Earth ChangesS


Bizarro Earth

Yay for Hay! Redneck Rocket Science - perhaps BP should listen?

Image

CW Roberts employees demonstrating the use of hay to assist in a defense against the oil spill in the Gulf. This is the method that is included in the Walton County Plan of Action.


Bizarro Earth

Rare "King of Herrings" Found off Swedish Coast

Oarfish
© AP/Roger JanssonIn this undated photo released by The House of the Sea aquarium in Lysekil, Sweden, a 12-foot Giant Oarfish found off Sweden's west coast is displayed and measured.
A maritime expert says a 12-foot Giant Oarfish - the world's largest bony fish - has been found in Swedish waters for the first time in 130 years.

Also known as the "King of Herrings," the dead fish was picked up by a west coast resident who found it floating near the shore over the weekend. It was handed over to The House of the Sea aquarium in the town of Lysekil, where expert Roger Jansson says it's being kept pending a decision on what to do with it.

Johansson said Wednesday the Giant Oarfish can grow up to 36 feet, and is believed to live in deep waters. He says the last recorded discovery in Sweden was in 1879.

Recycle

A Passion to Clean up the Pacific Ocean's Great 'Garbage Patch'

Image
© Tony Avelar/The Christian Science MonitorMary Crowley’s project wants to enlist fishing vessels to help attack the mass of floating plastic garbage known as the North Pacific Trash Gyre.
Mary Crowley would rather be at sea. But she's not. Instead, she is in a small conference room at a roadside Marriott in this landlocked town north of Sacramento.

Around her are mainly men, many with beards, and many with baseball caps pulled down low and arms crossed tight. They are listening. Many of them would also rather be at sea.

Can these wishes be joined? We shall see in the next month or so.

Ms. Crowley has long hair, a ruddy outdoor complexion, and a sincere manner. She wants to sail west in the next month or two, out to what is called the North Pacific Trash Gyre. Her goal is to start cleaning up the plastic trash that has leaped into social consciousness over the past couple of years.

Comment: For more information about the serious problem with trash in the oceans of our planet read the following articles carried on SOTT:

The Biggest Dump in the World

What is the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch?

A Plague of Plastic

Mission to Break up Pacific Island of Rubbish Twice the Size of Texas

Huge Garbage Patch Found in Atlantic Too


Vader

Cap-and-Trade is back on the cards thanks to BP oil disaster

On Wednesday,
Image
© UnknownSenators John Kerry (right) (D-MA) and Joe Lieberman (center) (I-CT)
plan to introduce legislation designed to inflate the cost of energy, strain family budgets, and decimate America's manufacturing sector -- all in the name of supposedly saving the climate.

Kerry and Lieberman have been revamping legislation that narrowly passed the House of Representatives last year. The House bill imposes oppressive limits on carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and establishes a complex cap-and-trade scheme in which the federal government determines how much CO2 a business may emit. If a business exceeds its allowance, it may purchase additional "carbon credits" from an exchange, where the credits will be traded like a commodity. Rules for the exchange of carbon credits, including the trading of carbon derivatives, are addressed in the House bill, and my sources tell me that the Senate version will include these same stratagems.

In an e-mail sent to the media last week regarding their plans, Kerry and Lieberman said, "We can no longer wait to solve this problem which threatens our economy, our security and our environment."

Newspaper

South Africa: Woman Kicked to Death by Giraffe as She Walked Her Dogs

Image
© AlamyTragic: Merike Engelbrecht, 25, died instantly on Saturday after a giraffe kicked her near Musina in South Africa
A woman was kicked to death by a giraffe as she walked her dogs on a game farm in South Africa, police said today.

Merike Engelbrecht, 25, died instantly on Saturday after the animal lashed out at her near Musina in the country's Limpopo province.

Police spokeswoman Lieutenant Colonel Ronel Otto said the tragedy happened when one of Ms Engelbrecht's dogs ran towards and startled the giraffe.

It is believed the animal became agitated and violent in an attempt to protect its young calf, who had been walking nearby.

Colonel Otto said: 'It was a terrible incident. It appears the animal kicked out sharply as she walked close to it.

Magnify

Once Amigos, Now Enemies: BP, Halliburton, And Transocean

Image
© New Junkie PostHaliburton station in Venice, Louisiana.
Reporting from New Orleans

It has been a day of finger-pointing at the first Senate hearing on what caused the Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion. None of the men representing the three companies - BP, Transocean, and Halliburton - have wanted to admit total responsibility for what caused the accident on April 20, which resulted in 11 deaths, and in 4,000 square miles of oil contaminated water in the Gulf of Mexico.

Both Halliburton and Transocean were subcontracted by BP to work on the 5th generation oil rig. The rig was supposed to be one the most modern rigs ever built, defying ocean depths and debuting the rig's "dynamic" free-standing platforms. But the events that led to the April 20 explosion should have warned BP that its race to have the latest, rig technology could deliver, was going to go sour.

According to an article in the Times Picayune, a natural gas surge shut down the Deepwater Horizon rig just weeks before the April 20 explosion. BP engineers thought they had found a solution to the problem, but the oil rig eventually failed.

Footprints

Rumble in the Jungle: Activists vs. Palm Oil

Image
© David Gilbert
Wake up in the morning. Enjoy a warm, soapy shower. Eat a bowl of cereal, perhaps with soy milk. Dab on some lipstick ...

Perform any of those mundane tasks and chances are you've done your bit to destroy a patch of rainforest somewhere in Indonesia where vast stands of virgin trees have been cut, bulldozed, and burned to clear land for palm oil plantations. Once used primarily in cosmetics, palm oil, which is free of artery-clogging trans fats, has become the ingredient du jour in processed foods. In the United States, consumption of the stuff has tripled over the past five years. Growing oil palms is now the largest cause of deforestation in Indonesia, contributing to global warming and destroying crucial habitat for the country's endangered orangutan population, which has fallen by half since the onset of the palm-oil boom.

Red Flag

Chemical Dispersants Being Used in Gulf Clean-up are Potentially Toxic

Image
© U.S. Coast GuardCoast Guard workers spray Corexit in a 2007 Berkeley, California, cleanup. It is not yet being used on Gulf of Mexico beaches.
We finally know the main two dispersants that BP and the U.S. government are using to treat the ongoing Gulf spill. Both, by their maker's own admission, have the "potential to bioconcentrate," and both have "moderate toxicity to early life stages of fish, crustaceans, and mollusks," according to a study by Exxon, the company that originally developed them. Their use may be the least-bad course, given the importance of minimizing oil's effect on coastal wetlands. But a little digging into the chemical makeup of these two substances, which are being dumped in vast quantities into the Gulf, reveals that they could potentially do far more harm than good, both to the Gulf and to humans who later eat from it.

As ProPublica reported Monday, information about dispersants is "kept secret under competitive trade laws." I've spent the last several days trying to confirm what many in the ocean-ecology and public health worlds seemed to know, but no one would say officially: that two different dispersants sold under the banner of Corexit were being used in vast quantities. The Corexit brand is owned by an Illinois-based company called Nalco, which entered the dispersant business back in 1994, when it merged with Exxon's chemical unit. (By 2004, Exxon had divested and Nalco was a standalone company, according to Nalco's company history.)

Bizarro Earth

Dead dolphins wash up on coast; oil's role unclear

Image
© (AP Photo/Alex BrandonA pod of Bottle Nose dolphins swim under the oily water of Chandeleur Sound, La., Thursday, May 6, 2010.
Ship Island, Mississippi - Federal wildlife officials are treating the deaths of six dolphins on the Gulf Coast as oil-related even though other factors may be to blame.

Blair Mase (MACE') of the National Marine Fisheries Service said Tuesday that the carcasses have all been found in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama since May 2. Samples have been sent for testing to see whether a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico helped kill the dolphins.

Mase and animal rescue coordinator Michele Kelley in Louisiana said none of the carcasses has obvious signs of oil. Mase also said it's common for dead dolphins to wash up this time of year when they are in shallow waters to calve.

Better Earth

Stray grey whale navigates the North-West Passage

Image
© New Scientist
Conventional wisdom has it that grey whales have been extinct in the Atlantic Ocean for more than 200 years, and the species survives only in the north Pacific. That was the case until last weekend, when a 13-metre-long grey whale was spotted cruising off the coast of Israel.

"This is sensational," said Phillip Clapham of the US government's National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle after hearing the news from marine biologists in Israel. "The most plausible explanation is that it came across an ice-free North-West Passage from the Pacific Ocean, and is now wondering where the hell it is."

The North-West Passage, which runs through the Canadian Arctic, has been open in summer in recent years, partly because of rising global temperatures.

Although they are known for their long migrations, grey whales do not normally stray from their regular routes. "Were I to speculate wildly, I'd say it found Europe and remembered its mother telling it to keep the coast to its left going south, then it hit the strait of Gibraltar and entered the Mediterranean," said Clapham.

The Arctic route makes most sense, agrees Giuseppe Notarbartolo di Sciara, an expert on Mediterranean cetaceans who advises several international conservation bodies. He points to reports that grey whales have been seen getting farther north than usual into the Arctic, probably helped by the low-ice conditions.

Comment: "rising global temperatures" are the least of the grey whales problems: Freak Arctic Weather Precursor to the Coming Ice Age?