welcome to reality trivia
environment
The environment is everything that isn't me.
Albert Einstein
august 21, 2018
Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth.
Henry David Thoreau
*articles*
*Study cites longer dry spells as fueling US wildfires
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*‘A smokestorm is imminent’: Spokane’s hazardous air now worse than Beijing and Delhi combined(ARTICLE BELOW)
*The Amount of Toxic Wastewater Produced by Fracking is Unbelievable
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Fracking is destroying U.S. water supply, warns shocking new study
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Weedkiller found in wide range of breakfast foods aimed at children
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Hidden Studies From Decades Ago Could Have Curbed PFAS Chemical Problem
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Toxic 'red tide' algae bloom is killing Florida wildlife and menacing tourism
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump Allows GMO Crops and Harmful Pesticides in Wildlife Refuges
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*DEADLY TOXINS IN WATER SUPPLY A 'WAKE-UP CALL' FOR LOCAL U.S. AUTHORITIES
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Farmers are drawing groundwater from the giant Ogallala Aquifer faster than nature replaces it(excerpt BELOW)
*Study warns of looming potential for runaway global warming
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump administration lifts ban on pesticides linked to declining bee numbers
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Air pollution linked to changes in heart structure
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*Trump administration to freeze fuel efficiency requirements
(ARTICLE BELOW)
*EPA tells energy regulators that previous offer of climate tools wasn’t Trump-approved(ARTICLE BELOW)
cartoons(at the end)
Study cites longer dry spells as fueling US wildfires
Reuters - raw story
21 AUG 2018 AT 06:12 ET
Less rain and longer droughts are the major cause behind larger and more intense wildfires in the U.S. West, not higher temperatures and early snowmelt as previously thought, according to research released on Monday.
The findings by the U.S. Forest Service and University of Montana could help scientists better predict the severity of fire seasons, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study comes as tens of thousands of firefighters battle more than 100 blazes that have charred more than 1.9 million acres (770,000 hectares) in the Western United States. California is marking one of the most destructive fire seasons on record.
The researchers compared snowmelt timing and warming summer temperatures to fluctuations in the amount and distribution of summer rains on lands scorched by wildfires and determined that the latter were drivers.
Lack of summer rain and the extended duration of droughts foster warmer, drier air during fire seasons, leading to more surface heating, which, in turn, sucks moisture from trees, shrubs and vegetation, the study found.
“This new information can help us better monitor changing conditions before the fire season to ensure that areas are prepared for increased wildfire potential,” Matt Jolly, USDA Forest Service research ecologist and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Further, it may improve our ability to predict fire season severity.”
The research also comes amid heated public debate ignited by high-ranking officials within the Trump administration about the cause of California’s wildfires, which have killed at least 11 people, destroyed homes and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
The administration has alternately rejected or downplayed the role of climate change in the worsening wildfire picture. After recently visiting some of California’s major fire zones, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed “gross mismanagement of forests” because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by “environmental terrorist groups.”
Authorities in California have reported an increase in large, explosive and swiftly spreading wildfires over a longer, virtually year-round fire season.
Fire officials say that trend has been fueled by several years of drought-stricken vegetation and stoked by frequent and persistent bouts of erratic winds and triple-digit temperatures, in keeping with scientists’ forecasts of changing climate conditions.
Ninety-five percent of wildfires are human-caused, from camp fires left unattended to careless smoking, to sparks from vehicles and improperly maintained power lines, fire managers say.
The findings by the U.S. Forest Service and University of Montana could help scientists better predict the severity of fire seasons, said the study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The study comes as tens of thousands of firefighters battle more than 100 blazes that have charred more than 1.9 million acres (770,000 hectares) in the Western United States. California is marking one of the most destructive fire seasons on record.
The researchers compared snowmelt timing and warming summer temperatures to fluctuations in the amount and distribution of summer rains on lands scorched by wildfires and determined that the latter were drivers.
Lack of summer rain and the extended duration of droughts foster warmer, drier air during fire seasons, leading to more surface heating, which, in turn, sucks moisture from trees, shrubs and vegetation, the study found.
“This new information can help us better monitor changing conditions before the fire season to ensure that areas are prepared for increased wildfire potential,” Matt Jolly, USDA Forest Service research ecologist and co-author of the study, said in a statement. “Further, it may improve our ability to predict fire season severity.”
The research also comes amid heated public debate ignited by high-ranking officials within the Trump administration about the cause of California’s wildfires, which have killed at least 11 people, destroyed homes and forced the evacuation of tens of thousands of people.
The administration has alternately rejected or downplayed the role of climate change in the worsening wildfire picture. After recently visiting some of California’s major fire zones, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke blamed “gross mismanagement of forests” because of timber harvest restrictions that he said were supported by “environmental terrorist groups.”
Authorities in California have reported an increase in large, explosive and swiftly spreading wildfires over a longer, virtually year-round fire season.
Fire officials say that trend has been fueled by several years of drought-stricken vegetation and stoked by frequent and persistent bouts of erratic winds and triple-digit temperatures, in keeping with scientists’ forecasts of changing climate conditions.
Ninety-five percent of wildfires are human-caused, from camp fires left unattended to careless smoking, to sparks from vehicles and improperly maintained power lines, fire managers say.
‘A smokestorm is imminent’: Spokane’s hazardous air now worse than Beijing and Delhi combined
Surrounded by wildfires, Washington state sees worst air quality in history.
JOE ROMM - thinkprogress
AUG 20, 2018, 1:37 PM
SMOKE FROM THE RIVER FIRE FILLS THE SKY AS IT BURNS THROUGH A CANYON ON JULY 31, 2018 IN LAKEPORT, CALIFORNIA. CREDIT: JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
As of Monday morning, Spokane, Washington’s air quality is worse than Beijing and Delhi combined.
Surrounded on three sides by warming-driven wildfires, Seattle is also experiencing its worst air quality on record, according to Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Washington University. On Sunday, Mass warned that “a smokestorm is imminent for western Washington.”
In Eastern Washington, the air is literally “hazardous.” At 7:15 a.m. local time Monday, Spokane’s Regional Health District tweeted out that “Spokane is waking to ‘hazardous’ or maroon category for air quality.” That means, “At this level, everyone should be staying indoors.”
The warning is based on PM2.5 levels, which measure the fine particulate matter (PM) smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, much of which is caused by combustion of fossil fuels.
These particles are so tiny — 20 times smaller than the width of human hair — they can bypass the body’s normal defense mechanisms and cause grave harm. Studies have found that PM2.5 concentrations are directly correlated to mortality levels from lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease.
Equally worrisome, recent studies link particulate matter directly to higher rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
In the air quality index (AQI) system used for warning the public (see below), 0 to 50 is considered a “good level,” but anything above 150 is “unhealthy” for all groups, and anything above 300 is “hazardous.”
As of mid-morning Pacific time, the AQI for Beijing is 81. The AQI for Delhi is 173. The AQI for Spokane is 306. The highest recorded level Monday in Washington State is over 400.
While air quality is worst in the states currently battling major wildfires, smoke from the numerous western wildfires has traveled all the way across the country, even to Washington, D.C.
California has been slammed by the worst wildfires on record. But eastern Washington is also ablaze, and British Columbia’s wildfires to the north are so severe that places like Prince George are seeing darkness hours after sunrise.
And the reason so many places in North America and around the world are seeing such off the charts wildfires — and that so many places around the world have seen “unprecedented” wildfires in the last few years — is also no mystery.
Climate change is a major cause — despite the fact that President Trump and his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have offered all sorts of “comedically ill-informed” alternative explanations, as experts pointed out last week.
In fact, President Trump’s own White House signed off on the actual science behind increasing wildfires. As the November 2017 National Climate Assessmentexplains, “frequently discussed in the literature is the increase in wildfire risk resulting from the combined effects of high precipitation variability (wet seasons followed by dry), elevated temperature, and low humidity.”
Those wildfires do terrible damage right where they occur, as we’ve seen, but they also harm human health hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
Surrounded on three sides by warming-driven wildfires, Seattle is also experiencing its worst air quality on record, according to Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at Washington University. On Sunday, Mass warned that “a smokestorm is imminent for western Washington.”
In Eastern Washington, the air is literally “hazardous.” At 7:15 a.m. local time Monday, Spokane’s Regional Health District tweeted out that “Spokane is waking to ‘hazardous’ or maroon category for air quality.” That means, “At this level, everyone should be staying indoors.”
The warning is based on PM2.5 levels, which measure the fine particulate matter (PM) smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter, much of which is caused by combustion of fossil fuels.
These particles are so tiny — 20 times smaller than the width of human hair — they can bypass the body’s normal defense mechanisms and cause grave harm. Studies have found that PM2.5 concentrations are directly correlated to mortality levels from lung cancer and cardiopulmonary disease.
Equally worrisome, recent studies link particulate matter directly to higher rates of Alzheimer’s and dementia.
In the air quality index (AQI) system used for warning the public (see below), 0 to 50 is considered a “good level,” but anything above 150 is “unhealthy” for all groups, and anything above 300 is “hazardous.”
As of mid-morning Pacific time, the AQI for Beijing is 81. The AQI for Delhi is 173. The AQI for Spokane is 306. The highest recorded level Monday in Washington State is over 400.
While air quality is worst in the states currently battling major wildfires, smoke from the numerous western wildfires has traveled all the way across the country, even to Washington, D.C.
California has been slammed by the worst wildfires on record. But eastern Washington is also ablaze, and British Columbia’s wildfires to the north are so severe that places like Prince George are seeing darkness hours after sunrise.
And the reason so many places in North America and around the world are seeing such off the charts wildfires — and that so many places around the world have seen “unprecedented” wildfires in the last few years — is also no mystery.
Climate change is a major cause — despite the fact that President Trump and his Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke have offered all sorts of “comedically ill-informed” alternative explanations, as experts pointed out last week.
In fact, President Trump’s own White House signed off on the actual science behind increasing wildfires. As the November 2017 National Climate Assessmentexplains, “frequently discussed in the literature is the increase in wildfire risk resulting from the combined effects of high precipitation variability (wet seasons followed by dry), elevated temperature, and low humidity.”
Those wildfires do terrible damage right where they occur, as we’ve seen, but they also harm human health hundreds and even thousands of miles away.
The Amount of Toxic Wastewater Produced by Fracking is Unbelievable
Up to 1,440 percent more was generated in the first year.
ALEXANDER C. KAUFMAN - mother jones
AUG. 17, 2018 12:21 PM
Fracking companies used 770 percent more water per well in 2016 than in 2011 across all the United States’ major gas- and oil-producing regions, according to a new study.
The number of new fracking wells decreased as gas prices fell, but the amount of water used per well skyrocketed, with up to 1,440 percent more toxic wastewater generated in the first year of each new well’s production period by 2016.
The research, published Wednesday afternoon in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, raises new concerns that hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique used to extract oil and gas trapped deep in bedrock, imperils vital drinking water reserves.
In regions where the warming climate is drying sources of fresh water, fracking intensifies pressure on an already-strained system while increasing the availability of fuels that cause emissions, speeding up the rise in temperatures.
Fracking also produces huge volumes of wastewater laced with cancer-causing chemicals, salts and naturally-occurring radioactive material that can cause earthquakes and contaminate aquifers when pumped underground.
“We saw this dramatic rise in water use and wastewater,” Avner Vengosh, a co-author of the study and professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a phone interview. “They’re drilling much more.”
The study found that if gas and oil prices rise and production increases to the levels of the early 2010s, when fracking first took off, water use and wastewater production could multiply 50-fold for gas drilling and 20-fold for oil extraction by 2030. Even if future drilling rates stay at 2016 levels, the study predicts “a large increase of the total water use for both unconventional oil and shale gas basins,” with a surge in wastewater creation to match.
To conduct the analysis, the researchers compared well information from the US Energy Information Agency and state environmental and natural resource agencies to data collected by the services DrillingInfo and the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry. The data set covered six years and more than 12,000 individual wells.
Mounting research shows that rising fossil fuel emissions, which increase the temperature of the planet, pose grave risks to water supplies. Water levels in 21 of the world’s 47 largest known aquifers are trending negative, according to a 2015 study published by a group of NASA scientists in the journal Water Resources Research. Another NASA study, published in the journal Nature in May, found that California alone lost four gigatons of water from 2007 to 2015.
The demand for water, driven largely by agriculture, is on pace to increase by 55 percent globally between 2000 and 2050. Food production already accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawals around the world, but, by some estimates, farmers need to increase water use by 69 percent to feed the total global population by the year 2035.
“At a time when large parts of our county are suffering through persistent droughts and year-round fire seasons, it’s truly unconscionable that the fossil fuel industry would be allowed to divert vast volumes of water to fracking for oil and gas,” Seth Gladstone, a spokesman for the environmental group Food & Water Watch, said in an email. “The fact that the burning of this oil and gas is driving our climate chaos and intensifying the droughts and fires makes this reality all the more shameful and absurd.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby, declined to comment on the findings of the study before it was released, stating that it would review the details of the report. But, in an email, spokesman Reid Porter said the industry focuses on “reclaiming and practical reuse of waste, using treatments that reduce the waste produced, thereby reducing the amounts that have to be disposed.”
Despite oil and gas industry pushback, other research shows wastewater can contaminate drinking water. In April 2016, former Environmental Protection Agency scientist Dominic DiGiulio concluded that methanol, a chemical that causes permanent nerve damage and blindness, seeped from unlined pits holding fracking wastewater into a massive aquifer in Wyoming. The EPA later found diesel and benzene, a carcinogen, in wells near the water reserve, but held off on linking the contaminants to fracking, which the Obama administration touted for increasing natural gas production and reducing the nation’s reliance on carbon dioxide-spewing coal.
In December 2016, the EPA issued a landmark finding that fracking can contaminate water.
But the agency failed to put any regulations in place to establish a national standard for addressing the issue before President Donald Trump took office, installing former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man with brazenly public ties to the oil and gas industry, as EPA administrator. Almost immediately after the Senate confirmed his nomination, Pruitt began eliminating regulations on the fracking industry.
“We don’t have a national policy, and each state will have different ways of dealing with [fracking],” study co-author Vengosh said. “Given that there’s no uniform regulation in the US, and the weakening of the EPA to have no say in anything these days, that could be a problem.”
Fracking isn’t the only source of contaminants putting stress on water systems. The study comes amid rising concerns over perfluorinated chemicals, including compounds used in firefighting foam and nonstick Teflon, in water sources across the country.
A growing number of states are setting strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemicals, which remain in the water for decades. But the EPA has yet to regulate perfluorinated chemicals―and went as far as to suppress a federal report that recommended lowering the maximum limit by nearly seven times the current standard.
The number of new fracking wells decreased as gas prices fell, but the amount of water used per well skyrocketed, with up to 1,440 percent more toxic wastewater generated in the first year of each new well’s production period by 2016.
The research, published Wednesday afternoon in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, raises new concerns that hydraulic fracturing, the controversial drilling technique used to extract oil and gas trapped deep in bedrock, imperils vital drinking water reserves.
In regions where the warming climate is drying sources of fresh water, fracking intensifies pressure on an already-strained system while increasing the availability of fuels that cause emissions, speeding up the rise in temperatures.
Fracking also produces huge volumes of wastewater laced with cancer-causing chemicals, salts and naturally-occurring radioactive material that can cause earthquakes and contaminate aquifers when pumped underground.
“We saw this dramatic rise in water use and wastewater,” Avner Vengosh, a co-author of the study and professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, said in a phone interview. “They’re drilling much more.”
The study found that if gas and oil prices rise and production increases to the levels of the early 2010s, when fracking first took off, water use and wastewater production could multiply 50-fold for gas drilling and 20-fold for oil extraction by 2030. Even if future drilling rates stay at 2016 levels, the study predicts “a large increase of the total water use for both unconventional oil and shale gas basins,” with a surge in wastewater creation to match.
To conduct the analysis, the researchers compared well information from the US Energy Information Agency and state environmental and natural resource agencies to data collected by the services DrillingInfo and the FracFocus Chemical Disclosure Registry. The data set covered six years and more than 12,000 individual wells.
Mounting research shows that rising fossil fuel emissions, which increase the temperature of the planet, pose grave risks to water supplies. Water levels in 21 of the world’s 47 largest known aquifers are trending negative, according to a 2015 study published by a group of NASA scientists in the journal Water Resources Research. Another NASA study, published in the journal Nature in May, found that California alone lost four gigatons of water from 2007 to 2015.
The demand for water, driven largely by agriculture, is on pace to increase by 55 percent globally between 2000 and 2050. Food production already accounts for 70 percent of water withdrawals around the world, but, by some estimates, farmers need to increase water use by 69 percent to feed the total global population by the year 2035.
“At a time when large parts of our county are suffering through persistent droughts and year-round fire seasons, it’s truly unconscionable that the fossil fuel industry would be allowed to divert vast volumes of water to fracking for oil and gas,” Seth Gladstone, a spokesman for the environmental group Food & Water Watch, said in an email. “The fact that the burning of this oil and gas is driving our climate chaos and intensifying the droughts and fires makes this reality all the more shameful and absurd.”
The American Petroleum Institute, the oil and gas industry’s biggest lobby, declined to comment on the findings of the study before it was released, stating that it would review the details of the report. But, in an email, spokesman Reid Porter said the industry focuses on “reclaiming and practical reuse of waste, using treatments that reduce the waste produced, thereby reducing the amounts that have to be disposed.”
Despite oil and gas industry pushback, other research shows wastewater can contaminate drinking water. In April 2016, former Environmental Protection Agency scientist Dominic DiGiulio concluded that methanol, a chemical that causes permanent nerve damage and blindness, seeped from unlined pits holding fracking wastewater into a massive aquifer in Wyoming. The EPA later found diesel and benzene, a carcinogen, in wells near the water reserve, but held off on linking the contaminants to fracking, which the Obama administration touted for increasing natural gas production and reducing the nation’s reliance on carbon dioxide-spewing coal.
In December 2016, the EPA issued a landmark finding that fracking can contaminate water.
But the agency failed to put any regulations in place to establish a national standard for addressing the issue before President Donald Trump took office, installing former Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, a man with brazenly public ties to the oil and gas industry, as EPA administrator. Almost immediately after the Senate confirmed his nomination, Pruitt began eliminating regulations on the fracking industry.
“We don’t have a national policy, and each state will have different ways of dealing with [fracking],” study co-author Vengosh said. “Given that there’s no uniform regulation in the US, and the weakening of the EPA to have no say in anything these days, that could be a problem.”
Fracking isn’t the only source of contaminants putting stress on water systems. The study comes amid rising concerns over perfluorinated chemicals, including compounds used in firefighting foam and nonstick Teflon, in water sources across the country.
A growing number of states are setting strict new limits on the cancer-causing chemicals, which remain in the water for decades. But the EPA has yet to regulate perfluorinated chemicals―and went as far as to suppress a federal report that recommended lowering the maximum limit by nearly seven times the current standard.
Fracking is destroying U.S. water supply, warns shocking new study
Toxic wastewater from fracking jumps 14-fold from 2011 to 2016 — and it may get 50 times bigger by 2030.
JOE ROMM - thinkprogress
AUG 17, 2018, 8:00 AM
An alarming new study reveals fracking is quite simply destroying America’s water supply.
That means we are losing potable water forever in many semi-arid regions of the country, while simultaneously producing more carbon pollution that in turn is driving ever-worsening droughts in those same regions, as fracking expert Anthony Ingraffea, a professor at Cornell University, explained to ThinkProgress.
The game-changing study from Duke University found that “from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770 percent.” In addition, the toxic wastewater produced in the first year of production jumped up to 1440 percent.
“Previous studies suggested hydraulic fracturing does not use significantly more water than other energy sources, but those findings were based only on aggregated data from the early years of fracking,” explained co-author Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke.
“After more than a decade of fracking operation, we now have more years of data to draw upon from multiple verifiable sources,” said Vengosh. The researchers looked at data on water used — and oil, gas, and wastewater produced — for over 12,000 wells from 2011 to 2016.
Ingraffea, who was not involved in the study, explained that while first generation wells used 3 to 5 millions gallons of water, current third generation wells use 10 to 30 million gallons. Ingraffea — who worked with the fossil fuel industry for three decades and has been co-editor-in-chief of the journal Engineering Fracture Mechanics since 2005 — noted that the federal government “forecasts a million more such wells in the next 20 years.”
That would mean trillions of gallons of water used.
The Duke study warns that the water footprint of fracking could jump as much as 50-fold in some areas by 2030, “raising concerns about its sustainability, particularly in arid or semi-arid regions in western states, or other areas where groundwater supplies are stressed.”
As their analysis shows, some of the fracking sites that are seeing the biggest jump in water footprint per well — like the Permian and Eagle Ford Basins — are also located in highly water-stressed areas (see chart above).
One key point the study makes is that, unlike other energy sources, much of the water fracking uses is essentially lost to humanity. Either the water doesn’t escape the shale formation or, when it does come back to the surface, it “is highly saline, is difficult to treat, and is often disposed through deep injection wells.”
Therefore, even though other forms of energy have a higher intensity of water use, “the permanent loss of water use for hydraulic fracturing from the hydrosphere” may still be higher.
The study also points out that the world has seen “rapidly diminishing global water resources due to population growth and climate change.”
Yet countless studies show that because the fracking process leaks so much methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas — fracked gas isn’t a climate solution. In fact, “natural gas could warm the planet as much as coal in the short term,” one major 24-author study from June concluded. So those who continue touting fracked gas as a bridge to a low-carbon future are not keeping up with the latest science.
And so we have the tragic situation where we are using up one of our most precious non-renewable resources, water, to produce oil and gas, which worsens the stress on our water system.
As Ingraffea put it, “shale gas/oil is exchanging absurd volumes of water for absurd volumes of fossil fuels at a time where using the latter is jeopardizing the availability of the former.” At the same time, fracking “is exchanging precious volumes of water usable for drinking and farming for toxic volumes of wastewater most of which has to be transported and injected underground,” at grave risk to underground sources of drinking water. Finally, “most of what is not transported and injected stays underground, an exchange of H2O for CO2.” Therefore, almost all of what arrives at a well is forever lost to the water cycle.”
Fracking is truly a Faustian bargain.
That means we are losing potable water forever in many semi-arid regions of the country, while simultaneously producing more carbon pollution that in turn is driving ever-worsening droughts in those same regions, as fracking expert Anthony Ingraffea, a professor at Cornell University, explained to ThinkProgress.
The game-changing study from Duke University found that “from 2011 to 2016, the water use per well increased up to 770 percent.” In addition, the toxic wastewater produced in the first year of production jumped up to 1440 percent.
“Previous studies suggested hydraulic fracturing does not use significantly more water than other energy sources, but those findings were based only on aggregated data from the early years of fracking,” explained co-author Avner Vengosh, a professor of geochemistry and water quality at Duke.
“After more than a decade of fracking operation, we now have more years of data to draw upon from multiple verifiable sources,” said Vengosh. The researchers looked at data on water used — and oil, gas, and wastewater produced — for over 12,000 wells from 2011 to 2016.
Ingraffea, who was not involved in the study, explained that while first generation wells used 3 to 5 millions gallons of water, current third generation wells use 10 to 30 million gallons. Ingraffea — who worked with the fossil fuel industry for three decades and has been co-editor-in-chief of the journal Engineering Fracture Mechanics since 2005 — noted that the federal government “forecasts a million more such wells in the next 20 years.”
That would mean trillions of gallons of water used.
The Duke study warns that the water footprint of fracking could jump as much as 50-fold in some areas by 2030, “raising concerns about its sustainability, particularly in arid or semi-arid regions in western states, or other areas where groundwater supplies are stressed.”
As their analysis shows, some of the fracking sites that are seeing the biggest jump in water footprint per well — like the Permian and Eagle Ford Basins — are also located in highly water-stressed areas (see chart above).
One key point the study makes is that, unlike other energy sources, much of the water fracking uses is essentially lost to humanity. Either the water doesn’t escape the shale formation or, when it does come back to the surface, it “is highly saline, is difficult to treat, and is often disposed through deep injection wells.”
Therefore, even though other forms of energy have a higher intensity of water use, “the permanent loss of water use for hydraulic fracturing from the hydrosphere” may still be higher.
The study also points out that the world has seen “rapidly diminishing global water resources due to population growth and climate change.”
Yet countless studies show that because the fracking process leaks so much methane — a highly potent greenhouse gas — fracked gas isn’t a climate solution. In fact, “natural gas could warm the planet as much as coal in the short term,” one major 24-author study from June concluded. So those who continue touting fracked gas as a bridge to a low-carbon future are not keeping up with the latest science.
And so we have the tragic situation where we are using up one of our most precious non-renewable resources, water, to produce oil and gas, which worsens the stress on our water system.
As Ingraffea put it, “shale gas/oil is exchanging absurd volumes of water for absurd volumes of fossil fuels at a time where using the latter is jeopardizing the availability of the former.” At the same time, fracking “is exchanging precious volumes of water usable for drinking and farming for toxic volumes of wastewater most of which has to be transported and injected underground,” at grave risk to underground sources of drinking water. Finally, “most of what is not transported and injected stays underground, an exchange of H2O for CO2.” Therefore, almost all of what arrives at a well is forever lost to the water cycle.”
Fracking is truly a Faustian bargain.
poisoning children for profit!!!
Weedkiller found in wide range of breakfast foods aimed at children
Cancer-linked herbicide, sold as Roundup by Monsanto, present in 45 products including granola, snack bars and Cheerios
Oliver Milman in New York
the guardian
Thu 16 Aug 2018 01.00 EDT
Significant levels of the weedkilling chemical glyphosate have been found in an array of popular breakfast cereals, oats and snack bars marketed to US children, a new study has found.
Tests revealed glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller brand Roundup, present in all but two of the 45 oat-derived products that were sampled by the Environmental Working Group, a public health organization.
Nearly three in four of the products exceeded what the EWG classes safe for children to consume. Products with some of the highest levels of glyphosate include granola, oats and snack bars made by leading industry namesQuaker, Kellogg’s and General Mills, which makes Cheerios.
One sample of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats measured at more than 1,000 parts per billion of glyphosate. The Environmental Protection Agency has a range of safe levels for glyphosate on crops such as corn, soybeans, grains and some fruits, spanning 0.1 to 310 parts per million.
“I grew up eating Cheerios and Quaker Oats long before they were tainted with glyphosate,” said EWG’s president, Ken Cook. “No one wants to eat a weedkiller for breakfast, and no one should have to do so.” Cook said EWG will urge the EPA to limit the use of glyphosate on food crops but said companies should “step up” because of the “lawless” nature of the regulator under the Trump administration.
“It is very troubling that cereals children like to eat contain glyphosate,” said Alexis Temkin, an EWG toxicologist and author of the report. “Parents shouldn’t worry about whether feeding their children heathy oat foods will also expose them to a chemical linked to cancer. The government must take steps to protect our most vulnerable populations.”
The findings follow a landmark decision in a San Francisco court last week to order that Monsanto pay $289m in damages to Dewayne Johnson, a 46-year-old former groundskeeper. A jury deemed that Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller caused Johnson’s cancer and that it had failed to warn him about the health risks of exposure.
Monsanto, which said it will appeal against the verdict, has said glyphosate has been used safely for decades. In 2015, the EPA said that glyphosate has a low toxicity for people but could cause problems for some pets if they consume the chemical.
However, the World Health Organization has called glyphosate a “probable carcinogen” and authorities in California list it as a chemical “known to the state to cause cancer”.
In April, internal emails obtained from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that scientists have found glyphosate on a wide range of commonly consumed food, to the point that they were finding it difficult to identify a food without the chemical on it. The FDA has yet to release any official results from this process.
US farmers spray about 200m pounds of Roundup each year on their crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat and oats. It can also be used on produce such as spinach and almonds.
A General Mills spokeswoman said: “Our products are safe and without question they meet regulatory safety levels. The EPA has researched this issue and has set rules that we follow, as do farmers who grow crops including wheat and oats.”
A Kellogg’s spokesman said: “Our food is safe. Providing safe, high-quality foods is one of the ways we earn the trust of millions of people around the world. The EPA sets strict standards for safe levels of these agricultural residues and the ingredients we purchase from suppliers for our foods fall under these limits.”
Quaker Oats continues to “proudly stand by the safety and quality of our Quaker products”, a spokesman said.
But Cook said that General Mills and Quaker Oats are “relying on outdated safety standards”.
“Our view is that the government standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency pose real health risks to Americans – particularly children, who are more sensitive to the effects of toxic chemicals than adults,” he said.
Tests revealed glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weedkiller brand Roundup, present in all but two of the 45 oat-derived products that were sampled by the Environmental Working Group, a public health organization.
Nearly three in four of the products exceeded what the EWG classes safe for children to consume. Products with some of the highest levels of glyphosate include granola, oats and snack bars made by leading industry namesQuaker, Kellogg’s and General Mills, which makes Cheerios.
One sample of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats measured at more than 1,000 parts per billion of glyphosate. The Environmental Protection Agency has a range of safe levels for glyphosate on crops such as corn, soybeans, grains and some fruits, spanning 0.1 to 310 parts per million.
“I grew up eating Cheerios and Quaker Oats long before they were tainted with glyphosate,” said EWG’s president, Ken Cook. “No one wants to eat a weedkiller for breakfast, and no one should have to do so.” Cook said EWG will urge the EPA to limit the use of glyphosate on food crops but said companies should “step up” because of the “lawless” nature of the regulator under the Trump administration.
“It is very troubling that cereals children like to eat contain glyphosate,” said Alexis Temkin, an EWG toxicologist and author of the report. “Parents shouldn’t worry about whether feeding their children heathy oat foods will also expose them to a chemical linked to cancer. The government must take steps to protect our most vulnerable populations.”
The findings follow a landmark decision in a San Francisco court last week to order that Monsanto pay $289m in damages to Dewayne Johnson, a 46-year-old former groundskeeper. A jury deemed that Monsanto’s Roundup weedkiller caused Johnson’s cancer and that it had failed to warn him about the health risks of exposure.
Monsanto, which said it will appeal against the verdict, has said glyphosate has been used safely for decades. In 2015, the EPA said that glyphosate has a low toxicity for people but could cause problems for some pets if they consume the chemical.
However, the World Health Organization has called glyphosate a “probable carcinogen” and authorities in California list it as a chemical “known to the state to cause cancer”.
In April, internal emails obtained from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) showed that scientists have found glyphosate on a wide range of commonly consumed food, to the point that they were finding it difficult to identify a food without the chemical on it. The FDA has yet to release any official results from this process.
US farmers spray about 200m pounds of Roundup each year on their crops, including corn, soybeans, wheat and oats. It can also be used on produce such as spinach and almonds.
A General Mills spokeswoman said: “Our products are safe and without question they meet regulatory safety levels. The EPA has researched this issue and has set rules that we follow, as do farmers who grow crops including wheat and oats.”
A Kellogg’s spokesman said: “Our food is safe. Providing safe, high-quality foods is one of the ways we earn the trust of millions of people around the world. The EPA sets strict standards for safe levels of these agricultural residues and the ingredients we purchase from suppliers for our foods fall under these limits.”
Quaker Oats continues to “proudly stand by the safety and quality of our Quaker products”, a spokesman said.
But Cook said that General Mills and Quaker Oats are “relying on outdated safety standards”.
“Our view is that the government standards set by the Environmental Protection Agency pose real health risks to Americans – particularly children, who are more sensitive to the effects of toxic chemicals than adults,” he said.
greed and profit vs human lives!!!
Hidden Studies From Decades Ago Could Have Curbed PFAS Chemical Problem
BY Heather Mongilio Environmental Health News - truthout
PUBLISHED
August 15, 2018
An editorial published in Environmental Health July 31 suggests that research on perfluorinated alkylate substances (PFAS) and their dangerous health effects was not revealed until several decades after it was conducted.
The lack of publicly available research has prevented proper guidelines for levels of the chemical compounds, including in drinking water, Philippe Grandjean, a professor at University of Southern Denmark and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued in his piece.
In the editorial, Grandjean said studies conducted up to four decades ago found health effects, including on the immune system, from PFAS chemicals, but those studies were hidden by production companies, like 3M Co.
“It’s frustrating to be an environmental health researcher and spend years and years to characterize the exposures and the adverse health effects of these compounds, only to discover that most of that information was already known but had been kept secret,” Grandjean told EHN.
Ubiquitous Problem
PFASs are industrial chemicals known for repelling water and fat. They are often used in stain or water resistant sprays, teflon and in microwave popcorn bags, among other household items.
“It’s very challenging to avoid PFASs in consumer products,” Laurel Schaider, a research scientists at Silent Spring Institute, told EHN.
They were also used in fire fighting foams, which is why areas near military sites across the US have been found contaminated.
Their chemical compounds, defined by the length of their carbon chains, have made them toxic to both humans and the environment. The chemicals have been linked to multiple human health problems, including testicular and kidney cancers, decreased birth weights, thyroid disease, decreased sperm quality, high cholesterol, pregnancy-induced hypertension, asthma and ulcerative colitis.
Most research has been done on two PFASs, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), Schaider said, however, there are new perfluorinated compounds that are raising alarm among scientists as well.
The editorial comes as communities across the US continually uncover dangerous amounts of the chemicals in water supplies. Recently, Michigan declared a state of emergency over the levels of PFAS chemicals found in the town of Parchment’s water, and state health officials warn the compounds could be affecting up to 11,000 sites statewide.
Michigan isn’t alone: In May, an analysis released by the Environmental Working Group reported that more than 1,500 drinking water systems, serving up to 110 million Americans, may be contaminated with PFAS compounds.
The compounds have also been the subject of multiple lawsuits against chemical manufacturers Dupont and 3M, the most recent of which was settled in Minnesota. 3M ultimately settled with the state of Minnesota for $850 million, and during the lawsuit, many of 3M’s documents were released, including unreleased studies showing some of the health effects of the chemicals.
Hidden Research
According to Grandjean’s editorial, health effects from PFASs have been known since 1978 when two internal reports from the International Research and Development Corporation prepared for 3M about monkey studies were released. One of the studies was halted due to monkey mortality from doses of PFOS, according to the editorial.
The studies were eventually released to the EPA, which used them infurther studies and reports on PFAS.
The chemicals had also been found in production workers’ blood in 1976, and PFAS have been found to transfer to babies as far back as 1981. But despite knowing that PFAS were found in umbilical cord blood in 1981, the information was not released until 20 years later, according to the editorial.
Grandjean had published a study in 2012 detailing how higher PFAS exposure was linked to vaccinated children developing lower amounts of antibodies, a finding at the time he considered a “major discovery.”
But the 1978 monkey study had shown that the immune system was affected by PFOA. The study was not published nor was there a follow-up. And without the published research, the compounds were spread into the environment without scrutiny, Grandjean said.
“Had I found out in 1978 that this industrial chemical was toxic to the immune system, I could see all sorts of examinations of exposed kids that could be done, but I was not told, so it had to wait, this case 30 years, before I turned my attention to this,” he said.
But it goes beyond not releasing information. As part of the Minnesota lawsuit against 3M, a Science Publication Strategy from 1998 was released, which details how the company planned to release selected studies on PFASs and use their narrative to make it clear the substances were not harmful.
The strategy included releasing a study on pregnant mice that showed no birth defects on the babies. But another document listed in the strategy reported that PFOS, when given to pregnant mice, reduced pup survival and the mouse’s average weight gain during the pregnancy.
In another case, a draft study of PFOS and PFOA found a link between PFOA, cholesterol and triglycerides, which was not published in the final study.
3M settled in February 2018 with Minnesota for $850 million. It also had settled for a lesser amount in 2007, which started one of the first clean up efforts, Walker Smith, spokesperson for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, told EHN.
With the first settlement in 2007, the state was able to start some cleanup efforts, including removing contamination from soil, providing bottle water for people who get their water from wells and getting filters for some of the wells, Smith said.
“Up to this point, it’s been a kind of Band-Aid approach,” he said.
With the new settlement, the state has created working groups to decide what projects the money should fund, he said.
But Minnesota is not the only place where lawsuits have occurred against PFAS production companies. Robert Bilott, a lawyer working for Taft, Stettinius and Hollister LLP, has made a name for himself going after these companies.
Bilotts’s first case was against DuPont, which settled. And over the past 20 years, he tried to forward studies and data to the EPA, he told EHN.
Bilott then filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont, which, he said, allowed scientists to start weighing in on the PFASs found in the drinking water in West Virginia, which ultimately led to the massive study a decade ago of nearly 70,000 community members in the Ohio River Valley—dubbed the C8 Science Panel. The panel became a model for studying current contamination and health impacts from highly fluorinated chemicals.
Once the science came back, individuals who had one of the six diseases linked to PFASs were able to sue DuPont.
Prior to the lawsuits, people had not known that there were PFASs in their drinking water, Bilott said.
“These were things that could have been avoided if handled properly by the companies,” he said.
A spokesperson for 3M did not return a request for comment as of publication.
The Old and New PFASs
Most companies have stopped producing PFOA and PFOS, but there is nothing banning their production, Schaider said. And they still persist in the environment.
PFOA and PFOS have long carbon chains, which mean they take longer to break down. Some of the new PFASs being produced have shorter carbon chains, meaning their half-lives are closer to months, she said.
“And while they don’t stick around in our bodies as long, they pose some other challenges. They are harder to remove with the same water treatments people use to remove PFOS and PFOA from drinking water,” she said.
They also have accumulative effects on the environment, she added.
The other problem with the newer chemicals is the lack of research on the newer compounds. Just like with PFOA and PFOS, these compounds are being used without a full assessment to any possible harm they might bring, Grandjean said.
Regulations and Going Forth
What Grandjean, Billot and Schaider want is more regulation on PFASs.
There is no current federal standard for the amount of PFASs that can be in drinking water, Schaider said.
In his editorial, Grandjean calls for more research before widespread usage of PFASs. But there are other “easy” fixes Congress could do to have more regulation over the compounds, such as determining PFOA and PFOS as hazardous so the military can be involved in the clean up, Grandjean said.
“It’s a fairly simple thing, and when I say we’re 20 years behind in research and rediscovering what was known by the private sector much earlier, we’re also way behind in regard to the decisions in society, the regulatory agencies,” he said.
“This is really in my mind low hanging fruit. The airport should use fluorine-free fire-fighting foams and we should simply measure PFASs in drinking water across the country.”
The lack of publicly available research has prevented proper guidelines for levels of the chemical compounds, including in drinking water, Philippe Grandjean, a professor at University of Southern Denmark and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, argued in his piece.
In the editorial, Grandjean said studies conducted up to four decades ago found health effects, including on the immune system, from PFAS chemicals, but those studies were hidden by production companies, like 3M Co.
“It’s frustrating to be an environmental health researcher and spend years and years to characterize the exposures and the adverse health effects of these compounds, only to discover that most of that information was already known but had been kept secret,” Grandjean told EHN.
Ubiquitous Problem
PFASs are industrial chemicals known for repelling water and fat. They are often used in stain or water resistant sprays, teflon and in microwave popcorn bags, among other household items.
“It’s very challenging to avoid PFASs in consumer products,” Laurel Schaider, a research scientists at Silent Spring Institute, told EHN.
They were also used in fire fighting foams, which is why areas near military sites across the US have been found contaminated.
Their chemical compounds, defined by the length of their carbon chains, have made them toxic to both humans and the environment. The chemicals have been linked to multiple human health problems, including testicular and kidney cancers, decreased birth weights, thyroid disease, decreased sperm quality, high cholesterol, pregnancy-induced hypertension, asthma and ulcerative colitis.
Most research has been done on two PFASs, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctane sulfonic acid (PFOS), Schaider said, however, there are new perfluorinated compounds that are raising alarm among scientists as well.
The editorial comes as communities across the US continually uncover dangerous amounts of the chemicals in water supplies. Recently, Michigan declared a state of emergency over the levels of PFAS chemicals found in the town of Parchment’s water, and state health officials warn the compounds could be affecting up to 11,000 sites statewide.
Michigan isn’t alone: In May, an analysis released by the Environmental Working Group reported that more than 1,500 drinking water systems, serving up to 110 million Americans, may be contaminated with PFAS compounds.
The compounds have also been the subject of multiple lawsuits against chemical manufacturers Dupont and 3M, the most recent of which was settled in Minnesota. 3M ultimately settled with the state of Minnesota for $850 million, and during the lawsuit, many of 3M’s documents were released, including unreleased studies showing some of the health effects of the chemicals.
Hidden Research
According to Grandjean’s editorial, health effects from PFASs have been known since 1978 when two internal reports from the International Research and Development Corporation prepared for 3M about monkey studies were released. One of the studies was halted due to monkey mortality from doses of PFOS, according to the editorial.
The studies were eventually released to the EPA, which used them infurther studies and reports on PFAS.
The chemicals had also been found in production workers’ blood in 1976, and PFAS have been found to transfer to babies as far back as 1981. But despite knowing that PFAS were found in umbilical cord blood in 1981, the information was not released until 20 years later, according to the editorial.
Grandjean had published a study in 2012 detailing how higher PFAS exposure was linked to vaccinated children developing lower amounts of antibodies, a finding at the time he considered a “major discovery.”
But the 1978 monkey study had shown that the immune system was affected by PFOA. The study was not published nor was there a follow-up. And without the published research, the compounds were spread into the environment without scrutiny, Grandjean said.
“Had I found out in 1978 that this industrial chemical was toxic to the immune system, I could see all sorts of examinations of exposed kids that could be done, but I was not told, so it had to wait, this case 30 years, before I turned my attention to this,” he said.
But it goes beyond not releasing information. As part of the Minnesota lawsuit against 3M, a Science Publication Strategy from 1998 was released, which details how the company planned to release selected studies on PFASs and use their narrative to make it clear the substances were not harmful.
The strategy included releasing a study on pregnant mice that showed no birth defects on the babies. But another document listed in the strategy reported that PFOS, when given to pregnant mice, reduced pup survival and the mouse’s average weight gain during the pregnancy.
In another case, a draft study of PFOS and PFOA found a link between PFOA, cholesterol and triglycerides, which was not published in the final study.
3M settled in February 2018 with Minnesota for $850 million. It also had settled for a lesser amount in 2007, which started one of the first clean up efforts, Walker Smith, spokesperson for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, told EHN.
With the first settlement in 2007, the state was able to start some cleanup efforts, including removing contamination from soil, providing bottle water for people who get their water from wells and getting filters for some of the wells, Smith said.
“Up to this point, it’s been a kind of Band-Aid approach,” he said.
With the new settlement, the state has created working groups to decide what projects the money should fund, he said.
But Minnesota is not the only place where lawsuits have occurred against PFAS production companies. Robert Bilott, a lawyer working for Taft, Stettinius and Hollister LLP, has made a name for himself going after these companies.
Bilotts’s first case was against DuPont, which settled. And over the past 20 years, he tried to forward studies and data to the EPA, he told EHN.
Bilott then filed a class action lawsuit against DuPont, which, he said, allowed scientists to start weighing in on the PFASs found in the drinking water in West Virginia, which ultimately led to the massive study a decade ago of nearly 70,000 community members in the Ohio River Valley—dubbed the C8 Science Panel. The panel became a model for studying current contamination and health impacts from highly fluorinated chemicals.
Once the science came back, individuals who had one of the six diseases linked to PFASs were able to sue DuPont.
Prior to the lawsuits, people had not known that there were PFASs in their drinking water, Bilott said.
“These were things that could have been avoided if handled properly by the companies,” he said.
A spokesperson for 3M did not return a request for comment as of publication.
The Old and New PFASs
Most companies have stopped producing PFOA and PFOS, but there is nothing banning their production, Schaider said. And they still persist in the environment.
PFOA and PFOS have long carbon chains, which mean they take longer to break down. Some of the new PFASs being produced have shorter carbon chains, meaning their half-lives are closer to months, she said.
“And while they don’t stick around in our bodies as long, they pose some other challenges. They are harder to remove with the same water treatments people use to remove PFOS and PFOA from drinking water,” she said.
They also have accumulative effects on the environment, she added.
The other problem with the newer chemicals is the lack of research on the newer compounds. Just like with PFOA and PFOS, these compounds are being used without a full assessment to any possible harm they might bring, Grandjean said.
Regulations and Going Forth
What Grandjean, Billot and Schaider want is more regulation on PFASs.
There is no current federal standard for the amount of PFASs that can be in drinking water, Schaider said.
In his editorial, Grandjean calls for more research before widespread usage of PFASs. But there are other “easy” fixes Congress could do to have more regulation over the compounds, such as determining PFOA and PFOS as hazardous so the military can be involved in the clean up, Grandjean said.
“It’s a fairly simple thing, and when I say we’re 20 years behind in research and rediscovering what was known by the private sector much earlier, we’re also way behind in regard to the decisions in society, the regulatory agencies,” he said.
“This is really in my mind low hanging fruit. The airport should use fluorine-free fire-fighting foams and we should simply measure PFASs in drinking water across the country.”
stupidity has consequences!!!
Toxic 'red tide' algae bloom is killing Florida wildlife and menacing tourism
Mallory Pickett in Sanibel, Florida
the guardian
Tue 14 Aug 2018 01.00 EDT
Dead fish near a boat ramp in Bradenton Beach, Florida. Photograph: Chris O'Meara/AP
This year 267 tons of marine life, including thousands of small fish and 72 Goliath groupers, have washed up along 150 miles of the Gulf Coast from the unrelenting bloom
Fish washed up after dying in a red tide in Captiva, Florida. Photograph: Cristobal Herrera/EPAWith its long, white, sandy beaches, Sanibel Island off the coast of south-western Florida is usually a perfect place for families to enjoy these last days of summer.
This year, however, 267 tons of marine life, including thousands of small fish, 72 Goliath groupers, and even a 21-ft whale shark have washed up on the beach since July – thanks to a a disastrous “red tide” of toxic algae.
The algae, called Karenia brevis, began in November and has affected beaches along about 150 miles of Florida’s Gulf Coast from Anna Maria Island to Naples. In Sarasota, two hours north of Sanibel, wildlife scientists recovered nine dead bottlenose dolphins last week.
“We had groupers probably four feet and five feet up here, and all kinds of fish [wash up],” said Andrew Stone, who was taking a sunset walk on Sanibel’s Lighthouse beach with his wife, Joyce Hillman. The couple comes here from Bonita Springs every year.
“We had the binoculars and we were looking at fish bobbing up and down way out there, bigger than those buoys,” he said, pointing about 100 meters offshore. “And the bugs were horrific.”
While algal blooms are common here, they are usually constrained to a few months in late summer or early fall, and are mainly noticeable for the dark, greenish-red color they give the water. But this bloom has lasted from one season into the next without reprieve, and achieved the unusually high densities believed to be responsible for killing so much wildlife.
Sanibel Island is usually bustling at this time of year, but the sight and smell of scores of dead fish on beaches, and reports on the bloom in the news, have kept many tourists away.
The algae also causes mild respiratory irritation, so those who brave the smell can spend their time on the beach – if they can put up with a cough and watery eyes. People with asthma or other respiratory diseases are at risk of more serious complications, however.
“There’s definitely been many, many, fewer people,” said Hillman, the sunset reflecting on the reddish tint in the water behind her last week.
Clean-up crews had removed the dead fish from the sand earlier in the day, but the water was still dark, and the beach was sparsely populated. “This is the cleanest the beaches have been in two weeks,” she added.
Though Sanibel’s beaches have now been cleaned up – the bloom is continuing.
In a recently released survey, businesses in Sarasota County reported losses of up to 6% compared to last year, which they have attributed to the bloom.
“It’s scary, and it’s weird and it’s devastating really,” said Morgan Combs, who grew up on Sanibel and works at a local inn. “Just observing not having any traffic, and not seeing anyone on the beach other than cleaners.”
Scientists are still trying to determine what is responsible for this bloom, but the consensus so far seems to be that a combination of factors – including heavy rainfall, ocean temperature and salinity, unlucky wind patterns and pollution – could have aligned to create just the right conditions for Karenia brevis to thrive and to stay put.
“There’s a lot of different things that can be involved,” said Kate Hubbard, who leads the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s harmful algal bloom research group. “We do know that we haven’t had the physical conditions that sometimes help with bloom termination, that help push the bloom offshore.”
At the same time that the Karenia brevis bloom is casting a pall on south-western Florida’s beaches, a record-breaking bloom of blue-green “algae” is also spreading through its freshwater.
Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in July to respond to the blue-green algae (which is actually a species of cyanobacteria, not an algae) and combat pollution. But the foul-smelling algae are clogging canals, preventing fishing and similarlyaffecting tourism business.
There is more clarity on the causes of the cyanobacteria bloom: scientists believe that it is likely caused by warmer waters from climate change and polluted runoff from agriculture and urban areas surrounding Lake Okeechobee.
The pollution is made worse because many wetlands in Florida have been developed, so water moves quickly into the rivers and lakes, without natural filtration through the estuaries.
Some people are concerned the same pollution exacerbating the blue-green algae may be reaching the sea and feeding the Karenia brevis as well, but there is disagreement among experts on the issue.
Rick Bartleson, an environmental scientist at the non-profit Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, thinks it’s clear that nutrients from the land are at least a part of the problem.
“There are other factors that had to work together [to create] this perfect storm for the developing red tide population … [but], it’s obvious that you can’t have dense blooms like this, and long lasting blooms, without having a high nutrient supply rate to the algae.”
Hubbard is much more circumspect.
“It’s a naturally occurring event, it’s been documented centuries ago,” Hubbard said.
One idea to tackle the blooms that Hubbard and collaborators are working on involves field and lab studies to inform whether installing shellfish in some of the areas in Florida often impacted by blooms of toxic algae might one day help, because shellfish are natural “grazers” that filter out and eat the algae.
As Florida prepares for November elections, gubernatorial and senate candidates have been forced to address the crises caused by algae. Senate candidate Bill Nelson, running against Scott, held a roundtable on the blue-green algae on Friday, and candidates in the Republican and Democratic primaries for governor addressed the issue in their debates.
Activists in areas affected by “red tides” held a peaceful protest called “Hands along the water” on beaches along Florida’s coast on Sunday, to “show that we do not, and will not, stand for our beautiful beaches, wildlife, homes and livelihoods to continuously be destroyed and impacted by the water released from Lake Okeechobee.”
RELATED: Scientists seek new ways to combat Florida's growing 'red tide'
Fish washed up after dying in a red tide in Captiva, Florida. Photograph: Cristobal Herrera/EPAWith its long, white, sandy beaches, Sanibel Island off the coast of south-western Florida is usually a perfect place for families to enjoy these last days of summer.
This year, however, 267 tons of marine life, including thousands of small fish, 72 Goliath groupers, and even a 21-ft whale shark have washed up on the beach since July – thanks to a a disastrous “red tide” of toxic algae.
The algae, called Karenia brevis, began in November and has affected beaches along about 150 miles of Florida’s Gulf Coast from Anna Maria Island to Naples. In Sarasota, two hours north of Sanibel, wildlife scientists recovered nine dead bottlenose dolphins last week.
“We had groupers probably four feet and five feet up here, and all kinds of fish [wash up],” said Andrew Stone, who was taking a sunset walk on Sanibel’s Lighthouse beach with his wife, Joyce Hillman. The couple comes here from Bonita Springs every year.
“We had the binoculars and we were looking at fish bobbing up and down way out there, bigger than those buoys,” he said, pointing about 100 meters offshore. “And the bugs were horrific.”
While algal blooms are common here, they are usually constrained to a few months in late summer or early fall, and are mainly noticeable for the dark, greenish-red color they give the water. But this bloom has lasted from one season into the next without reprieve, and achieved the unusually high densities believed to be responsible for killing so much wildlife.
Sanibel Island is usually bustling at this time of year, but the sight and smell of scores of dead fish on beaches, and reports on the bloom in the news, have kept many tourists away.
The algae also causes mild respiratory irritation, so those who brave the smell can spend their time on the beach – if they can put up with a cough and watery eyes. People with asthma or other respiratory diseases are at risk of more serious complications, however.
“There’s definitely been many, many, fewer people,” said Hillman, the sunset reflecting on the reddish tint in the water behind her last week.
Clean-up crews had removed the dead fish from the sand earlier in the day, but the water was still dark, and the beach was sparsely populated. “This is the cleanest the beaches have been in two weeks,” she added.
Though Sanibel’s beaches have now been cleaned up – the bloom is continuing.
In a recently released survey, businesses in Sarasota County reported losses of up to 6% compared to last year, which they have attributed to the bloom.
“It’s scary, and it’s weird and it’s devastating really,” said Morgan Combs, who grew up on Sanibel and works at a local inn. “Just observing not having any traffic, and not seeing anyone on the beach other than cleaners.”
Scientists are still trying to determine what is responsible for this bloom, but the consensus so far seems to be that a combination of factors – including heavy rainfall, ocean temperature and salinity, unlucky wind patterns and pollution – could have aligned to create just the right conditions for Karenia brevis to thrive and to stay put.
“There’s a lot of different things that can be involved,” said Kate Hubbard, who leads the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission’s harmful algal bloom research group. “We do know that we haven’t had the physical conditions that sometimes help with bloom termination, that help push the bloom offshore.”
At the same time that the Karenia brevis bloom is casting a pall on south-western Florida’s beaches, a record-breaking bloom of blue-green “algae” is also spreading through its freshwater.
Governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency in July to respond to the blue-green algae (which is actually a species of cyanobacteria, not an algae) and combat pollution. But the foul-smelling algae are clogging canals, preventing fishing and similarlyaffecting tourism business.
There is more clarity on the causes of the cyanobacteria bloom: scientists believe that it is likely caused by warmer waters from climate change and polluted runoff from agriculture and urban areas surrounding Lake Okeechobee.
The pollution is made worse because many wetlands in Florida have been developed, so water moves quickly into the rivers and lakes, without natural filtration through the estuaries.
Some people are concerned the same pollution exacerbating the blue-green algae may be reaching the sea and feeding the Karenia brevis as well, but there is disagreement among experts on the issue.
Rick Bartleson, an environmental scientist at the non-profit Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation, thinks it’s clear that nutrients from the land are at least a part of the problem.
“There are other factors that had to work together [to create] this perfect storm for the developing red tide population … [but], it’s obvious that you can’t have dense blooms like this, and long lasting blooms, without having a high nutrient supply rate to the algae.”
Hubbard is much more circumspect.
“It’s a naturally occurring event, it’s been documented centuries ago,” Hubbard said.
One idea to tackle the blooms that Hubbard and collaborators are working on involves field and lab studies to inform whether installing shellfish in some of the areas in Florida often impacted by blooms of toxic algae might one day help, because shellfish are natural “grazers” that filter out and eat the algae.
As Florida prepares for November elections, gubernatorial and senate candidates have been forced to address the crises caused by algae. Senate candidate Bill Nelson, running against Scott, held a roundtable on the blue-green algae on Friday, and candidates in the Republican and Democratic primaries for governor addressed the issue in their debates.
Activists in areas affected by “red tides” held a peaceful protest called “Hands along the water” on beaches along Florida’s coast on Sunday, to “show that we do not, and will not, stand for our beautiful beaches, wildlife, homes and livelihoods to continuously be destroyed and impacted by the water released from Lake Okeechobee.”
RELATED: Scientists seek new ways to combat Florida's growing 'red tide'
Trump Allows GMO Crops and Harmful Pesticides in Wildlife Refuges
BY Mike Ludwig Truthout
PUBLISHED
August 8, 2018
Late last week, the Trump administration rescinded an Obama-era policy banning the use of GMO crops and a controversial class of pesticides thought to harm bees and birds in federal wildlife refuges. The news generated some eye-popping headlines and raises the question: Why would land managers plant genetically engineered corn and soy plants and spray harmful pesticides in federal refuges for wildlife in the first place?
Wildlife refuges across the country have entered into cooperative agreements with private farmers, allowing them to farm on federal land in exchange for dedicating a portion of the agricultural area to habitat restoration and providing forage for migrating birds. Due to rapid habitat loss, birds and butterflies have come to depend on wildlife refuges along their migration routes to survive.
Refuges have historically used these private farms to prepare seed beds for native habitats and provide food for migrating birds. However, environmentalists say some of these farms use pesticides and GMO row-crop techniques that can harm wildlife.
For example, an increase in pesticide use associated with certain GMOs has decimated plants that provide food for monarch butterflies.
More than 490,000 pounds of potentially dangerous pesticides were sprayed on farms in wildlife refuges for agricultural reasons in 2016 alone, according to a recent report by the Center for Biological Diversity. Similar amounts of chemicals were used in prior years, even as pesticide-resistant GMO crops were phased out.
“Wildlife refuges are places where we should be protecting wildlife, not promoting use of highly toxic poisons on row crops,” Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center and author of the report, said in a statement.
During the Obama administration, environmental groups filed a series of successful lawsuits against the use of herbicide-resistant GMO crops at these farms, which can increase the amount of weed-killing chemicals farmers use. In 2014, the US Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to phase outthe use of GMO crops and the controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids or “neonics” at wildlife refuge farms nationwide.
Neonics have been repeatedly linked to declining populations of bees and other pollinators, and the European Union recently expanded a ban on their outdoor use. Recent research by the United States government shows that certain neonics can threaten birds and small mammals as well.
Most GMO crops are engineered to resist herbicide applications, allowing farmers to blanket whole fields with weed-killing chemicals while sparing the food crops. These biotech crops became so popular in the US that weeds began developing a resistance to Roundup, an herbicide developed by Monsanto and paired with GMO crops. The company recently added a more toxic pesticide to its GMO crop system to tackle the rise of so-called “superweeds.”
As you might expect, the use of such technology at refuges for threatened wildlife has long outraged environmentalists. Federal courts agreed, and lawsuits filed by environmental groups blocked GMO farming at several refuges before the Obama administration declared in 2014 that GMOs and neonics were not “essential” to fulfilling the refuges’ mission.
In a memo reversing the Obama-era ban, US Fish and Wildlife Deputy Direct Gregory Sheehan wrote that phasing out GMOs and neonics on some refuge farms was “appropriate and expedient.” However, he argued that there may be situations where GMO seeds are “essential” for meeting the needs of birds and other wildlife, and land managers should have the option to use them on a case-by-case basis.
Connor suspects this decision is not just about making sure that wildlife officials have access to all the tools in the toolbox. Since taking office, the Trump administration has systematically rolled back environmental protections put in place during the Obama administration, including many hard-fought victories won by environmentalists. And when it comes to public lands, the administration has prioritized the interests of private industry and game hunters above all else.
“It’s part of a trend we’ve seen on refuge lands, and all of our other public lands,” Connor told Truthout in an interview, adding that the Trump administration has aggressively moved to expand fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
Then there is the biotech and agrichemical industry, which has fought for years to save the tarnished public image of GMO crops and food products. In 2011, when environmentalists began challenging GMO fields in wildlife refuges, top biotech industry lobbyists took their concerns straight to the White House. At the time, the industry was working with the Obama administration to boost agricultural exports to Europe, where consumers and governments tend to be wary of GMO foods.
Last year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a free-market think tank that supports GMO and industrial agriculture, sent a letter to the Interior Department requesting the ban on neonics and GMO crops at wildlife refuges be rescinded. GMOs have been unfairly stigmatized, the group wrote, even though science has shown that they outperform other types of crops. Neonics may threaten native butterflies, but they are less toxic to other animals than older pesticides, so why not allow the chemicals to be used on a case-by-case basis?
Of course, environmentalists are not concerned about GMO soybeans harming the birds and the bees in wildlife refuges — they are concerned about the herbicides and pesticides that come with them. However, conventional farming techniques can also be pesticide-heavy, raising the question of whether wildlife refuges should host for-profit farms to begin with.
“The claim that refuge wildlife need genetically modified soybeans cannot be made with a straight face,” said Peter Jenkins, an attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, one of the groups that sued to stop GMO farming at wildlife refuges.
Jenkins added that the agricultural biotech industry has lobbied the Trump administration to reverse the Obama-era ban because it undermines sales pitches claiming that GMOs and pesticides have no ill side effects.
“These refuges are supposed to benefit wildlife, not a corporate bottom line,” Jenkins said.
Wildlife refuges across the country have entered into cooperative agreements with private farmers, allowing them to farm on federal land in exchange for dedicating a portion of the agricultural area to habitat restoration and providing forage for migrating birds. Due to rapid habitat loss, birds and butterflies have come to depend on wildlife refuges along their migration routes to survive.
Refuges have historically used these private farms to prepare seed beds for native habitats and provide food for migrating birds. However, environmentalists say some of these farms use pesticides and GMO row-crop techniques that can harm wildlife.
For example, an increase in pesticide use associated with certain GMOs has decimated plants that provide food for monarch butterflies.
More than 490,000 pounds of potentially dangerous pesticides were sprayed on farms in wildlife refuges for agricultural reasons in 2016 alone, according to a recent report by the Center for Biological Diversity. Similar amounts of chemicals were used in prior years, even as pesticide-resistant GMO crops were phased out.
“Wildlife refuges are places where we should be protecting wildlife, not promoting use of highly toxic poisons on row crops,” Hannah Connor, a senior attorney at the Center and author of the report, said in a statement.
During the Obama administration, environmental groups filed a series of successful lawsuits against the use of herbicide-resistant GMO crops at these farms, which can increase the amount of weed-killing chemicals farmers use. In 2014, the US Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to phase outthe use of GMO crops and the controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids or “neonics” at wildlife refuge farms nationwide.
Neonics have been repeatedly linked to declining populations of bees and other pollinators, and the European Union recently expanded a ban on their outdoor use. Recent research by the United States government shows that certain neonics can threaten birds and small mammals as well.
Most GMO crops are engineered to resist herbicide applications, allowing farmers to blanket whole fields with weed-killing chemicals while sparing the food crops. These biotech crops became so popular in the US that weeds began developing a resistance to Roundup, an herbicide developed by Monsanto and paired with GMO crops. The company recently added a more toxic pesticide to its GMO crop system to tackle the rise of so-called “superweeds.”
As you might expect, the use of such technology at refuges for threatened wildlife has long outraged environmentalists. Federal courts agreed, and lawsuits filed by environmental groups blocked GMO farming at several refuges before the Obama administration declared in 2014 that GMOs and neonics were not “essential” to fulfilling the refuges’ mission.
In a memo reversing the Obama-era ban, US Fish and Wildlife Deputy Direct Gregory Sheehan wrote that phasing out GMOs and neonics on some refuge farms was “appropriate and expedient.” However, he argued that there may be situations where GMO seeds are “essential” for meeting the needs of birds and other wildlife, and land managers should have the option to use them on a case-by-case basis.
Connor suspects this decision is not just about making sure that wildlife officials have access to all the tools in the toolbox. Since taking office, the Trump administration has systematically rolled back environmental protections put in place during the Obama administration, including many hard-fought victories won by environmentalists. And when it comes to public lands, the administration has prioritized the interests of private industry and game hunters above all else.
“It’s part of a trend we’ve seen on refuge lands, and all of our other public lands,” Connor told Truthout in an interview, adding that the Trump administration has aggressively moved to expand fossil fuel extraction on public lands.
Then there is the biotech and agrichemical industry, which has fought for years to save the tarnished public image of GMO crops and food products. In 2011, when environmentalists began challenging GMO fields in wildlife refuges, top biotech industry lobbyists took their concerns straight to the White House. At the time, the industry was working with the Obama administration to boost agricultural exports to Europe, where consumers and governments tend to be wary of GMO foods.
Last year, the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a free-market think tank that supports GMO and industrial agriculture, sent a letter to the Interior Department requesting the ban on neonics and GMO crops at wildlife refuges be rescinded. GMOs have been unfairly stigmatized, the group wrote, even though science has shown that they outperform other types of crops. Neonics may threaten native butterflies, but they are less toxic to other animals than older pesticides, so why not allow the chemicals to be used on a case-by-case basis?
Of course, environmentalists are not concerned about GMO soybeans harming the birds and the bees in wildlife refuges — they are concerned about the herbicides and pesticides that come with them. However, conventional farming techniques can also be pesticide-heavy, raising the question of whether wildlife refuges should host for-profit farms to begin with.
“The claim that refuge wildlife need genetically modified soybeans cannot be made with a straight face,” said Peter Jenkins, an attorney with Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, one of the groups that sued to stop GMO farming at wildlife refuges.
Jenkins added that the agricultural biotech industry has lobbied the Trump administration to reverse the Obama-era ban because it undermines sales pitches claiming that GMOs and pesticides have no ill side effects.
“These refuges are supposed to benefit wildlife, not a corporate bottom line,” Jenkins said.
DEADLY TOXINS IN WATER SUPPLY A 'WAKE-UP CALL' FOR LOCAL U.S. AUTHORITIES
BY EMMA PENROD - newsweek
ON 8/7/18 AT 7:00 am
The swimmers and kayakers of Oregon are no strangers to algae. In recent years, warnings of infestations in ponds and lakes have become routine. When an early-summer algal bloom developed on Detroit Lake near Salem this May, state and city officials knew exactly what tests to run and advisories to issue.
But city leaders hadn’t anticipated a threat to drinking water. Detroit Lake drains into the North Santiam River, and from there, water runs into the municipal system. On May 31, a few days after the algae was first detected in the system, Salem toxicologists found potentially deadly toxins in the water supply. That same day, the city warned its nearly 200,000 residents that tap water was off-limits for children under the age of 6, people with existing liver or kidney conditions, pregnant and nursing women, the elderly and pets. The advisory remained in place for more than a month.
It was the first time Oregon had detected algal toxins in treated water. “This was a real wake-up call for us, that, yeah, it can get into drinking water systems,” says Jonathan Modie, a communications officer for the Oregon Health Authority.
Because of the lack of data, experts don’t know for certain whether toxic algae outbreaks are increasing in frequency or simply being reported more often. But warmer temperatures do encourage the growth of algae and algal blooms, and that can come with a potentially deadly threat.
Most algae are harmless, but certain species of the blue-green variety, also called cyanobacteria, produce toxins strong enough to poison large mammals, including humans, with potentially fatal consequences. In 2001, the EPA and the Water Research Foundation surveyed 45 drinking water sources in the U.S. and Canada. Four in five, they found, were contaminated with microcystin, which attacks the liver and kidneys. Although most people make full recoveries, life can become pretty unpleasant, and the symptoms—fever, nausea and diarrhea—can be confused with food poisoning.
One expert estimates that more than 90 percent of lakes, rivers and reservoirs used as drinking water sources in the United States are vulnerable to algal blooms. Equally troubling: The majority of water treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove toxins, which require pricey treatment methods like ozone disinfection. When the algae interfere with drinking supplies, timely remedies can be hard to come by, leaving some towns with no choice but to order the residents to stop using tap water, sometimes for weeks at a time. Although municipal water managers are reluctant to talk publicly about the issue, “they’re very worried,” says Deepak Mishra, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia who studies the global distribution of harmful algal blooms.
So far, nobody has died from algal toxins in the U.S., but the possibility looms. A high enough dose of microcystin could cause liver or kidney failure, says David Farrer, a public health toxicologist with the Oregon Health Authority. A combination of microcystin and cylindrospermopsin, another potentially deadly toxin, is thought to have killed 52 people in Brazil in 1996, though they were dialysis patients who suffered intravenous exposure to contaminated tap water during treatment.
Comprehensive data on algae contamination in the U.S. is lacking, largely because municipalities are not required to test for it. Some states and townships began testing a decade or so ago, but the benchmarks water administrators use to determine if the water is safe to drink are largely preliminary—the Environmental Protection Agency implemented its first trial protocol just this year.
Norton, Kansas, had an algae scare on June 19. Pond scum on Sebelius Lake, a reservoir, contaminated a treatment plant with a specific kind of cyanobacteria known to produce anatoxin, which targets the brain and can cause seizures, loss of muscle control and even death.
When lab results confirmed the species of the algae, the response was swift. The town of Norton immediately stopped drawing water from the reservoir, and the Kansas National Guard arrived hours later to hand out bottled water. Shutting down the reservoir strained the rest of the water system, and when it failed, health officials ordered roughly 3,000 residents to boil their water before drinking it. Officials later confirmed no toxins had entered the public supply.
Boiling water, however, isn’t a solution. Filters will catch the algae themselves—blooms are prone to causing problems by physically blocking filters—but the toxins flow through. And chemical disinfectants like chlorine, which kill algae, can actually make the problem worse, because cyanobacteria release intense bursts of toxins when they die. “There’s really not a lot that you can do,” says Farrer.
Greenfield, Iowa, experienced a similar scare in mid-July when potentially harmful algae from a bloom on Greenfield Lake managed to slip through a filter in the town water treatment plant. Greenfield Municipal Utilities ordered its 12,000 customers to avoid their tap water until lab results determined whether toxins were indeed present; tests eventually revealed they were not.
But toxins don’t have to enter the water system to cause disruption. In Utah in 2016, a massive algal bloom on Utah Lake tainted the water that residents in three counties use as untreated “secondary water” for their lawns and gardens. Officials were unable to determine if food grown with the contaminated water was safe to eat. As the algae spread, one secondary system after another opted to exercise an abundance of caution and close its valves. Residents switched to watering their lawns with drinking water, causing citywide shortages.
Algal toxins in drinking water is not a rare event, Mishra says. “They’re always there,” he says. “It’s just that a lot of them go undetected.” The question is whether low-level consumption is harmful. Mishra suspects that if the exposure is long-term, there could be cumulative damage to the liver and brain. Unfortunately, with research focused on trying to understand how, and when, these toxins kill, there are few studies on public health consequences.
The lack of good treatment options has led the Water Research Foundation to recommend a multistage approach combining several methods of decontamination. That could require treatment plant renovations that run into the millions of dollars. Many states are taking aim at the algal blooms themselves, attempting to starve the cyanobacteria by reducing nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, present in fertilizers and discharge from sewage plants. Kansas has an annual budget of over $5 million dedicated to limiting the amount of fertilizer and wastewater in waterways used as drinking water sources.
But Oregon isn’t taking any chances; cities in the state are already investing in expensive new treatment plants. “This appears to be a new normal for us,” says Modie.
But city leaders hadn’t anticipated a threat to drinking water. Detroit Lake drains into the North Santiam River, and from there, water runs into the municipal system. On May 31, a few days after the algae was first detected in the system, Salem toxicologists found potentially deadly toxins in the water supply. That same day, the city warned its nearly 200,000 residents that tap water was off-limits for children under the age of 6, people with existing liver or kidney conditions, pregnant and nursing women, the elderly and pets. The advisory remained in place for more than a month.
It was the first time Oregon had detected algal toxins in treated water. “This was a real wake-up call for us, that, yeah, it can get into drinking water systems,” says Jonathan Modie, a communications officer for the Oregon Health Authority.
Because of the lack of data, experts don’t know for certain whether toxic algae outbreaks are increasing in frequency or simply being reported more often. But warmer temperatures do encourage the growth of algae and algal blooms, and that can come with a potentially deadly threat.
Most algae are harmless, but certain species of the blue-green variety, also called cyanobacteria, produce toxins strong enough to poison large mammals, including humans, with potentially fatal consequences. In 2001, the EPA and the Water Research Foundation surveyed 45 drinking water sources in the U.S. and Canada. Four in five, they found, were contaminated with microcystin, which attacks the liver and kidneys. Although most people make full recoveries, life can become pretty unpleasant, and the symptoms—fever, nausea and diarrhea—can be confused with food poisoning.
One expert estimates that more than 90 percent of lakes, rivers and reservoirs used as drinking water sources in the United States are vulnerable to algal blooms. Equally troubling: The majority of water treatment plants aren’t equipped to remove toxins, which require pricey treatment methods like ozone disinfection. When the algae interfere with drinking supplies, timely remedies can be hard to come by, leaving some towns with no choice but to order the residents to stop using tap water, sometimes for weeks at a time. Although municipal water managers are reluctant to talk publicly about the issue, “they’re very worried,” says Deepak Mishra, an associate professor of geography at the University of Georgia who studies the global distribution of harmful algal blooms.
So far, nobody has died from algal toxins in the U.S., but the possibility looms. A high enough dose of microcystin could cause liver or kidney failure, says David Farrer, a public health toxicologist with the Oregon Health Authority. A combination of microcystin and cylindrospermopsin, another potentially deadly toxin, is thought to have killed 52 people in Brazil in 1996, though they were dialysis patients who suffered intravenous exposure to contaminated tap water during treatment.
Comprehensive data on algae contamination in the U.S. is lacking, largely because municipalities are not required to test for it. Some states and townships began testing a decade or so ago, but the benchmarks water administrators use to determine if the water is safe to drink are largely preliminary—the Environmental Protection Agency implemented its first trial protocol just this year.
Norton, Kansas, had an algae scare on June 19. Pond scum on Sebelius Lake, a reservoir, contaminated a treatment plant with a specific kind of cyanobacteria known to produce anatoxin, which targets the brain and can cause seizures, loss of muscle control and even death.
When lab results confirmed the species of the algae, the response was swift. The town of Norton immediately stopped drawing water from the reservoir, and the Kansas National Guard arrived hours later to hand out bottled water. Shutting down the reservoir strained the rest of the water system, and when it failed, health officials ordered roughly 3,000 residents to boil their water before drinking it. Officials later confirmed no toxins had entered the public supply.
Boiling water, however, isn’t a solution. Filters will catch the algae themselves—blooms are prone to causing problems by physically blocking filters—but the toxins flow through. And chemical disinfectants like chlorine, which kill algae, can actually make the problem worse, because cyanobacteria release intense bursts of toxins when they die. “There’s really not a lot that you can do,” says Farrer.
Greenfield, Iowa, experienced a similar scare in mid-July when potentially harmful algae from a bloom on Greenfield Lake managed to slip through a filter in the town water treatment plant. Greenfield Municipal Utilities ordered its 12,000 customers to avoid their tap water until lab results determined whether toxins were indeed present; tests eventually revealed they were not.
But toxins don’t have to enter the water system to cause disruption. In Utah in 2016, a massive algal bloom on Utah Lake tainted the water that residents in three counties use as untreated “secondary water” for their lawns and gardens. Officials were unable to determine if food grown with the contaminated water was safe to eat. As the algae spread, one secondary system after another opted to exercise an abundance of caution and close its valves. Residents switched to watering their lawns with drinking water, causing citywide shortages.
Algal toxins in drinking water is not a rare event, Mishra says. “They’re always there,” he says. “It’s just that a lot of them go undetected.” The question is whether low-level consumption is harmful. Mishra suspects that if the exposure is long-term, there could be cumulative damage to the liver and brain. Unfortunately, with research focused on trying to understand how, and when, these toxins kill, there are few studies on public health consequences.
The lack of good treatment options has led the Water Research Foundation to recommend a multistage approach combining several methods of decontamination. That could require treatment plant renovations that run into the millions of dollars. Many states are taking aim at the algal blooms themselves, attempting to starve the cyanobacteria by reducing nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus, present in fertilizers and discharge from sewage plants. Kansas has an annual budget of over $5 million dedicated to limiting the amount of fertilizer and wastewater in waterways used as drinking water sources.
But Oregon isn’t taking any chances; cities in the state are already investing in expensive new treatment plants. “This appears to be a new normal for us,” says Modie.
Farmers are drawing groundwater from the giant Ogallala Aquifer faster than nature replaces it
The Conversation - raw story
08 AUG 2018 AT 07:02 ET
Every summer the U.S. Central Plains go dry, leading farmers to tap into groundwater to irrigate sorghum, soy, cotton, wheat and corn and maintain large herds of cattle and hogs. As the heat rises, anxious irrigators gather to discuss whether and how they should adopt more stringent conservation measures.
They know that if they do not conserve, the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of their prosperity, will go dry. The Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is one of the largest underground freshwater sources in the world. It underlies an estimated 174,000 square miles of the Central Plains and holds as much water as Lake Huron. It irrigates portions of eight states, from Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska in the north to Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in the south.
But the current drought plaguing the region is unusually strong and persistent, driving farmers to rely more on the aquifer and sharpening the debate over its future. A current assessment by the U.S. Drought Monitor, published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows large swaths of the southern plains experiencing drought ranging from “severe” to “exceptional.”
These worrisome prospects form the dramatic backdrop to “Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land,” now out in its third edition. In it, my fellow historians John Opie and Kenna Lang Archer and I set current debates over the Ogallala Aquifer in the context of the region’s equally conflicted past.
Draining the source
In the 1880s, farmers in the region asserted that there was a steady movement of water beneath their feet, which they called “underflow,” from the Rockies east. Geologist F.N. Darton of the U.S. Geological Survey located the first outlines of the aquifer near Ogallala, Nebraska. His discovery nourished the ambitions of farmers and irrigation promoters. One booster, William E. Smythe, visited Garden City, Kansas, and cheered the irrigated future. Pumping underground water, he told his audience, would build “little homes of pleasing architecture. We will surround them with pretty lawns and fringe them with trees and hedges … in a new Kansas dedicated to industrial independence.”
Ogallala Aquifer water-level changes from predevelopment (about 1950) to 2015.
USGS
That bucolic vision took decades to realize. Windmills could only pump so much water, which constrained the amount of land farmers could put into production. And the Ogallala’s sand and gravel composition slowed the downward flow of surface waters to refill it, even in wet seasons.
This did not matter until farmers started adopting better drilling technology, gas-powered water pumps and high-tech irrigation systems after World War II. These advances turned the Central Plains into the world’s breadbasket and meat market, annually generating US$20 billion worth of foodstuffs.
As more pumps were drilled into the aquifer to capture its flow, some started to come up dry, which led to more drilling and pumping. Between the late 19th century and 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates irrigation depleted the aquifer by 253 million acre-feet – about 9 percent of its total volume. And the pace is accelerating. Analyzing federal data, The Denver Post found that the aquifer shrank twice as fast from 2011 through 2017 as it had over the previous 60 years.
The current drought is only adding to these woes. University of California-Irvine hydrologist Jay Famiglietti has identified the Ogallala region and California’s Central Valley as the two most overheated and water-starved areas in the United States.[...]
They know that if they do not conserve, the Ogallala Aquifer, the source of their prosperity, will go dry. The Ogallala, also known as the High Plains Aquifer, is one of the largest underground freshwater sources in the world. It underlies an estimated 174,000 square miles of the Central Plains and holds as much water as Lake Huron. It irrigates portions of eight states, from Wyoming, South Dakota and Nebraska in the north to Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas in the south.
But the current drought plaguing the region is unusually strong and persistent, driving farmers to rely more on the aquifer and sharpening the debate over its future. A current assessment by the U.S. Drought Monitor, published by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the United States Department of Agriculture and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, shows large swaths of the southern plains experiencing drought ranging from “severe” to “exceptional.”
These worrisome prospects form the dramatic backdrop to “Ogallala: Water for a Dry Land,” now out in its third edition. In it, my fellow historians John Opie and Kenna Lang Archer and I set current debates over the Ogallala Aquifer in the context of the region’s equally conflicted past.
Draining the source
In the 1880s, farmers in the region asserted that there was a steady movement of water beneath their feet, which they called “underflow,” from the Rockies east. Geologist F.N. Darton of the U.S. Geological Survey located the first outlines of the aquifer near Ogallala, Nebraska. His discovery nourished the ambitions of farmers and irrigation promoters. One booster, William E. Smythe, visited Garden City, Kansas, and cheered the irrigated future. Pumping underground water, he told his audience, would build “little homes of pleasing architecture. We will surround them with pretty lawns and fringe them with trees and hedges … in a new Kansas dedicated to industrial independence.”
Ogallala Aquifer water-level changes from predevelopment (about 1950) to 2015.
USGS
That bucolic vision took decades to realize. Windmills could only pump so much water, which constrained the amount of land farmers could put into production. And the Ogallala’s sand and gravel composition slowed the downward flow of surface waters to refill it, even in wet seasons.
This did not matter until farmers started adopting better drilling technology, gas-powered water pumps and high-tech irrigation systems after World War II. These advances turned the Central Plains into the world’s breadbasket and meat market, annually generating US$20 billion worth of foodstuffs.
As more pumps were drilled into the aquifer to capture its flow, some started to come up dry, which led to more drilling and pumping. Between the late 19th century and 2005, the U.S. Geological Survey estimates irrigation depleted the aquifer by 253 million acre-feet – about 9 percent of its total volume. And the pace is accelerating. Analyzing federal data, The Denver Post found that the aquifer shrank twice as fast from 2011 through 2017 as it had over the previous 60 years.
The current drought is only adding to these woes. University of California-Irvine hydrologist Jay Famiglietti has identified the Ogallala region and California’s Central Valley as the two most overheated and water-starved areas in the United States.[...]
Study warns of looming potential for runaway global warming
BY MAX GREENWOOD - the hill
08/06/18 07:56 PM ED
A new study out Monday warns of the possibility of out-of-control global warming if humans fail to ban together to fight the worst effects of climate change.
The analysis, conducted by researchers at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center, among other institutions, outlines the potential for a "threshold" that, if crossed, would lead to runaway warming patterns and the advent of a "Hothouse Earth."
If such a threshold is crossed, the study warns, global average temperatures could climb as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above current temperatures and sea levels could rise 30 to 200 feet.
"Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene," the study says.
The report is based on a review of past research of thresholds for climate change, according to USA Today.
Even if every country that signed on to the Paris climate agreement meets its obligations under the pact and limits the global temperature increase to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, runaway global warming could still be a threat, the newspaper reports.
The study says that mitigating that risk would require collective global action, including a drastic transformation of "social values" and the pursuit of new technology.
"Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies – and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values," the study says.
President Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement last year, arguing that it placed unfair burdens on the U.S. to curb carbon emissions and would ultimately hurt American businesses and industry.
The analysis, conducted by researchers at the Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center, among other institutions, outlines the potential for a "threshold" that, if crossed, would lead to runaway warming patterns and the advent of a "Hothouse Earth."
If such a threshold is crossed, the study warns, global average temperatures could climb as much as 8 degrees Fahrenheit above current temperatures and sea levels could rise 30 to 200 feet.
"Crossing the threshold would lead to a much higher global average temperature than any interglacial in the past 1.2 million years and to sea levels significantly higher than at any time in the Holocene," the study says.
The report is based on a review of past research of thresholds for climate change, according to USA Today.
Even if every country that signed on to the Paris climate agreement meets its obligations under the pact and limits the global temperature increase to 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, runaway global warming could still be a threat, the newspaper reports.
The study says that mitigating that risk would require collective global action, including a drastic transformation of "social values" and the pursuit of new technology.
"Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System – biosphere, climate, and societies – and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values," the study says.
President Trump withdrew from the Paris agreement last year, arguing that it placed unfair burdens on the U.S. to curb carbon emissions and would ultimately hurt American businesses and industry.
Trump administration lifts ban on pesticides linked to declining bee numbers
Environmentalists say lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects
Reuters - the guardian
Fri 3 Aug 2018 23.03 EDT
The Trump administration has rescinded an Obama-era ban on the use of pesticides linked to declining bee populations and the cultivation of genetically modified crops in dozens of national wildlife refuges where farming is permitted.
Environmentalists, who had sued to bring about the two-year-old ban, said on Friday that lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects and other sensitive creatures relying on toxic-free habitats afforded by wildlife refuges.
“Industrial agriculture has no place on refuges dedicated to wildlife conservation and protection of some of the most vital and vulnerable species,” said Jenny Keating, federal lands policy analyst for the group Defenders of Wildlife.
Limited agricultural activity is authorized on some refuges by law, including cooperative agreements in which farmers are permitted to grow certain crops to produce more food or improve habitat for the wildlife there.
The rollback, spelled out in a US Fish and Wildlife Service memo, ends a policy that had prohibited farmers on refuges from planting biotech crops – such as soybeans and corn – engineered to resist insect pests and weed-controlling herbicides.
That policy also had barred the use on wildlife refuges of neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, in conjunction with GMO crops. Neonics are a class of insecticides tied by research to declining populations of wild bees and other pollinating insects around the world.
Rather than continuing to impose a blanket ban on GMO crops and neonics on refuges, Fish and Wildlife Service deputy director Greg Sheehan said decisions about their use would be made on a case-by-case basis.
Sheehan said the move was needed to ensure adequate forage for migratory birds, including ducks and geese favored and hunted by sportsmen on many of the nation’s refuges. US interior secretary Ryan Zinke, whose department oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, has made expansion of hunting on public lands a priority for his agency.
Sheehan wrote that genetically modified organisms have helped “maximize production, and that neonicotinoids might be needed “to fulfill needed farming practices”.
It marked the latest in a series of Obama-era environmental restrictions to be reversed under Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to roll back government regulations.
In a 2014 Obama administration memo announcing plans to phase in the ban, Jim Kurth, head of the refuge system, wrote that seeds treated with neonics give rise to plants whose tissues contained compounds that could harm “non-target” species. He also said, “refuges throughout the country successfully meet wildlife management objectives without” GMOs or neonics.
Thursday’s memo named more than 50 national wildlife refuges across the country where the revised policy now applies. The entire system consists of 560 refuge units encompassing roughly 150 million acres nationwide.
Environmentalists, who had sued to bring about the two-year-old ban, said on Friday that lifting the restriction poses a grave threat to pollinating insects and other sensitive creatures relying on toxic-free habitats afforded by wildlife refuges.
“Industrial agriculture has no place on refuges dedicated to wildlife conservation and protection of some of the most vital and vulnerable species,” said Jenny Keating, federal lands policy analyst for the group Defenders of Wildlife.
Limited agricultural activity is authorized on some refuges by law, including cooperative agreements in which farmers are permitted to grow certain crops to produce more food or improve habitat for the wildlife there.
The rollback, spelled out in a US Fish and Wildlife Service memo, ends a policy that had prohibited farmers on refuges from planting biotech crops – such as soybeans and corn – engineered to resist insect pests and weed-controlling herbicides.
That policy also had barred the use on wildlife refuges of neonicotinoid pesticides, or neonics, in conjunction with GMO crops. Neonics are a class of insecticides tied by research to declining populations of wild bees and other pollinating insects around the world.
Rather than continuing to impose a blanket ban on GMO crops and neonics on refuges, Fish and Wildlife Service deputy director Greg Sheehan said decisions about their use would be made on a case-by-case basis.
Sheehan said the move was needed to ensure adequate forage for migratory birds, including ducks and geese favored and hunted by sportsmen on many of the nation’s refuges. US interior secretary Ryan Zinke, whose department oversees the Fish and Wildlife Service, has made expansion of hunting on public lands a priority for his agency.
Sheehan wrote that genetically modified organisms have helped “maximize production, and that neonicotinoids might be needed “to fulfill needed farming practices”.
It marked the latest in a series of Obama-era environmental restrictions to be reversed under Trump, who campaigned on a pledge to roll back government regulations.
In a 2014 Obama administration memo announcing plans to phase in the ban, Jim Kurth, head of the refuge system, wrote that seeds treated with neonics give rise to plants whose tissues contained compounds that could harm “non-target” species. He also said, “refuges throughout the country successfully meet wildlife management objectives without” GMOs or neonics.
Thursday’s memo named more than 50 national wildlife refuges across the country where the revised policy now applies. The entire system consists of 560 refuge units encompassing roughly 150 million acres nationwide.
Air pollution linked to changes in heart structure
Study shows correlation between levels of exposure to fine particulate matter and chamber enlargement seen in early stages of heart failure
Nicola Davis
the guardian
Fri 3 Aug 2018 00.15 EDT
Air pollution is linked to changes in the structure of the heart of the sort seen in early stages of heart failure, say researchers.
The finding could help explain the increased number of deaths seen in areas with high levels of dirty air. For example, a report last year revealed that people in the UK are 64 times more likely to die from the effect of air pollution than people living in Sweden. Such premature deaths can be linked to a number of causes including respiratory problems, stroke and coronary artery disease.
“What we don’t know is what is the mechanism behind it, why is air pollution leading to increased risk of heart attack and stroke?” said Dr Nay Aung, a cardiologist at Queen Mary University of London and first author of the research.
The latest study helps to unpick the conundrum. Writing in the journal Circulation, Aung and colleagues report that they found exposure to nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5 and PM10 particles, is linked to an increase in the size of two of the chambers of the heart, the left and right ventricle. PM particles are commonly emitted by motor vehicles, among other sources.
The authors add that similar changes can affect the performance of the heart and are often seen before heart failure takes hold.
The team used data from almost 4,000 volunteers who were part of a wider research effort known as the UK Biobank. These participants were aged between 40 and 69 years old, had been at the same address for the whole study, and were free from cardiovascular disease at the outset. Crucially, their data included cardiac MRI scans, which offer detailed images of the structure and function of the heart.
The study also involved estimates of the outdoor concentrations of different pollutants at participants’ home addresses at about five years prior to the scan. After controlling for factors including age, sex, income and smoking history, the team found that higher exposure to PM2.5 particles, PM10 particles and nitrogen dioxide were each linked to a greater volume of both the right and left ventricles after they had filled with blood.
Aung said the size of the effect identified was small, but important. “This effect size is comparable to other well known cardiac risk factors such as hypertension,” he said, noting that as blood pressure rises the heart size increases. “Although the increase in heart chamber size is small in this study, it is an early warning sign, which may explain the increased risk of heart failure in individuals exposed to higher level of pollution.”
“We know that people with heart failure or people who are developing heart failure, their heart will undergo changes, and one of the changes is they become larger,” said Aung. “When they become larger, that means that the heart is under stress, so the only way to accommodate this increased pressure and volume is to become larger. If you don’t treat or reverse that change, in the long run the heart may fail.”
Aung said the study found that an increase in exposure to PM2.5 of 1µg/m3 was linked to an increase in the size of each ventricle of just under 1%. He stressed that the findings were of particular concern because most of the participants lived in areas with relatively low exposure to air pollution.
On average, the participants were exposed to average PM2.5 concentrations of 8-12µg per cubic metre, close to the WHO recommended limit of 10µg/m3, but well within the UK guidelines of 25µg/m3. Research last year found that in some polluted areas such as central London, average levels of PM2.5 were above 18µg/ m3, with even higher levels seen on bad pollution days.
Previous work has also shown that mice exposed to high concentrations of PM2.5 develop larger left ventricles, the authors note.
Chris Gale, professor of cardiovascular medicine at University of Leeds who was not involved in the study, said that since people travel for work and other purposes, the home addresses of the participants might not represent the main location where they encountered air pollution. What’s more, he said the study looks at a snapshot in time, rather than recruiting and following individuals over years.
Nonetheless, he said the study was important: “[It] offers a possible mechanistic clinical pathway between the detrimental effects of air pollution and cardiovascular disease,” he said.
Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University, welcomed the study. “I think the study provides pretty convincing evidence of a correlation between levels of two air pollutants – fine particulates in the air and nitrogen dioxide – and measurable changes in the heart,” he said.
But, he added, the study only shows a link, rather than showing that it is air pollution that is driving the heart changes. “In this study the researchers did adjust their results carefully to allow for possible effects of many factors to do with lifestyle,” he said. “Such statistical adjustments can never be perfect, though, so some doubt must remain about whether the heart changes are actually caused by the pollution.”
Aung said that while the government’s recent consultation on clear air is a step in the right direction, avoiding air pollution can be difficult and individuals should also improve their health through other measures including tackling issues such as obesity, high cholesterol or high blood pressure.
Katie Nield of environmental legal group ClientEarth said: “This study is particularly worrying as it shows the serious health effects of air pollution at levels well below the current legal limits. We need a new Clean Air Act with stricter, binding air quality standards that reflect the latest science and help protect people from the serious damage that air pollution does to their health.”
The finding could help explain the increased number of deaths seen in areas with high levels of dirty air. For example, a report last year revealed that people in the UK are 64 times more likely to die from the effect of air pollution than people living in Sweden. Such premature deaths can be linked to a number of causes including respiratory problems, stroke and coronary artery disease.
“What we don’t know is what is the mechanism behind it, why is air pollution leading to increased risk of heart attack and stroke?” said Dr Nay Aung, a cardiologist at Queen Mary University of London and first author of the research.
The latest study helps to unpick the conundrum. Writing in the journal Circulation, Aung and colleagues report that they found exposure to nitrogen dioxide and fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5 and PM10 particles, is linked to an increase in the size of two of the chambers of the heart, the left and right ventricle. PM particles are commonly emitted by motor vehicles, among other sources.
The authors add that similar changes can affect the performance of the heart and are often seen before heart failure takes hold.
The team used data from almost 4,000 volunteers who were part of a wider research effort known as the UK Biobank. These participants were aged between 40 and 69 years old, had been at the same address for the whole study, and were free from cardiovascular disease at the outset. Crucially, their data included cardiac MRI scans, which offer detailed images of the structure and function of the heart.
The study also involved estimates of the outdoor concentrations of different pollutants at participants’ home addresses at about five years prior to the scan. After controlling for factors including age, sex, income and smoking history, the team found that higher exposure to PM2.5 particles, PM10 particles and nitrogen dioxide were each linked to a greater volume of both the right and left ventricles after they had filled with blood.
Aung said the size of the effect identified was small, but important. “This effect size is comparable to other well known cardiac risk factors such as hypertension,” he said, noting that as blood pressure rises the heart size increases. “Although the increase in heart chamber size is small in this study, it is an early warning sign, which may explain the increased risk of heart failure in individuals exposed to higher level of pollution.”
“We know that people with heart failure or people who are developing heart failure, their heart will undergo changes, and one of the changes is they become larger,” said Aung. “When they become larger, that means that the heart is under stress, so the only way to accommodate this increased pressure and volume is to become larger. If you don’t treat or reverse that change, in the long run the heart may fail.”
Aung said the study found that an increase in exposure to PM2.5 of 1µg/m3 was linked to an increase in the size of each ventricle of just under 1%. He stressed that the findings were of particular concern because most of the participants lived in areas with relatively low exposure to air pollution.
On average, the participants were exposed to average PM2.5 concentrations of 8-12µg per cubic metre, close to the WHO recommended limit of 10µg/m3, but well within the UK guidelines of 25µg/m3. Research last year found that in some polluted areas such as central London, average levels of PM2.5 were above 18µg/ m3, with even higher levels seen on bad pollution days.
Previous work has also shown that mice exposed to high concentrations of PM2.5 develop larger left ventricles, the authors note.
Chris Gale, professor of cardiovascular medicine at University of Leeds who was not involved in the study, said that since people travel for work and other purposes, the home addresses of the participants might not represent the main location where they encountered air pollution. What’s more, he said the study looks at a snapshot in time, rather than recruiting and following individuals over years.
Nonetheless, he said the study was important: “[It] offers a possible mechanistic clinical pathway between the detrimental effects of air pollution and cardiovascular disease,” he said.
Kevin McConway, emeritus professor of Applied Statistics at the Open University, welcomed the study. “I think the study provides pretty convincing evidence of a correlation between levels of two air pollutants – fine particulates in the air and nitrogen dioxide – and measurable changes in the heart,” he said.
But, he added, the study only shows a link, rather than showing that it is air pollution that is driving the heart changes. “In this study the researchers did adjust their results carefully to allow for possible effects of many factors to do with lifestyle,” he said. “Such statistical adjustments can never be perfect, though, so some doubt must remain about whether the heart changes are actually caused by the pollution.”
Aung said that while the government’s recent consultation on clear air is a step in the right direction, avoiding air pollution can be difficult and individuals should also improve their health through other measures including tackling issues such as obesity, high cholesterol or high blood pressure.
Katie Nield of environmental legal group ClientEarth said: “This study is particularly worrying as it shows the serious health effects of air pollution at levels well below the current legal limits. We need a new Clean Air Act with stricter, binding air quality standards that reflect the latest science and help protect people from the serious damage that air pollution does to their health.”
public screwed, bribes worked!!!!
Trump administration to freeze fuel efficiency requirements
By Brady Dennis, Michael Laris and Juliet Eilperin - washington post
August 2 at 8:48 AM
The Trump administration on Thursday announced plans to freeze fuel efficiency requirements for the nation’s cars and trucks through 2026 — a massive regulatory rollback likely to spur a legal battle with California and other states, as well as create potential upheaval in the nation’s automotive market.
The proposal represents an abrupt reversal of the findings that the government reached under President Obama, when regulators argued that requiring more fuel efficient vehicles would improve public health, combat climate change and save consumers money without compromising safety.
Trump’s plan also undercuts California’s long-standing ability to set its own tailpipe restrictions, most recently in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The proposal argues that forcing automakers to reach a fleet-wide average of 51.4 miles per gallon by 2025, as the Obama administration required, would make vehicles more expensive and encourage people to stick to driving older, less-safe cars and trucks.The administration estimates that halting more ambitous fuel efficiency targets would save Americans thousands of dollars on every new vehicle purchased and avoid 1,000 road deaths a year.
Public health experts and environmental groups condemned the White House proposal even before its official release, arguing that it overlooks how much money Americans would save at the pump if cars were more efficient and also squanders a chance to cut pollution from the transportation sector, which has become the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.
“By 2030, the pollution equivalent of this rollback will be like firing up 30 coal power plants,” Paul Cort, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “It’s a boon for big oil that ordinary Americans will pay for with their health and their wallets.”
Representatives of the U.S. auto industry praised the administration’s proposal, even as some automakers privately have expressed unease at the prospect of abrupt changes in fuel standards and having to meet different standards in different states.
“Automakers support continued improvements in fuel economy and flexibilities that incentivize advanced technologies while balancing priorities like affordability, safety, jobs, and the environment,” Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a statement. “We urge California and the federal government to find a common sense solution that sets continued increases in vehicle efficiency standards while also meeting the needs of America’s drivers.”
Trump administration officials have fought for weeks behind the scenes over the details of the how to relax Obama-era standards. Top officials at the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency clashed over whether the White House’s justifications for the new policy can stand up to legal scrutiny.
In one recent internal presentation, part of which was obtained by The Washington Post, officials at the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality warned that the proposal at that point contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”
Ultimately, the two agencies published Thursday’s proposal jointly, and acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler publicly defended the proposal during testimony Wednesday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
The proposal represents an abrupt reversal of the findings that the government reached under President Obama, when regulators argued that requiring more fuel efficient vehicles would improve public health, combat climate change and save consumers money without compromising safety.
Trump’s plan also undercuts California’s long-standing ability to set its own tailpipe restrictions, most recently in an effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
The proposal argues that forcing automakers to reach a fleet-wide average of 51.4 miles per gallon by 2025, as the Obama administration required, would make vehicles more expensive and encourage people to stick to driving older, less-safe cars and trucks.The administration estimates that halting more ambitous fuel efficiency targets would save Americans thousands of dollars on every new vehicle purchased and avoid 1,000 road deaths a year.
Public health experts and environmental groups condemned the White House proposal even before its official release, arguing that it overlooks how much money Americans would save at the pump if cars were more efficient and also squanders a chance to cut pollution from the transportation sector, which has become the nation’s largest source of carbon dioxide emissions.
“By 2030, the pollution equivalent of this rollback will be like firing up 30 coal power plants,” Paul Cort, an attorney at the advocacy group Earthjustice, said in a statement. “It’s a boon for big oil that ordinary Americans will pay for with their health and their wallets.”
Representatives of the U.S. auto industry praised the administration’s proposal, even as some automakers privately have expressed unease at the prospect of abrupt changes in fuel standards and having to meet different standards in different states.
“Automakers support continued improvements in fuel economy and flexibilities that incentivize advanced technologies while balancing priorities like affordability, safety, jobs, and the environment,” Gloria Bergquist, spokeswoman for the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, said in a statement. “We urge California and the federal government to find a common sense solution that sets continued increases in vehicle efficiency standards while also meeting the needs of America’s drivers.”
Trump administration officials have fought for weeks behind the scenes over the details of the how to relax Obama-era standards. Top officials at the Transportation Department and the Environmental Protection Agency clashed over whether the White House’s justifications for the new policy can stand up to legal scrutiny.
In one recent internal presentation, part of which was obtained by The Washington Post, officials at the EPA’s Office of Transportation and Air Quality warned that the proposal at that point contained “a wide range of errors, use of outdated data, and unsupported assumptions.”
Ultimately, the two agencies published Thursday’s proposal jointly, and acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler publicly defended the proposal during testimony Wednesday before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
EPA tells energy regulators that previous offer of climate tools wasn’t Trump-approved
Political appointee walks back colleague's comments on measuring climate impact.
MARK HAND - thinkprogress
JUL 27, 2018, 11:42 AM
An Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) political appointee walked back comments made by one of her colleagues — a senior career agency employee — on how the EPA could help federal energy regulators analyze the climate impact of proposed natural gas pipelines.
The political appointee, EPA Associate Administrator of Policy Brittany Bolen, said in a letter to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC), dated July 25, that she wanted to “clarify” comments submitted by another top EPA staffer as part of the commission’s inquiry into whether it should change its policy on how it reviews pipeline applications.
In the letter, first reported by E&E News, Bolen emphasized that the EPA’s previous comments submitted by the career staffer only sought to address questions raised by FERC in its inquiry into how it reviews pipeline applications. Those comments on possible methods of greenhouse gas analysis “did not speak to the question of whether and when FERC should engage in such analysis” and did not identify “any deficiency in FERC’s policies or specific past analyses,” Bolen wrote.
Natural gas industry officials have held up FERC as a model regulatory agency because of its long history of approving almost every natural gas pipeline application it receives. The commission has resisted calls from environmental advocates to measure the level of greenhouse gas emissions expected to be caused by a proposed pipeline when deciding whether or not to grant a permit to a project.
On Thursday, the Sierra Club expressed concern with the EPA’s decision to engage in a “rolling back” of previous suggestions from its own experts on how FERC could evaluate the environmental impact of natural gas pipelines.
“Bolen’s declaration is another example of Trump administration political appointees ignoring widely accepted science-based tools to better evaluate environmental and climate impacts of proposed projects,” the Sierra Club said in a statement.
“FERC should be using every tool at its disposal to protect our air, water, climate, and communities from the effects of fracked gas pipelines, but the EPA’s political appointees show it’s still business as usual to put polluters’ profits over people’s health,” the group added.
Bolen joined the EPA in 2017 and became the head of policy for the agency earlier this month, succeeding Samantha Dravis, who left the agency in the spring under a cloud of controversy. Bolen previously served as Republican counsel to climate denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
In the earlier letter to FERC, Robert Tomiak, a member of the EPA’s career staff and director of EPA’s Office of Federal Activities, recommended “a number of available tools that can be used.”
Methods are available, for example, to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a natural gas pipeline project, including emissions caused by natural gas drilling and emissions caused by the burning of natural gas, Tomiak wrote. To calculate the upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions associated with a proposed pipeline, he recommended that FERC consider using tools such as the EPA’s greenhouse gas inventory and greenhouse gas reporting programs.
Tomiak also explained that estimates of the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases allow analysts to incorporate the societal value of changes in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to a cost-benefit analysis of actions, such as pipeline construction, on global greenhouse gas emissions. The social cost of carbon measures carbon emissions’ long-term harm.
Over the past year, FERC Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, a Democratic appointee to the commission, has undergone a change of heart on the role that climate impacts should play when reviewing pipeline applications. LaFleur previously could always be counted on to approve every pipeline application that came before the commission.
But in June, LaFleur announced she will consider the broader climate impacts of new natural gas infrastructure when voting on new projects. Richard Glick, the other Democratic appointee at FERC, has emphasized the agency’s failure to address broad climate impacts in each major pipeline decision since his appointment in late 2017, Utility Dive reported last month.
On Thursday, six Democratic senators — Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Jeff Merkley (OR), Ben Cardin (MD), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Ed Markey (MA), and Brian Schatz (HI) — sent a letter to FERC calling for it to incorporate the social cost of carbon in its evaluation of natural gas pipeline projects. The social cost of carbon “is commonly used to evaluate the economic costs of greenhouse gas pollution, but FERC continues to reject it, effectively taking the position that carbon pollution has no cost on society,” the senators wrote in their letter.
A group of state attorneys general also urged FERC to do a better job of considering the impact of natural gas pipeline projects on the environment and climate. In comments filed on Wednesday with FERC, seven attorneys general raised concerns that FERC’s process is giving a green light to pipelines that are not needed and may be environmentally damaging.
“The AGs are demanding that FERC not approve new gas pipeline requests without probing ‘affiliate’ corporate relationships between regulated utilities and gas pipeline proponents, evaluating regional energy needs, and undertaking comprehensive environmental analyses that include evaluations of potential climate impacts,” David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, said Thursday in a statement. The center, based at the New York University School of Law, supports state attorneys general in defending and promoting climate and environmental laws.
In its own comments on FERC’s pipeline permitting policy, the Sierra Club said the commission’s current approach discounts environmental impacts and doesn’t consider the effects of greenhouse gases produced by using natural gas for fuel, “even though they have the tools to measure these effects and a recent court order required them to do so.”
The political appointee, EPA Associate Administrator of Policy Brittany Bolen, said in a letter to the Federal Energy Regulation Commission (FERC), dated July 25, that she wanted to “clarify” comments submitted by another top EPA staffer as part of the commission’s inquiry into whether it should change its policy on how it reviews pipeline applications.
In the letter, first reported by E&E News, Bolen emphasized that the EPA’s previous comments submitted by the career staffer only sought to address questions raised by FERC in its inquiry into how it reviews pipeline applications. Those comments on possible methods of greenhouse gas analysis “did not speak to the question of whether and when FERC should engage in such analysis” and did not identify “any deficiency in FERC’s policies or specific past analyses,” Bolen wrote.
Natural gas industry officials have held up FERC as a model regulatory agency because of its long history of approving almost every natural gas pipeline application it receives. The commission has resisted calls from environmental advocates to measure the level of greenhouse gas emissions expected to be caused by a proposed pipeline when deciding whether or not to grant a permit to a project.
On Thursday, the Sierra Club expressed concern with the EPA’s decision to engage in a “rolling back” of previous suggestions from its own experts on how FERC could evaluate the environmental impact of natural gas pipelines.
“Bolen’s declaration is another example of Trump administration political appointees ignoring widely accepted science-based tools to better evaluate environmental and climate impacts of proposed projects,” the Sierra Club said in a statement.
“FERC should be using every tool at its disposal to protect our air, water, climate, and communities from the effects of fracked gas pipelines, but the EPA’s political appointees show it’s still business as usual to put polluters’ profits over people’s health,” the group added.
Bolen joined the EPA in 2017 and became the head of policy for the agency earlier this month, succeeding Samantha Dravis, who left the agency in the spring under a cloud of controversy. Bolen previously served as Republican counsel to climate denier Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
In the earlier letter to FERC, Robert Tomiak, a member of the EPA’s career staff and director of EPA’s Office of Federal Activities, recommended “a number of available tools that can be used.”
Methods are available, for example, to quantify the greenhouse gas emissions associated with a natural gas pipeline project, including emissions caused by natural gas drilling and emissions caused by the burning of natural gas, Tomiak wrote. To calculate the upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions associated with a proposed pipeline, he recommended that FERC consider using tools such as the EPA’s greenhouse gas inventory and greenhouse gas reporting programs.
Tomiak also explained that estimates of the social cost of carbon and other greenhouse gases allow analysts to incorporate the societal value of changes in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to a cost-benefit analysis of actions, such as pipeline construction, on global greenhouse gas emissions. The social cost of carbon measures carbon emissions’ long-term harm.
Over the past year, FERC Commissioner Cheryl LaFleur, a Democratic appointee to the commission, has undergone a change of heart on the role that climate impacts should play when reviewing pipeline applications. LaFleur previously could always be counted on to approve every pipeline application that came before the commission.
But in June, LaFleur announced she will consider the broader climate impacts of new natural gas infrastructure when voting on new projects. Richard Glick, the other Democratic appointee at FERC, has emphasized the agency’s failure to address broad climate impacts in each major pipeline decision since his appointment in late 2017, Utility Dive reported last month.
On Thursday, six Democratic senators — Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Jeff Merkley (OR), Ben Cardin (MD), Chris Van Hollen (MD), Ed Markey (MA), and Brian Schatz (HI) — sent a letter to FERC calling for it to incorporate the social cost of carbon in its evaluation of natural gas pipeline projects. The social cost of carbon “is commonly used to evaluate the economic costs of greenhouse gas pollution, but FERC continues to reject it, effectively taking the position that carbon pollution has no cost on society,” the senators wrote in their letter.
A group of state attorneys general also urged FERC to do a better job of considering the impact of natural gas pipeline projects on the environment and climate. In comments filed on Wednesday with FERC, seven attorneys general raised concerns that FERC’s process is giving a green light to pipelines that are not needed and may be environmentally damaging.
“The AGs are demanding that FERC not approve new gas pipeline requests without probing ‘affiliate’ corporate relationships between regulated utilities and gas pipeline proponents, evaluating regional energy needs, and undertaking comprehensive environmental analyses that include evaluations of potential climate impacts,” David Hayes, executive director of the State Energy and Environmental Impact Center, said Thursday in a statement. The center, based at the New York University School of Law, supports state attorneys general in defending and promoting climate and environmental laws.
In its own comments on FERC’s pipeline permitting policy, the Sierra Club said the commission’s current approach discounts environmental impacts and doesn’t consider the effects of greenhouse gases produced by using natural gas for fuel, “even though they have the tools to measure these effects and a recent court order required them to do so.”
The big heatwave: from Algeria to the Arctic. But what’s the cause?
Robin McKie
the guardian
Sun 22 Jul 2018 03.00 EDT
A simulation of maximum temperatures on 21 July. Photograph: Climate Reanalyzer/Climate Change Institute/University of Maine
Last week, authorities in Sweden took an unusual step. They issued an appeal for international aid to help them tackle an epidemic of wildfires that has spread across the nation over the past few days.
After months without rain, followed by weeks of soaring temperatures, the nation’s forests had become tinderboxes.
The result was inevitable. Wildfires broke out and, by the end of last week, more than 50 forest blazes – a dozen inside the Arctic circle – had spread across Sweden.
A nation famous for its cold and snow found itself unable to cope with the conflagrations taking place within its border and so made its appeal for international help, a request that has already been answered by Norway and Italy who have both sent airborne firefighting teams to help battle Sweden’s blazes.
Nor is the nation’s fiery fate particularly unusual at present. Across much of the northern hemisphere, intense and prolonged heatwaves have triggered disruption and devastation as North America, the Arctic, northern Europe and Africa have sweltered in record-breaking temperatures. In Africa, a weather station at Ouargla, Algeria, in the Sahara desert, recorded a temperature of 51.3C, the highest reliable temperature ever recorded in Africa. In Japan, where temperatures have reached more than 40C, people were last week urged to take precautions after the death toll reached 30 with thousands more having sought hospital treatment for heat-related conditions. And in California increased use of air conditioning units, switched on to counter the scorching conditions there, has led to power shortages.
But perhaps the strangest impact of the intense heat has been felt in Canada. It too has been gripped by ferocious heat, with Toronto recording temperatures that have exceeded 30C on 18 days so far this year. This figure compares with only nine such days all last summer.
Dozens have died in the withering heat – with startling and grim consequences. Montreal’s morgue has been swamped with the bodies of those who have died because of the heat, and many corpses have had to be stored elsewhere in the city. Montreal coroner Jean Brochu said it was first time the city’s morgue had been overwhelmed this way.
Britain’s scorching weather – which has melted the roof of Glasgow’s Science Centre and parched the lawns of the nation’s historic homes – may have made regular UK headlines. However, it has been relatively mild in impact compared to those experienced in many other parts of the world.
Far from being a parochial problem, the current heatwave is clearly an issue that affects vast stretches of our planet: a global concern not a local one.
But why is so much of our world currently being afflicted with blisteringly hot weather? What is driving the wildfires, the soaring temperatures and those melting rooftops? These are tricky questions to answer, such is the complex nature of the planet’s weather systems. Most scientists point to a number of factors with global warming being the most obvious candidate. Others warn that it would be wrong to overstate its role in the current heatwaves, however.
“Yes, it is hard not to believe that climate change has to be playing a part in what is going on round the globe at present,” said Dann Mitchell of Bristol University. “There have been some remarkable extremes recorded in the past few weeks, after all. However, we should take care about overstating climate change’s influence for it is equally clear there are also other influences at work.”
One of those other factors is the jet stream – a core of strong winds around five to seven miles above the Earth’s surface that blow from west to east and which steer weather around the globe. Sometimes, when they are intense, they bring storms. On other occasions, when they are weak, they bring very calm and settled days. And that is what is occurring at present.
“The jet stream we are currently experiencing is extremely weak and, as a result, areas of atmospheric high pressure are lingering for long periods over the same place,” added Mitchell.
Other factors involved in creating the meteorological conditions that have brought such heat to the northern hemisphere include substantial changes to sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. “These are part of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation,” said Professor Adam Scaife, of the Met Office.
“In fact, the situation is very like the one we had in 1976, when we had similar ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and an unchanging jet stream that left great areas of high pressure over many areas for long periods,” said Scaife.
“And of course, that year we had one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers in the UK in the 20th century.”
However, there is one crucial difference between 1976 and today, added Professor Tim Osborn, director of research at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia. “The baseline on which these effects operated is very different today. Since 1976 we have had several decades of global warming – caused by rising carbon emissions – which has raised baseline global temperatures significantly.”
As a result, any phenomenon such as the weakening of the jet stream is going to have a more pronounced effect than it did 40 years ago.
And as global carbon emissions continue to rise and predictions suggest the world will be unable to hold global temperature rises this century to below 2C above pre-industrial levels, widespread heatwaves are very likely to get worse and become more frequent, scientists warn.
Nor is the problem of increasingly severe heatwaves confined to the land. “We have marine heatwaves as well – all over the globe,” said Michael Burrows, of the Scottish Marine Institute, Oban. “For example, there was a major marine heatwave that struck the coast of Australia last year. It devastated vast swathes of the Great Barrier Reef. More to the point, marine heatwaves are also becoming more and more frequent and intense, like those on land, and that is something else that we should be very worried about.”
After months without rain, followed by weeks of soaring temperatures, the nation’s forests had become tinderboxes.
The result was inevitable. Wildfires broke out and, by the end of last week, more than 50 forest blazes – a dozen inside the Arctic circle – had spread across Sweden.
A nation famous for its cold and snow found itself unable to cope with the conflagrations taking place within its border and so made its appeal for international help, a request that has already been answered by Norway and Italy who have both sent airborne firefighting teams to help battle Sweden’s blazes.
Nor is the nation’s fiery fate particularly unusual at present. Across much of the northern hemisphere, intense and prolonged heatwaves have triggered disruption and devastation as North America, the Arctic, northern Europe and Africa have sweltered in record-breaking temperatures. In Africa, a weather station at Ouargla, Algeria, in the Sahara desert, recorded a temperature of 51.3C, the highest reliable temperature ever recorded in Africa. In Japan, where temperatures have reached more than 40C, people were last week urged to take precautions after the death toll reached 30 with thousands more having sought hospital treatment for heat-related conditions. And in California increased use of air conditioning units, switched on to counter the scorching conditions there, has led to power shortages.
But perhaps the strangest impact of the intense heat has been felt in Canada. It too has been gripped by ferocious heat, with Toronto recording temperatures that have exceeded 30C on 18 days so far this year. This figure compares with only nine such days all last summer.
Dozens have died in the withering heat – with startling and grim consequences. Montreal’s morgue has been swamped with the bodies of those who have died because of the heat, and many corpses have had to be stored elsewhere in the city. Montreal coroner Jean Brochu said it was first time the city’s morgue had been overwhelmed this way.
Britain’s scorching weather – which has melted the roof of Glasgow’s Science Centre and parched the lawns of the nation’s historic homes – may have made regular UK headlines. However, it has been relatively mild in impact compared to those experienced in many other parts of the world.
Far from being a parochial problem, the current heatwave is clearly an issue that affects vast stretches of our planet: a global concern not a local one.
But why is so much of our world currently being afflicted with blisteringly hot weather? What is driving the wildfires, the soaring temperatures and those melting rooftops? These are tricky questions to answer, such is the complex nature of the planet’s weather systems. Most scientists point to a number of factors with global warming being the most obvious candidate. Others warn that it would be wrong to overstate its role in the current heatwaves, however.
“Yes, it is hard not to believe that climate change has to be playing a part in what is going on round the globe at present,” said Dann Mitchell of Bristol University. “There have been some remarkable extremes recorded in the past few weeks, after all. However, we should take care about overstating climate change’s influence for it is equally clear there are also other influences at work.”
One of those other factors is the jet stream – a core of strong winds around five to seven miles above the Earth’s surface that blow from west to east and which steer weather around the globe. Sometimes, when they are intense, they bring storms. On other occasions, when they are weak, they bring very calm and settled days. And that is what is occurring at present.
“The jet stream we are currently experiencing is extremely weak and, as a result, areas of atmospheric high pressure are lingering for long periods over the same place,” added Mitchell.
Other factors involved in creating the meteorological conditions that have brought such heat to the northern hemisphere include substantial changes to sea surface temperatures in the North Atlantic. “These are part of a phenomenon known as the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation,” said Professor Adam Scaife, of the Met Office.
“In fact, the situation is very like the one we had in 1976, when we had similar ocean temperatures in the Atlantic and an unchanging jet stream that left great areas of high pressure over many areas for long periods,” said Scaife.
“And of course, that year we had one of the driest, sunniest and warmest summers in the UK in the 20th century.”
However, there is one crucial difference between 1976 and today, added Professor Tim Osborn, director of research at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia. “The baseline on which these effects operated is very different today. Since 1976 we have had several decades of global warming – caused by rising carbon emissions – which has raised baseline global temperatures significantly.”
As a result, any phenomenon such as the weakening of the jet stream is going to have a more pronounced effect than it did 40 years ago.
And as global carbon emissions continue to rise and predictions suggest the world will be unable to hold global temperature rises this century to below 2C above pre-industrial levels, widespread heatwaves are very likely to get worse and become more frequent, scientists warn.
Nor is the problem of increasingly severe heatwaves confined to the land. “We have marine heatwaves as well – all over the globe,” said Michael Burrows, of the Scottish Marine Institute, Oban. “For example, there was a major marine heatwave that struck the coast of Australia last year. It devastated vast swathes of the Great Barrier Reef. More to the point, marine heatwaves are also becoming more and more frequent and intense, like those on land, and that is something else that we should be very worried about.”
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