hundreds of ceramic discs, which they plan to transplant onto the badly-bleached Sekisei Lagoon reef within two years. In 30 years or so, they hope the reef can recover fully.

A similar, if more low-tech, exercise is under way in the Philippine coastal community of Bolinao, where local people have broken off chunks from the healthy section of their local reef and have crudely wedged them into cracks in bleached sections. Others have cultured corals in swimming pools, and researchers in the Maldives are using giant sunken cages, connected to a low level electric current, to help coral form their chalky shells.

But the problem with all these efforts, according to Rogers at the ZSL, is that they cannot address the looming holocaust that reefs face. A new, terrible curse that comes on top of the bleaching, the battering, the poisoning and the pollution.

Remember the carbon dioxide that we left dissolving in the oceans? Billions and billions of tonnes of it over the last 150 years or so since the industrial revolution? While mankind has squabbled, delayed, distracted and dithered over the impact that carbon emissions have on the atmosphere, that dissolved pollution has been steadily turning the oceans more acidic. There is no dispute, no denial, about this one. Chemistry is chemistry, and carbon dioxide plus water has made carbonic acid since the dawn of time.

As a result, the surface waters of the world's oceans have dropped by about 0.1 pH unit – a sentence that proves the hopeless inadequacy of scientific terminology to express certain concepts. It sounds small, but is a truly jaw-dropping change for coral reefs.

For reefs to rebuild their stony skeletons, they rely on the seawater washing over them to be rich in the calcium mineral aragonite. Put simply, the more acid the seawater, the less aragonite it can hold, and the less corals can rebuild their structure. Earlier this year, a paper in the journal Science reported that calcification rates across the Great Barrier Reefs have dropped 14% since 1990. The researchers said more acidic seas were the most likely culprit, and ended their sober write-up of the study with the extraordinary warning that it showed "precipitous changes in the biodiversity and productivity of the world's oceans may be imminent".

Rogers says carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are already over the safe limits for coral reefs. And even the most ambitious political targets for carbon cuts, based on limiting temperature rise to 2C, are insufficient. Their only hope, he says, is a long-term carbon concentration much lower than today's. The clock must somehow be wound back and carbon somehow sucked out of the air. If not, then so much more carbon will dissolve in the seas that the reefs will surely crumble to dust. Given the reluctance to reduce emissions so far, the coral community is not holding its breath.

"I just don't see the world having the commitment to sort this one out," says Obura. "We need to use the coral reef lesson to wake us up and not let this happen to a hundred other ecosystems."

[erik]

Ayres Rock 'used by tourists as a toilet'

Thousands of tourists from all over the world climb Australia’s Ayres Rock every year.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/6153862/Ayres-Rock-used-by-tourists-as-a-toilet.html


'The most rewarding view is of Uluru, not from the top of it'  Photo: REUTERS

But is seems that, once atop of the Northern Territory monolith, visitors are taking more than photographs.

Tour guides have accused some tourists of using the rock, which is considered to be a sacred site to local aborigines, “as a toilet”.

Andrew Simpson, general manager of the Aboriginal-owned Anangu Waai tour company, said tourists had been defecating on the rock.

“That’s been going on for years,” he told the Northern Territory News.

“When people climb up the top of the rock there’s no toilet facilities up there.”

The climb takes at least half a hour each way, but Mr Simpson said no matter how desperate climbers were, it was not acceptable to use the rock as a lavatory.

Ayres Rock, or Uluru, is sacred for the local Anangu people, to whom the land was handed back in 1985.

“They get out of sight ... (and) most of them have a toilet roll tucked away,” he claimed.

“They’re ******** on a sacred site.”

The allegations of misuse could increase the chances of the rock closed to climbers.

Mr Simpson’s claims were made in a submission on the draft Uluru-Kata Tjuta national park management plan, which includes a proposal to ban climbing on the 348-metre-high rock.

The Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park called for an end to people making the arduous trek up the monolith earlier this year, citing cultural, environmental and safety concerns.

It sparked immediate debate over the future of the climb, which is seen by many as a drawcard for the 350,000 tourists who visit the rock each year.

Submissions on the plan closed last Friday. Peter Garrett, the environment minister, will consider more than 150 of them before making a decision next year.

Kevin Rudd, the prime minister, has said he believed the climb should not be closed.

[Michael]

Obama's Health Care program speech to a combined sitting is for some strange reason getting little coverage over here - for such a momentous event.

I was away for two days after it, so perhaps I missed a bit.

I heard that the speech was well received in post-speech polls, but now I see there has been a massive anti-Health Care demonstration. You can see the Republicans and the Pharmos were ready.

I saw this happen in Aust once, over logging, when the aggressive demonstration of a minority swayed the government - when a massive turnout by the majority was needed to tell the loggers to piss off, simply diddn'tr happen because the leadership was lacking.

I sense that if the pro-Health Care people do not take to the streets, this opportunity will be lost.

[Jahn]

When it comes down to Welfare state basics, The US is 30 years behind the EU.

Canada is closer.

[Nichi]

I was hoping that this was something I had read in a bad dream:

Obama: Health insurance mandate no tax increase

          By BEN FELLER,  Associated Press Writer – 1 hr 14 mins ago
WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama says requiring people to get health insurance and fining them if they don't would not amount to a backhanded tax increase.

"I absolutely reject that notion," the president said. Blanketing most of the Sunday TV news shows, Obama defended his proposed health care overhaul, including a key point of the various health care bills on Capitol Hill: mandating that people get health insurance to share the cost burden fairly among all. Those who failed to get coverage would face financial penalties.
continued at http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090921/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_health_care_overhaul

This is totally screwed up, and the last rub in a series of confusing edicts and actions. It's driven home to me plainly:

~If I can't afford to pay out of pocket $250-500 per month for health insurance, according to this plan, I will be fined $3,500+. If I can't pay that monthly fee, how can I pay 3.5k? And just because individuals might be classified as essentially indigent doesn't mean that they then have the wherewithal to go through the laborious red tape required to get on the welfare books. Some folks are literally stranded, or physically incapable of "going downtown" a thousand times to execute all that needs to be done. Whether it's a tax increase or not, have they lost their minds?  He compares it to auto insurance, but "auto insurance" is for folks who can afford to have a car --- there's no logical comparison between the 2 types of insurances.  If I don't have a car, well, then there's nothing to pay insurance for: I don't think anyone would disagree. But I do have a body, the implications of which, for me, the message comes down to this:

You're going to have to stop having that body, in order to get off this gangster grid.

There is a peccadillo of their stat-system which rarely gets pointed out: in order to be considered "unemployed", one has to either be collecting unemployment insurance or be on welfare.  Which means that there has always been an underestimation of jobless folks -- always, whether there has been a Republican or Democrat in office. There is a whole world of folks who have neither unemployment insurance nor welfare, and this is the population which will be put to the screws by this action. I predict that the suicide rate will dramatically increase.

[Michael]

Usually this kind of payment is linked to income, thus is adjusted at tax time. I would assume in US it is well recognised that not all unemployed are in the welfare system - in Australia they are actively discouraged from being on unemployment benefits. Its called the Help and Hassle system. The Health Care is run by the Welfare arm of Government, but not dependent on the Benefit system, although they do get greater Health perks.

The people who get the best perks from the Health System are those that qualify for the Gold Card - a returned services thing, but not all service personnel get it.

I suggest to read carefully V, as there seems to be a huge amount of deception and misinformation disseminated about this thing in your country.

[Firestarter]

Wow. I dont know what to say. Its all screwed up, but penalties? Thats not the american way.

I hope not at least.

[Nichi]

Alas, I don't know enough about the Australian system to make a comparison, M, but I know what the bottom line is in this whole thing, and it threatens my freedom and my control over my life -- what little of it I had, anyway.

It takes a long time to sift through the logic of it, but it starts with HIPAA -- meaning that my medical record information is required to get inputted into an electronic database, one that all doctors and pharmacists everywhere can pull up.   They DEFINITELY deceive all patients when they get patients to sign "consent" for it. They say things like, "This protects your confidentiality," and that's the biggest bullshit in the world. It deprives one of any chance of confidentiality.

When I admitted patients myself, I had to bite my tongue. They say, "this means that if you're unconscious and have an allergy to ____(hypothetical drug)___, then they'll be able to find out when they pull it up in the databanks, and therefore not administer it to you." Sounds good, right?

But it also means that if I have refused a recommended procedure, then my "refusal" goes on the books as "noncompliance": insurances can technically refuse to pay if the patient is "noncompliant", and if a course of action was deemed Against Medical Advice. "AMA" discharges often end up with a patient getting a bill it will take a lifetime to pay off.
So the doors to all alternative therapies get harder to open. So your future treaters see you as a difficult patient, and may even refuse to deal with you at all.

Obama wants everyone in the database. That was part of his platform. The next step is the chip -- and call me a hippie if you will, I REFUSE.

Now, it won't be enough that I duck doctors by my own choice -- I'll have to pay this extortion fee on top of it. I'm really pissed.

[Firestarter]

Someone told me, and I dont know if its true, but all americans would have to have a bank account and the govt would have access to it under this plan. I dont know if its true, but if it were Id freak. If they were looking into penalties that could be a setup for seizing people's monies out of their accts for the plan.

Alas, I don't know enough about the Australian system to make a comparison, M, but I know what the bottom line is in this whole thing, and it threatens my freedom and my control over my life.

It takes a long time to sift through the logic of it, but it starts with HIPAA -- meaning that my medical record information is required to get inputted into an electronic database, one that all doctors and pharmacists everywhere can pull up.   They DEFINITELY deceive all patients when they get patients to sign "consent" for it. They say things like, "This protects your confidentiality," and that's the biggest bullshit in the world. It deprives one of any chance of confidentiality.

When I admitted patients myself, I had to bite my tongue. They say, "this means that if you're unconscious and have an allergy to ____(hypothetical drug)___, then they'll be able to find out when they pull it up in the databanks, and therefore not administer it to you." Sounds good, right?

But it also means that if I have refused a recommended procedure, then my "refusal" goes on the books as "noncompliance": insurances can technically refuse to pay if the patient is "noncompliant", and if a course of action was deemed Against Medical Advice. "AMA" discharges often end up with a patient getting a bill it will take a lifetime to pay off.
So the doors to all alternative therapies get harder to open. So your future treaters see you as a difficult patient, and may even refuse to deal with you at all.

Obama wants everyone in the database. That was part of his platform. The next step is the chip -- and call me a hippie if you will, I REFUSE.

Now, it won't be enough that I duck doctors by my own choice -- I'll have to pay this extortion fee on top of it. I'm really pissed.

[Nichi]

They already can go into bank accounts, so yes, no doubt they'd go into them for this as well.

[Michael]

Jahn, do people in Sweden have this fear that the government is out to get them?

[Michael]

Well I just listened to Obama's interview, and he said:
"If you can't afford Health Insurance, then you certainly shouldn't be punished for that. If you can afford it but decide to take your chances..." etc,

basically saying those who can afford but don't want to pay, should be required to pay something, but those who can't afford it, then there will still be insurance coverage for them.

So I don't see any suggestion that if you can't afford to pay, you'll be penalised. It does appear he is bending over backwards to bring Health Insurance to those you can't currently afford it - I mean that is the whole point.