Archive: Around the web
A couple of weeks back, the United States Secretary of Commerce, Carlos M. Gutierrez, declared the West Coast salmon fishery a commercial failure for 2008 and shut down any notion that the Chinook fishery would reopen. According to studies, the Chinook salmon run comprised an estimated 800,000 individuals in 2002, a number that dwindled to under 100,000 in 2007. Estimates for 2008 fall for the return of somewhere around 60,000 adult salmon.
From Science Daily:
Although the reasons for the sudden decline of the fishery are not completely understood, NOAA scientists suggest that changes in ocean conditions, including unfavorable shifts in ocean temperature and food sources for juvenile salmon, likely caused poor survival of salmon that would have comprised this year’s fishery. Loss of freshwater habitat for salmon spawning, rearing, and migration to the ocean is a chronic problem that has made salmon populations more susceptible to the occasional poor ocean conditions. NOAA will undertake a thorough examination of the causes.
Related news items
The CBC has a section of its website devoted to people and technologies that are dedicated to ‘going green’. There are tips for energy savings that can be made around the house and on the road, as well as lots of videos showing cutting edge (or old-but-efficient) techniques for building, civic planning, and transportation. It’s definitely worth a visit, although you should be prepared to spend a little bit of time on the site — there are plenty of things to see.
The Tyee has a good little piece that involves Richard Balfour, a strategic planner and advocate for smart, localized growth. Balfour and Eileen McAdam Keenan have written a book, Strategic Sustainable Planning: A Civil Defense Manual for Cultural Survival, that recommends strategies for developing cities and regions in the days and years following Peak Oil .
Be sure to read the first few comments, as there are some that relate directly to the ALR drama that’s currently being played out in Maple Ridge and Pitt Meadows.
There was a bunch of gloomy news on the global warming front over the past couple of weeks,
Glaciers retreating at a rapid rate
starting with a United Nations report that claims many of the world’s glaciers are retreating at a rapid rate. UN scientists claim that the glaciers they studied are retreating at a rate that is between five and ten times faster than they were a decade earlier. Since glaciers provide water to millions of people, particularly in India and North America, their decline is of obvious significance.
Wilkins Ice Shelf collapses in Antarctica
A 405 square kilometer chunk of the Wilkins Ice Shelf in Antarctica collapsed in early March and fell into the ocean:
From: National Snow and Ice Data Centre
Satellite images indicate that the Wilkins began its collapse on February 28; data revealed that a large iceberg, 41 by 2.5 kilometers (25.5 by 1.5 miles), fell away from the ice shelf’s southwestern front, triggering a runaway disintegration of 405 square kilometers (160 square miles) of the shelf interior (Figure 1). The edge of the shelf crumbled into the sky-blue pattern of exposed deep glacial ice that has become characteristic of climate-induced ice shelf break-ups such as the Larsen B in 2002. A narrow beam of intact ice, just 6 kilometers wide (3.7 miles) was protecting the remaining shelf from further breakup as of March 23 (Figure 2).
Scientists track ice shelves and study collapses carefully because some of them hold back glaciers, which if unleashed, can accelerate and raise sea level. Scambos said, “The Wilkins disintegration won’t raise sea level because it already floats in the ocean, and few glaciers flow into it. However, the collapse underscores that the Wilkins region has experienced an intense melt season. Regional sea ice has all but vanished, leaving the ice shelf exposed to the action of waves.”
With Antarctica’s summer melt season drawing to a close, scientists do not expect the Wilkins to further disintegrate in the next several months. “This unusual show is over for this season,” Scambos said. “But come January, we’ll be watching to see if the Wilkins continues to fall apart.”
Check out the time lapse animation showing the extent of the collapse from the NSIDC website.
The release of a peer-reviewed CDC report on pollution in the Great Lakes region of North America has been delayed by the American government, prompting suggestions that the findings are less than favourable.
According to a story by the CBC, experts in the field believe the report is ready for widespread release but feel the government is delaying publication because the findings are pretty disturbing from both economic and social points of view. Among other unsettling findings, the report claims that there are higher than average rates of lung, colon, and breast cancer in the region’s cities, along with abnormal birth statistics in specific areas. The worst part of this whole scenario is that some of the people familiar with the report feel the full social costs involved with cleaning up these waterways are astronomical and, quite possibly, prohibitive.
The cost of future cleanup is something that governments of all levels across North America need to keep in the back of their collective minds as they continue to approve developments in sensitive areas.
Water supplies and access to water supplies are sure to be among the most significant battles humanity has on its hands for the 21st century. Sustainable fresh water sources are under siege as industry emerges in developing nations and western countries continue their unabated growth, so much so that the United Nations recently made the protection of said sources a focal point of its current environmental strategy.
Lake Mead expected to be dry by 2021
Nevada’s Lake Mead can be used as a case study when looking at the long term sustainability both of water-related megaprojects and the impact that human activity has on the landscape around it. Lake Mead, the largest man-made lake and reservoir in the United States, emerged when the Hoover Dam blocked the Colorado River in 1935. The Hoover Dam generates electricity for residents of Arizona, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and parts of Southern California.
Recent research indicates that the strain that current usage is placing on the system is too great and scientists have found that there is a significant chance that Lake Mead will run dry by 2021. Researchers from Scripps Oceanographic Institute released their findings a couple of days ago and their claims are unsettling:
[Tim] Barnett and [David] Pierce concluded that human demand, natural forces like evaporation, and human-induced climate change are creating a net deficit of nearly 1 million acre-feet of water per year from the Colorado River system that includes Lake Mead and Lake Powell. This amount of water can supply roughly 8 million people. Their analysis of Federal Bureau of Reclamation records of past water demand and calculations of scheduled water allocations and climate conditions indicate that the system could run dry even if mitigation measures now being proposed are implemented.
These conclusions are based on sound scientific principles, and the source paper has been submitted to a journal for peer review.
What makes this report scary, however, is that there are parallel problems all around the world, something that more site specific studies will uncover. As the evidence for global warming becomes more and more significant, we’ll likely find that the world’s fresh water sources are under siege, and we’ll start seeing similar claims popping up around North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Researchers from the University of British Columbia believe salmon play a very significant role in the movement of sediment, shaping waterways and playing a key role in the overall health the ecosystem in which they spawn.
According to a ScienceNow article,
The researchers found that the salmon account for up to 50% of the annual amount of sediment migration in a given stream, visibly deepening channels in the headwaters and filling in pools and channels downstream. “People have known for a long time that salmon dig up the stream bottoms,” Hassan says. “But until now, nobody knew how much.”
The salmon excavating is actually beneficial to a stream’s inhabitants. Just the act of piling sediment on the downstream sides of redds, for example, churns up the current enough to increase its oxygenation, improving the health of the ecosystem. Recognizing how this process works is critical to understanding the dynamics of streams frequented by salmon, says Hassan. And stream-restoration plans need to consider this effect because “off-the-shelf restoration designs” that don’t account for the actions of salmon may not hit the mark.
While the sample size is small (four mountain streams), even these preliminary results shows the complexity of stream-based ecosystems and the importance of developing site-specific mitigation // management strategies.
There was a sharp drop in year-over-year stocks of Chinook salmon in California in 2007. Fish stocks dropped almost 88% when compared to 2002, which saw the highest run in recorded history. Scientists, fishermen, and environmentalists are trying to make sense of the data; some believe the decline is related to global warming, while others cite an increase in water exports from spawning areas as the source of the problem.
“The magnitude of the low abundance … is such that the opening of all marine and freshwater fisheries impacting this important salmon stock will be questioned,” he said.
It’s only the second time in 35 years that the Central Valley has not met the agency’s conservation goal of 122,000 to 180,000 returning fish, according to the council, which regulates Pacific Coast fisheries.
More worrisome is that only about 2,000 2-year-old juvenile chinooks — used to predict returns of adult spawners in the coming season — returned to the Central Valley last year, by far the lowest number ever counted. On average, about 40,000 juveniles, or “jacks,” return each year.
Salmon that spawn in Central Valley rivers form the backbone of the West Coast’s commercial and recreational salmon fishery and are caught by fishermen from Southern California to British Columbia.
Of course, the problem is likely a combination of a number of factors, something that industry and government will have to come to grips with when determining fishing policy in the region.
There’s a good position piece over at The Tyee that discusses the looming crisis set to take place over the Alberta tar sands. The Premier of Alberta, Ed Stelmach, refuses to admit there’s a huge issue for concern and oil-friendly Stephen Harper refuses to take a major position, which has left the provinces to develop their own mitigation techniques.
The tar sands have quickly grown to become the most destructive project on Earth. Their greenhouse gas emissions are the main reason Canada’s emissions keep rising, the main reason we cannot live up to international agreements, the main reason we are becoming an international pariah on the most important issue facing humanity.
By refusing to act aggressively on global warming, Stephen Harper has ceded the field to the provinces. Some, like B.C. and Quebec have stepped into this vacuum and given Canadians the action they want. But Alberta has taken advantage of the vacuum to stomp on the gas pedal, with exploding emissions from the tar sands being the result.
If this is something that you’re interested in, the first comment following the article is well worth the read.
