As Though I Needed Another Reason

In the past ten years I've given up on travel, especially air travel. My flying days are done. It's not like I haven't had my share. I have - and then some, a lot actually.

I traveled most back when I was young. It was a lot more fun then, much more adventuresome. There was nothing pre-packaged, no McDonald's in every town, no credit cards, no ATMs, a good chance of winding up where English simply wasn't spoken, no cell phones, no internet, communication was pretty much a postcard if you could find stamps and some place to mail it.  Charging about on a less than reliable English motorcycle you saw more, if only because you broke down more. Yet it was a different world, still emerging from WWII, the signs were around if you noticed, and there were a lot fewer of us crowding this planet, about half our current numbers. Tourism was not the battery-hen operation that plagues us today. Even riding solo through Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia, you really didn't give that a second thought except, perhaps, to imagine yourself a latter-day T.E. Lawrence.

A couple of times I've revisited places I knew from the late 60s/early 70s only to be disappointed at the change. It's like an assault on some really great memories.

Now there's another reason not to retrace old paths. The air is apt to be rotten if not unbreathable. Enter the age of biohazard tourism. From the New York Times:

While China takes a bulk of the heat when it comes to unhealthy levels of air quality, air pollution is a major issue throughout Asia and beyond, even to Europe and North America. Without research and self-care, even short-term visitors may feel the effects. Here are some precautions you can take to help you breathe easier.

You can find a given city’s Air Quality Index, or A.Q.I., on air-monitoring websites like aqicn.org. This index indicates how polluted or dirty the air is (typically measuring particulate matter in the air) and explains the possible health implications of that level. While A.Q.I. levels are often referenced to in the United States during allergy season or at times of dust storms or wildfires, the index is commonplace throughout Asia. The U.S. Department of Agriculture has a complete explanation of what makes “good” or “bad” air quality on its website.

...A proper air-filtering face mask can be your best friend when air quality is low. Although you can find disposable face masks at pharmacies in most cities, the type of masks recommended by medical professionals are rarely found in drugstores or department stores. You’re better off ordering quality ones online in advance of your trip instead of scrambling to find them in a new city.

...After a day of sightseeing, protecting your skin and your lungs from air pollution and particulates that may have settled in your clothes, on your skin or in your hair, is simple: take a shower as soon as you can, apply sunscreen and moisturizer, and repeat every time you spend a prolonged period outdoors.

Refraining from outdoor activities on heavily-polluted days is the most common piece of advice when it comes to avoiding the effects of air pollution from medical experts, including those at the American Lung Association. Plan activities like museum visits, souvenir shopping trips, and other mostly-indoor activities for days when the air quality is really bad. Or, just keep a few of those activities in your pocket in case everything seems good one day, but the air quality takes a turn on the next.

Fortunately for those looking for a reprieve from air pollution, a growing number of accommodations and activities are now making clean air a main feature. Not only have several hotel chains have added air purifiers to their list of amenities, but smog-free cinemas, oxygen bars and clean air cafes have become en vogue in cities like Seoul, Bangkok and Beijing. If you’ve already been to the museum, maybe it’s time to take in a film.

Blade Runner tourism where you're a biohazard refugee in every destination. A regime of constant decontamination. Why not find a fashionable haz-mat suit as you prowl the remaining wonders of the world? Know something? I'm good. I think I'll just stick with my memories of a world that is no more.

While All Eyes Have Been On That Idiot in the White House or Our Suffocating Oceans

One thing you have to say for Donald Trump. He manages to suck all the oxygen out of a room.

This post happens to be about oxygen and it isn't about Trump, not directly. It's a report that came out last week that, as these studies tend to do, is about to vanish down the memory hole. It's a horror story or it should be if we had our wits about us. We don't.

The report is about oxygen, specifically how it is disappearing from our oceans and creating dead zones.  The study finds that the number of these dead zones has quadrupled since 1950. These anoxic waters have expanded by millions of square miles in just our lifetimes.  But wait, there's more. Along our coasts these dead zones have increased ten times. Not four, ten.

"Oxygen is fundamental to life in the oceans," said Denise Breitburg, lead author and marine ecologist with the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center. She's part of the GO2NE (Global Ocean Oxygen Network), which was founded in 2016 to tackle this problem.

"The decline in ocean oxygen ranks among the most serious effects of human activities on Earth's environment."

While scientists have long been aware of these dead zones, this is the first review paper to take such a broad, global view of the issue. And the results aren't pretty.

...

As Earth's climate continues to warm, the team predicts that the oceans will continue to lose oxygen at a rapid pace.

And, as the paper in the journal Science points out: "Major extinction events in Earth's history have been associated with warm climates and oxygen-deficient oceans."

So what's causing these dead zones?

Climate change is a huge part of the problem, especially for the open ocean. Because warm water holds less oxygen, as surface water temperatures warm up, it makes it harder for oxygen to get down into the depths of the ocean.

Closer to shore, nutrient pollution - such as the runoff from agricultural practises - is also playing a big role.

Nutrients like phosphorous from fertiliser can easily end up in rivers and estuaries, which creates algal blooms that drain oxygen from the water as they die and decompose.

It's no surprise then that scientists are worried about the algae bloom the size of Mexico in the Arabian Sea.

Unfortunately, as the oceans get warmer, marine life actually needs more oxygen to survive, not less. The result is huge patches of bleached coral and dead marine life.

Here's a chart depicting our suffocating oceans.

And what is our political response to this? Close to nil. The oceans, with their ability to suck vast quantities of heat and CO2 from the atmosphere and as the handy dumping ground for our waste, including agricultural chemical runoff, are a political "get out of jail free" card, for now.

Unfortunately, our oceans bat last. In recent decades prevailing wind patterns have caused the oceans to absorb enormous amounts of heat energy that has been carried into the depths. That's where the first law of thermodynamics comes into play, the one that tells us that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, just converted from one form into another. So all that heat carried into the depths of the ocean, well it's coming back up and it will be returned to the atmosphere.

Climate change is like a prize fight. It's not how you take a punch but how you absorb a flurry of punches. The ocean is absorbing what we're dealing out - the extra heat, the acidification, the chemical contamination - but we are not prepared for its counter-punching. You can be hundreds, thousands of miles from the ocean, drylanders in Toronto or Winnipeg or Calgary. It makes no difference. The ocean will reach you.

Paleontologist Peter Ward of the University of Washington in his book, "Under a Green Sky," has a one-paragraph description of what happens when absorbed CO2  crosses the oceanic tipping point:

First, the world warms over short intervals of time because of a sudden increase of carbon dioxide and methane... The warmer world affects the ocean circulation systems and disrupts the position of the conveyor currents. Bottom waters begin to have warm, low-oxygen water dumped into them. Warming continues, and the decrease of equator-to-pole temperature differences reduces ocean winds and surface currents to a near standstill. Mixing of oxygenated surface waters with the deeper, and volumetrically increasing, low-oxygen bottom waters decreases, causing ever-shallower water to change from oxygenated to anoxic. Finally, the bottom water is at depths were light can penetrate, the combination of low oxygen and light allows green sulfur bacteria to expand in numbers and fill the low-oxygen shallows. They live amid other bacteria that produce toxic amounts of hydrogen sulfide, and the flux of this gas into the atmosphere is as much as 2,000 times what it is today. The gas rises into the high atmosphere, where it breaks down the ozone layer, and the subsequent increase in ultraviolet radiation from the sun kills much of the photosynthetic green plant phytoplankton. On its way up into the sky, the hydrogen sulfide also kills some plant and animal life, and the combination of high heat and hydrogen sulfide creates a mass extinction on land. These are the greenhouse extinctions.

Well, Jeebus, if we knew that we would deal with it, wouldn't we? Surely we would never let that happen, not if we knew better. It's time for that godawful reality check. We do know. We know better. It's all good, old-fashioned, evidence based, tested and verified science. It's all there at the fingertips of every government on Earth. And no, we aren't going to deal with it. We are letting it happen. We are unleashing this fate on future generations. 

Additional reading:

Five Ways We're Killing Our Oceans

Those Shellfish Are Talking to You. Can You Hear Them?

New Research Reveals How Quickly Climate Change Impacts Set In

Ocean Dead Zones Growing (2008) 

How Agri-Business is Poisoning our Lakes and Rivers 

And So It Goes

When Pigs Float

Shanghai has a water problem.   Somehow more than 2,800 dead pigs wound up floating in one of the main rivers that supplies drinking water to the mega-metropolis of 23-million.

Local authorities claim the river water is still safe to drink but they are local authorities and this is China.

Nobody has figured out where the pigs came from yet.   How some farmer can conceal the absence of nearly three thousand pigs is a bit tough to understand.   Yet the animals show no sign of disease or any other obvious cause of death.

Apparently this is nothing new.

"You can see dead pigs here every year, but there are more now than in the past few years," a local man told the [state broadcaster CCTV].

The Jiaxing Daily newspaper in northern Zhejiang province quoted a villager as saying that over the past two months almost 20,000 pigs in his village have died of unknown causes. While Shanghai compensates its farmers for properly disposing of dead swine, the newspaper said, Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces lack a comparable incentive system, so farmers there often dump their pig carcasses directly into local rivers.

"The local authorities are conducting co-ordinated efforts to stop the dumping of dead pigs from the source," said China's official newswire Xinhua.

Experts say the groundwater in half of all Chinese cities is contaminated, most of it severely, and that soil pollution could be widespread in 15 of the country's 33 provinces.

A study released last year found that upwards of 40% of Chinese farmland is now contaminated by arsenic and heavy metals carried from factory smokestacks.   China is in a race to salvage its agricultural production, a race that might already be lost.

China's Water Woes

China does not seem able to come to grips with the pollution that is inexorably poisoning the country.   While Beijing talks about green energy, including 5th generation reactor technology, it brings online a new coal-fired power plant almost daily.  The country imports truly massive quantities of coal from the Pacific Rim, especially from Australia, with Canada getting its share also.  And China is eager to receive regular shipments of Athabasca bitumen to process through its own refineries.

Just how bad is it?  Last year it was reported that some 40% of the country's productive farmland is too contaminated from airborne heavy metals to be safe enough for food production.   And when your river looks like this, you've got a serious problem.

"Finally this issue [water pollution] has aroused the attention of the general public," said Ma Jun, head of the Beijing-based Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs. "Although it's going to take a long time [to fix], now we have seen a starting point."

...the government announced on Thursday that it will force heavily polluting industries to participate in a compulsory insurance programme to ensure they can adequately provide compensation for damage.

The mining and smelting industries must participate in the scheme, along with lead battery manufacturers, leather goods firms and chemical factories. Petrochemical companies and firms that make hazardous chemicals and hazardous waste would also be encouraged to participate.

China's water pollution woes are not a new story. The head of China's ministry of water resources said last year that up to 40% of the country's rivers are "seriously polluted", and an official report from last summer found that up to 200 million rural Chinese have no access to clean drinking water.

China's lakes are often affected by pollution-induced algae blooms, causing the surface of the water to turn a bright iridescent green. Yet even greater threats may lurk underground. A recent government study found that groundwater in 90% of China's cities is contaminated, most of it severely. Chinese media responded with surprising urgency – the Straits Times newspaper in southeastern Fujian province presented the findings in a full front-page spread.

"Groundwater is a key source of drinking water, industrial and agricultural use, especially in northern China," said Ma. "If this resource gets contaminated, it's far more difficult to restore than surface water or the air."

The Traveller's Guide to Beijing. Toothbrush, Toothpaste, Passport and, Oh Yeah, Plenty of Oxygen

The World Health Organization sets the safe level at 25.   The U.S. EPA puts the emergency level at 300.   For days Beijing has been at anywhere between 600 and 900.

The figures are for PM2.5 or particulate matter tiny enough to be absorbed into human tissue.

Air quality has long been a problem in the Chinese capital, but this weekend saw levels more than 30 times above the level judged safe by the World Health Organisation.

Breakneck economic growth, reliance on coal, dramatic expansion of car ownership and the widespread flouting of environmental laws have all contributed to China's air pollution problems. But the intensity of the current problem appears to be weather-related. The monitoring centre said the heavy pollution had been trapped by an area of low pressure and warned that the problem was likely to continue until Tuesday.

It's bad enough that Beijingers have to exist in a particulate fog but that doesn't begin to explore just what those micro-particles being absorbed into their bodies actually contain.   China is known to produce some truly wicked air pollution.   Lots of heavy metals, acids, toxins including arsenic and carcinogens.  

Soil pollution is another enormous problem facing China which accounts for 70% of the world's arsenic pollution.   It's been estimated that up to 40% of China's farmland is now too contaminated by airborne arsenic to be capable of producing crops fit for human consumption.

Poisoning Themselves and the Rest of Us

They're called "atmospheric brown clouds," huge smoglike plumes spreading over vast areas of the world's developing regions and caused by the burning of fossil fuels. From Associated Press:

A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns around the world and threatening health and food supplies, the U.N. reported Thursday.

...When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the U.N. Environment Program.

...Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.

Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in 13 megacities: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.

Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25 percent in some places including Karachi, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing.

...researchers found, brown clouds are forming over eastern China; northeastern Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Myanmar; Cambodia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam; sub-Saharan Africa southward into Angola, Zambia and Zimbabwe; and the Amazon Basin in South America.

An international response is needed to deal with "the twin threats of greenhouse gases and brown clouds and the unsustainable development that underpins both," said the lead researcher, Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a professor of climate and ocean sciences at the University of California in San Diego.

One of the most serious problems, Ramanathan said, is retreat of the glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush and in Tibet. The glaciers feed most Asian rivers and "have serious implications for the water and food security of Asia," he said.

Soot from the brown clouds lands on glaciers, particularly in the Himalayas, causing them to absorb more sunlight and melt faster. The picture above, from http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ , shows the sort of cloud that forms over the Himalayas.

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iiDlfwqOC5I71KgFjzSBuany-hrAD94EALKG3

Harper's Petro-Whopper

Yeah, right. Is this like fixed election dates, or accountability, or transparency in government?

Our Furious Leader has - get this - said that, "...if elected in October, the Conservatives will prohibit oil sands companies from shipping bitumen from Canada's oil sands to countries that do not have equivalent emission reduction targets." (National Spot).

So, let's see. I guess that rules out China. Australia is definitely out. Remind me how much of Alberta's bitumen they're getting anyway.

Oh yeah, but what about the States? Well, you see, that's where the hoax part comes in. What did he really say? If they have "equivalent emission reduction targets" they can have all the tar sludge they want. Nobody ever said anything about actual equivalent emission reductions. You just have to announce a "target" that sounds nice.

And, if you don't announce a nice-sounding target, why we'll always be happy to refine the damned stuff here. Harp will make damned sure that Canada's targets leave lots of room for bitumen upgrading plants galore.

One thing we know about Harpo is that he doesn't let things like his word stand in his way when he wants something and he wants the mantle of Energy Superpower so bad he'd say anything. So, given his impressive record of lying his ass off, this assurance is bound to be as empty as Harper's integrity.

Hey Steve, wasn't the election supposed to be next year?

Putting a Number on the Tar Sands

The US Conference of Mayors annual meeting came up with a great idea - tracking the "life cycle impact" of various fossil fuels. They also passed a resolution urging member municipalities to stop using unconventional fuels with lage carbon footprints. The resolution specifically referenced Canada's Tar Sands:

"The production of tarsands oil from Canada emits approximately three times the carbon dioxide pollution per barrel as does conventional oil production and significantly damages Canada's Boreal forest ecosystem - the world's largest carbon storehouse."

You see, once you factor in the carbon footprint of various fossil fuels - assign a number to them - it's an easy process to translate that into any of several forms of carbon tariffs.

Alberta's Tar Sands have always benefitted from the "out of sight/out of mind" syndrome. They're way up north where few Albertans live. People don't have to see them if they don't want to. That, I suspect, is a key reason why Big Oil and the Alberta government have been able to get away with the environmental destruction the Tar Sands necessitate. Whenever someone does complain they're rebuffed with the same old assurances about new technologies being just around the corner, an excuse that's then put back in the bottom drawer until the next time it's needed.

A carbon tariff by end user markets might give Big Oil and the Alberta government the big, swift kick in the ass they've needed to actually make those promised new technologies a reality. You simply make it more expensive for them not to clean themselves up. They say they can do it. It's time they did.

Kudos to the US Conference of Mayors. They just might have pointed to the right path to curbing tar sands pollution.

Dead Ducks All In a Row

Special Ed Stelmach has a problem and it's one that's not going away.

Ed's problem, or at least his latest problem, is the toxic waste dump also known as the Athabasca Tar Sands. Getting ersatz oil out of Athabasca's bitumen tar uses an awful lot of water - fresh water that's turned into a black, oily waste that has to be pumped into tailing ponds built out of earthen walls.

These tailing ponds are big. They can be seen from the shuttle as it orbits in space. And they're not getting any smaller because no one, it seems, has any plan for dealing with this toxic sludge. Now I don't know what the lifespan of an earthen wall may be but I'm pretty sure it's not all that long. No one's really sure how much of this stuff may seep into the groundwater or when or just who may be effected by it eventually.

When it comes to the Tar Sands and the rich array of environmental threats associated with that boondoggle, Special Ed clings to the "see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" school of environmentalism. When native villages downstream get swept with cancer or migratory birds die in the tailing ponds, he proclaims the Tar Sands an environmental triumph and brands his critics as outsiders, sh*t disturbers.

So now Ed has five or six hundred dead ducks on his hands and, of course, it's not really about the ducks at all but where they died - the tailing ponds. That defeats the "out of sight, out of mind" firewall on which people like Ed rely so heavily. The timing couldn't have been worse, coming at the same time as Ed had dispatched his Number Two to the US to promote the Tar Sands. How did Ed react? Predictably. Ed tried to set up the province of Alberta as the underdog, the David to the environmentalists' Goliath. Why not? That kind of bullshit has worked great for the White House for the past eight years. Who cares whether the statement is utterly ridiculous so long as your target audience is willing to swallow.

Now it turns out that a Seattle scientist is calling "bullshit" on Ed Stemcell's claims that the normal, annual loss from the Tar Sands ponds is only 20-birds. Jeff Wells belongs to a group that conducted research at just one operation in 2003 that found, even with bird-deterrence programmes in place, 705 birds died in just a four week span. That's one operation, the Albian Sands project, and just four weeks. Albian Sands is a joint venture of Shell and Chevron-Texaco, operator of the Muskeg River mind about 75-kms. north of Fort McMurray.

Makes you wonder. If Ed's going to deceive the public about a few hundred migratory birds, when it comes to his cherished Tar Sands, what else is he willing to hide and bury and lie about? My guess is that he'll do whatever he thinks it takes.

No one seems to be asking why these tailing ponds are being left to grow and spread? The wealth associated with those tailings is leaving Athabasca and much of it is leaving Canada with the American oil companies running these mines. Simply leaving these tailings unresolved as a future threat to the region doesn't sound like much of a plan.

The National Spot ran the predictible opinion piece dismissing the incident as just a few hundred birds that otherwise would have fallen to hunters anyway. What was interesting was the furor that sparked in readers' letters. People were uniformly incensed with the Post's whitewash. Maybe there is hope yet.

The satellite picture at the top shows the Albian Sands project. I expect you can figure out for yourself what those black objects are at the top left.

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

100-million tonnes of garbage. Flotsam - floating debris. Spread out over an area twice the size of the United States.

It's all floating off the shores of California and Hawaii and other Pacific Rim nations. Much of it comes in the form of discarded plastic. From AlterNet:

The vast expanse of debris -- in effect the world's largest rubbish dump -- is held in place by swirling underwater currents. This drifting "soup" stretches from about 500 nautical miles off the Californian coast, across the northern Pacific, past Hawaii and almost as far as Japan.

Charles Moore, an American oceanographer who discovered the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or "trash vortex", believes that about 100 million tons of flotsam are circulating in the region. Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: "The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States."

Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer and leading authority on flotsam, has tracked the build-up of plastics in the seas for more than 15 years and compares the trash vortex to a living entity: "It moves around like a big animal without a leash." When that animal comes close to land, as it does at the Hawaiian archipelago, the results are dramatic. "The garbage patch barfs, and you get a beach covered with this confetti of plastic," he added.

Mr Moore said that because the sea of rubbish is translucent and lies just below the water's surface, it is not detectable in satellite photographs. "You only see it from the bows of ships," he said.

Plastic is believed to constitute 90 per cent of all rubbish floating in the oceans. The UN Environment Programme estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean contains 46,000 pieces of floating plastic."

Few realize it but, with the exception of a very small amount that's been incinerated, every bit of plastic that's ever been produced still exists somewhere. Recycling? Globally, we're recycling somewhere between 3 to 5% of total production.

Drive through the back country of Mexico, for example. The sides of the roads are covered in discarded plastic bags. The fences are full of them. Unless you've seen it you can't believe it.

Taxes Can Reform Attitudes

The New York Times reports on a highly successful Irish initiative to do away with the scourge of plastic bags:

"There is something missing from this otherwise typical bustling cityscape. There are taxis and buses. There are hip bars and pollution. Every other person is talking into a cellphone. But there are no plastic shopping bags, the ubiquitous symbol of urban life.

In 2002, Ireland passed a tax on plastic bags; customers who want them must now pay 33 cents per bag at the register. There was an advertising awareness campaign. And then something happened that was bigger than the sum of these parts.

Within weeks, plastic bag use dropped 94 percent. Within a year, nearly everyone had bought reusable cloth bags, keeping them in offices and in the backs of cars. Plastic bags were not outlawed, but carrying them became socially unacceptable — on a par with wearing a fur coat or not cleaning up after one’s dog."

Now I know this is going to send you libertarian folks out there into cardiac arrest but it shows that, like public smoking bans, we can adapt quite easily and, afterward, wonder what all the fuss was about.

China's Next Great Revolution?

Usually revolutions are aimed at toppling the very highest authority. In China there's a call for a revolution against local government.

The head of China's environmental agency blames public discontent and riots on pollution and has called for a "struggle" against polluters. Sounds straight out of Mao's Red Book, eh? From The Guardian:

Zhou Shengxian's comments "underscore the frustration of state mandarins at local government officials who ignore environmental standards in order to attract investment, jobs and bribes.

"Beijing is trying to shift the economy on to a more sustainable development track. But factory owners who violate state guidelines are often protected by local officials. ...According to Mr Zhou, the state environmental protection administration chief, many plants build secret pipes to discharge polluting chemicals. Others release toxins when locals are asleep.

"Demonstrations against power and chemical plants have become increasingly common in recent years. In May, thousands took to the streets of Xiamen, in Fujian province, leading to the suspension of a petrochemical plant. In 2005, police killed at least three villagers in Dongzhou, Guangdong province, while quelling a riot over a planned power plant.

"Anger has been fuelled by unfair land grabs and health fears. According to the government, two-thirds of China's 595 cities now have unhealthy air.

"Pollution scandals are common. Earlier yesterday, state media reported that tap water had been restored to 200,000 residents of Shuyang county in Jiangsu after a chemical spill halted supplies for 40 hours. The environment agency said more than a quarter of the seven main river systems were so polluted that the water was unfit for human contact."

China today faces a hellish host of critical, environmental threats ranging from air and water pollution to freshwater depletion and desertification. It is really difficult to conceive how China can bring these threats under control and maintain its planned industrial and economic expansion. It is definitely burning the candle at both ends.