China food security: climate change likely to reduce rice, wheat, and other crop yields

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Climate change is also likely to lower wheat production:  Global warming will have a bad effect on heat-sensitive wheat, slashing yields even more than was originally feared.  It could be much harder than we thought to feed everyone in a warmer world. Hot spells are cutting wheat yields in northern India, and models of global warming’s effect on crops may have underestimated the problem by a huge amount…an average warming of 2 °C may [cause losses] 50% greater than thought (Nature Climate Change, DOI: 10.1038/nclimate1356).  Earlier studies suggested that, by 2050, warming could cut wheat yields by 30 per cent in places like India – a figure that may now be optimistic. Yet global yields need to rise 50 per cent by then to feed the world’s growing population (Feb 3, 2012.  Extreme heat ages vital crop. New Scientist.)

Christina Larson.    February 8, 2013. Losing Arable Land, China Faces Stark Choice: Adapt or Go Hungry.  Science (339): 644-645

Warming is expected to trigger more episodes of heat stress that can sterilize the pollen of China’s most important staple grain: rice.

For half a century, Chinese scientists have been flocking to this spot on the eastern rim of the North China Plain, China’s breadbasket, to probe pressing agricultural questions. The region just north of the Yellow River is ground zero for tackling food-security challenges such as flood control, drought, wind erosion, and soil alkalinity. To this list of concerns, researchers have now added climate change and its potential impact on grain yields.

Across the globe, scientists and policy-makers are studying how climate change will affect agriculture. But in China, the question is especially urgent. The country has roughly 20% of the world’s population but only 7% of its arable land—a share that is shrinking in the face of rapid urbanization. From 1998 to 2006, more than 860,000 hectares of arable land were swallowed up by cities each year on average, according to data from China’s Ministry of Land and Resources.

Changing dietary habits, meanwhile, are fueling a rapid rise in food consumption. Accompanying the expansion of China’s middle class is a growing appetite for meat, which heaps more pressure on land and water resources. In 1978, China’s total meat consumption was 8 million tons, but by 2012 it had ballooned to 71 million tons, according to the Earth Policy Institute, a think tank in Washington, D.C. In 2011, one-third of China’s total grain harvest was converted to feed for livestock and aquaculture.

Climate change could exacerbate the fallout. According to the Chinese government’s Second National Assessment Report on Climate Change in 2011, rising sea levels are likely to threaten China’s eastern rice-growing regions by 2050, about the time that eight provinces in the north expect to face severe water shortages.

Already, annual mean temperatures near Yucheng rose 0.8°C between 1955 and 2011, according to China Meteorological Administration (CMA) records. The uptick is felt most in winter and spring—coinciding with the growing season for winter wheat, the region’s most important staple crop.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, rising temperatures in China’s heartland are translating into shorter overall growing periods. Although warming accelerates the early stages of wheat growth, the length of the reproductive period—the phase spanning flowering and maturity—remains roughly the same for cultivars now commonly grown in the region. Faster growth may mean fewer grains, spelling lower yields.

By comparing records compiled by CMA and provincial agricultural departments between 1980 and 2008, Tao has attempted to tease out the climate signal from other factors affecting yield, such as crop management and fertilizer use. In a paper published online last October in Climate Research, Tao linked changes across China in temperature, precipitation, and solar radiation over those 3 decades with 1.3% and 1.7% reductions in projected wheat and maize yields, respectively. That translates to hundreds of thousands of tons of lost harvest. A team at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing and the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C., has also identified a significant impact from climate change. They reported in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology in 2009 that warming caused a 4.5% decline in growth of wheat yields across China from 1979 to 2000.

Regional variation complicates the picture. In frigid northern China, where annual mean temperatures have risen faster than the national average, warming has extended arable land northward. But the potential agricultural benefits may be hard to reap, Tao warns, as climate change is expected to increase the frequency of drought and extreme weather events in an already water-stressed region.

Much of northern China is dry, making agriculture dependent upon irrigation from the Yellow River and the northern China aquifer. But pollution has degraded the quality of China’s “Mother River” and growing cities are siphoning off water for urban uses. Some 120 billion cubic meters more water were pumped from the aquifer than were replaced by rainfall over the last 4 decades, resulting in a steadily retreating water table (Science, 18 June 2010, p. 1462).

Rapid plant maturation and water shortages are threatening wheat in the north; heat stress and rising sea levels are the big worries in rice-growing areas in the south and east.

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Soot warming earth even more than thought

Posted on July 13, 2013 by
Richard A. Kerr Science 25 January 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6118 p. 382 DOI: 10.1126/science.339.6118.382

Soot Is Warming the World Even More Than Thought

A new study finds that soot is warming the climate about twice as fast as scientists had estimated.

With roughly 8 million tons of soot produced each year by burning everything from coal in power plants to oil in ship’s boilers, that’s bad news for the planet.

Scientists began the 232-page study—published last week in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres—4 years ago in response to calls for drastic reductions in emissions of soot, called black carbon in the scientific literature. Soot particles roughly 100 nanometers in diameter were obviously absorbing solar energy and passing it on to the atmosphere, adding to the warming caused by greenhouse gases.

Under the auspices of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project, 31 researchers from nine countries in a range of disciplines came together to assess the climate effects of soot. Working from published field observations, the authors looked at all the effects of soot on the planet’s retention of solar energy as well as the effects of other products of soot-producing combustion. They then tried to understand why different researchers got different answers from their climate models. “It’s a deeper view,” Bond says.

The new, deeper view—which drew 600 comments from 20 peer reviewers—finds a prominent role for soot in global warming.

All the ways soot can affect climate—among them by:

  • absorbing sunlight
  • shrinking cloud droplets and thus brightening clouds
  • darkening ice and snow

This adds 1.1 watts per square meter (W/m2) to the climate system, the study concludes.

“That’s a big number,” Bond says. It puts soot second behind carbon dioxide, which accounts for 1.66 W/m2.

Soot’s contribution to the warming is roughly twice as large as estimated in the 2007 assessment made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

 

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Climate Change deadlines: the longer we do nothing, the worse it gets

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Thomas F. Stocker Science 18 January 2013:
Vol. 339 no. 6117 pp. 280-282
DOI: 10.1126/science.1232468

The Closing Door of Climate Targets

Robust evidence from a range of climate–carbon cycle models shows that the maximum warming relative to pre-industrial times caused by the emissions of carbon dioxide is nearly proportional to the total amount of emitted anthropogenic carbon. This proportionality is a reasonable approximation for simulations covering many emissions scenarios for the time frame 1750 to 2500. This linear relationship is remarkable given the different complexities of the models and the wide range of emissions scenarios considered. It has direct implications for the possibility of achieving internationally agreed climate targets.

The considerations presented here are based on the assumption of a generic set of carbon dioxide emissions scenarios that reasonably approximate what is presently observed and what needs to be done to limit warming below a specific global mean temperature increase. In these idealized and illustrative emissions scenarios, emissions follow an exponential increase with a constant rate until a given year, after which the emissions decrease exponentially at a constant rate. The scenarios delineate the boundaries for any discussion and decision process for global measures limiting anthropogenic climate change.

Figure

For example, under these assumptions, keeping CO2-induced global warming below 2°C would require emissions reductions of almost 3.2% per year from 2020 onward; this is more than doubled if Global mitigation doesn’t begin until 2032. So every year counts; the longer the delay, the more reductions are required later.

Without mitigation of carbon dioxide, it becomes impossible to reach lower temperatures, the climate target closes irreversibly.

Under the present illustrative assumptions, the 1.5°C target expires after 2028, and the 2°C target vanishes after 2044. These times would be later if a period of stabilized emissions preceded the Global Mitigation Strategy (GMS). The more likely situation, however, is that a specific climate target becomes unreachable much earlier, because there are upper limits on sustained emissions reduction rates imposed by what the countries’ economies can realize collectively given the present state of technology and infrastructure.

Economic models estimate that feasible maximum rates of emissions reduction may not exceed about 5% per year (5). Under this assumption, the 1.5°C target has become unachievable before 2012, the 2°C target will become unachievable after 2027, and the 2.5°C target will become unreachable after 2040.

These years are only illustrative of the finite time that climate targets remain available options in the presence of continued greenhouse gas emissions.

As the emissions scenarios considered here illustrate, even well-intentioned and effective international efforts to limit climate change must face the hard physical reality of certain temperature targets that can no longer be achieved if too much carbon has already been emitted to the atmosphere. Both delay and insufficient mitigation efforts close the door on limiting global mean warming permanently. This constitutes more than a climate change commitment: It is the fast and irreversible shrinking, and eventual disappearance, of the mitigation options with every year of increasing greenhouse gas emissions.

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Climate change is causing increased salinity in water and soil world-wide

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

November 23, 2012. Climate Change–Induced Salinity Threatens Health.  Science Vol 338: 1028-1029

Sea-level rise, storm surges, and cyclones exacerbated by climate change have begun to severely affect coasts and river estuaries in low-income countries. The resulting increased salinity in soil and drinking water has health implications for large populations.

In coastal Bangladesh, natural drinking water sources such as rivers and groundwater are threatened by saltwater intrusion from the Bay of Bengal.

The increased salinity in drinking water will likely affect health over the long term [because it increases blood pressure], potentially leading to a substantial rise in cases of hypertension, as well as other associated health problems.

Salinity is also affecting other areas such as the Pearl River Delta, China (5); the San Joaquin Delta, California (6); and in the Netherlands (7), Australia (8), and Brazil (9). These estimates show that salinity may be an increasing problem in a number of coastal areas affected by intrusion of salty water into rivers.

To mitigate the risk of high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and other associated health problems caused by climate change–induced salt intrusions, we must take immediate action. Adaptation measures, including rainwater harvesting and solar distillation, require coordination among governments and nongovernmental organizations. Putting these prevention plans in place will be far less expensive than treating the disease that will occur later if salt intrusions continue unabated.

 

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Gonorrhea could soon be untreatable according to World Health Organization

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Science 15 June 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6087 pp. 1364-1365

WHO Warns of Drug-Resistant Gonorrhea

The World Health Organization (WHO) warned that gonorrhea, which infects 106 million people in the world each year, could soon become untreatable.

In its Global action plan to control the spread and impact of antimicrobial resistance in Neisseria gonorrhoea, released on 6 June, the public health arm of the United Nations sounds a dire note. “The loss of effective and readily available treatment options will lead to significant increases in morbidity and mortality,” the authors write.

Gonorrhea, if left untreated, can lead to infertility in men and women and increases the risk of contracting and transmitting HIV. It can also cause blindness in children born to infected women. The gonorrhea pathogen is now resistant to many common antibiotics such as penicillin and tetracyclines; only one class of antibiotics, called cephalosporins, has remained effective. But in the last few years, Australia, Sweden, Japan, the United Kingdom, and other countries have reported cases of resistance to cephalosporins.

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Invasive Species prevent new species from evolving: human induced mass extinction recovery will take longer than thought

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Richard A. Kerr. February 10, 2012.More Than One Way for Invaders to Wreak Havoc.   Science: Vol. 335:646

Ravenous pythons and anacondas invading the Florida Everglades are ravaging the local ecology. But a study published last month suggests that invasive species can have a more insidious effect on natural systems.

About 380 million years ago in the Devonian period, invasive species reigned rampant in the world ocean as the number of marine animal species plummeted. That ecological crisis has been classed as one of the Big Five mass extinctions. But paleontologists think the main problem was not that existing species died out but that new ones failed to form. And the new paper—published in the January issue of GSA Today—holds invasions responsible for that failure to speciate, at least in some marine animal groups.

The new look at the Devonian “has hit on something very interesting,” says paleontologist George McGhee of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. “We don’t know where modern invasives will lead us,” McGhee says, but the study raises the possibility that recovering from the current human-induced mass extinction could be much more difficult than thought.

Her deep-time study holds timely lessons for modern humans, Stigall says. Loss of habitat and the introduction of new predators and diseases may be driving the current mass extinction, she says, but “we’re looking at a worse outcome than currently predicted.” Whenever the human-induced mass extinction has run its course, invasives will be seriously inhibiting the creation of new species and retarding recovery. And the greater vulnerability of specialist species compared with generalists means that “even if tremendous resources are devoted to [specialist] species, they probably won’t be sustained in the long term.” Given limited resources, she says, conservationists should give more-resilient species in the middle range the highest priority.

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Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face & Pumalin NP in Chile

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

Article 1  Jimmy Langman. Spring 2012. Conversation: Doug Tompkins. Earth Island Journal.

I see Chile as overdeveloped. We have gone way past the carrying capacity of Earth to sustain all these people, activities, and consumption. Using all government measurements, nobody has shown that we’re as a globe underdeveloped. And yet we’re going for more overdevelopment.

Unemployment is preferable to doing harm. You got to take the long view: There are going to be tremendous ecological collapses from the overshoot perspective. A few years ago, we were called the doom-and-gloomers, but it’s all being borne out every day. There are limits to growth. Go back and look at William Catton’s book, Overshoot, on the ecological footprint from 1980. It’s better today than it was when he wrote it. Better in the sense that people accept it hands down today.

I joined the Sierra Club when I was 16. I hadn’t a clue about the deeper issues, the structural problems, the root causes of the extinction crisis, for example. And then how the worldview was affecting all of this: our epistemologies, our worldviews, our decisions, how we formed economies, and even down to our personal lifestyles. It took me a long time to get to this point. And I think for the most part I don’t believe that young people today are really clued in either. It takes a lot of scholarship. You have to read a lot. Activism helps.

You go back to places that you had been to ten years before, and there are clearcuts everywhere, bulldozers pushing a road into wilderness areas. You just keep seeing this interminable growth, this sort of implacable march of so-called progress, and you start saying, “Hey, wait a minute!”

And you start extending that idea into just about everywhere you look, and you see things are getting uglier. You start paying more attention to what’s happening in the media, such as reporting on everything from oil spills to lack of fish in the ocean to loss of forest cover, the 1,001 different environmental disasters that we read about every day. Every day they come up with something new!  It is one thing after another.

I feel lucky that I somehow escaped from the confines of the business class. Hardly anybody can escape there. They’re just chained under that worldview, whether they believe that capitalism is sacred, and, you know, the cornucopia of resources are for our exploitation. I feel so fortunate that somehow I managed to break out of that world and get to do something that really had more meaning.

I learned from my parents that you have to get pleasure out of what you’re doing, or don’t do it. And I also learned that you do a lot better and have a lot more satisfaction, and a lot more fun for that matter, by striving after excellence in the craft that you’re involved in. You can be in the wrong craft. That is why I got out of making stuff that nobody needs, because I came to realize that all that needless overconsumption is one of the driving forces of the extinction crisis.

There’s no doubt whatsoever that there’s no future in capitalism. It’s a relatively recent phenomenon. It’s probably no more than 500 years old, and it’s demonstrating over and over again that it is destroying the world. We are going to have to rethink that, and I wouldn’t even suggest that we are talking about other failed systems such as socialism and communism. We should take the best of socialism, the best of capitalism, and form new economic technologies that are going to sustain nature and not destroy it. I don’t think capitalism can survive: It’s built on the premise of endless growth, and anybody in their right mind knows you cannot grow endlessly. Even the worst impulses of capitalism are very difficult to contain, and the reforms end up changing it into something else.

———–

In 1990, Doug Tompkins, founder of clothing companies Esprit and The North Face, decided to get out of “making stuff that nobody needed” and instead focus on the issues that really mattered to him: corporate globalization, sustainable agriculture, preserving wild places, and stopping the clearcutting of ancient forests. Or, as he puts it, saving the environment and communities from an out-of-control economic model that each day is edging civilization “closer to the abyss.”

So Tompkins started the Foundation for Deep Ecology and moved to Chilean Patagonia, where he began using his fortune to buy up large parcels of land to form Pumalin Park. In the last two decades, Tompkins has expanded his holdings to include 740,000 acres of snow-capped volcanoes, Andean mountains, temperate rainforest, and turquoise-colored rivers. Today, Pumalin Park is considered the world’s largest private nature preserve.

Among his other conservation initiatives, Tompkins has donated private land to establish two coastal national parks in Chile and Argentina. A third, the half million-acre future Patagonia National Park in the Aysen region, is in the process of being transferred to Chile. His most ambitious project is still in the works: a huge property at Esteros del Ibera in northeastern Argentina, which he aims to make the key piece of a 6,500-square-mile national park to protect that region’s wetlands. (Langman)

Article 2. Jo Confino.11 July 2013. How technology has stopped evolution and is destroying the world. Doug Tompkins, founder of The North Face, on battles with Steve Jobs and why we need to dismantle our techno-industrial society. The Guardian.

It has become something of a mantra within the sustainability movement that innovations in technology can save the world. But rather than liberating us, Doug Tompkins, the cofounder of retail brands The North Face and Esprit, believes technology has enslaved us and is destroying the very health of the planet on which all species depend.

Tompkins, 70 has used his enormous wealth from selling both companies to preserve more land than any other individual in history, spending more than £200m buying over 2 million acres of wilderness in Argentina and Chile.

He challenges the view that technology is extending democracy, arguing that it is concentrating even more power in the hands of a tiny elite. What troubles him the most is that the very social and environmental movements that should be challenging the destructive nature of mega-technologies, have instead fallen under their spell.

“We have been poor on doing the systemic analysis and especially in the area of technology criticism,” says Tompkins. “Until we get better at that, I think we’re cooked, we’re going to continue to extinct species and we’re going to continue to dig the hole deeper of the whole eco-social crisis.

“If you just hold your cell phone for 30 seconds and think backwards through its production you have the entire techno-industrial culture wrapped up there. You can’t have that device without everything that goes with it. You see mining, transportation, manufacturing, computers, high-speed communications, satellite communications, it’s all there, you see and it’s that techno-industrial culture that’s destroying the world.”

Championing the environment

Tompkins is considered a hero in the deep ecology movement and works hand in hand with his wife Kris, the former CEO of the outdoor clothing and equipment company Patagonia.

They have been instrumental in creating two huge nature reserves and are in the process of creating another one in the South American region of Patagonia, despite opposition within Latin America, including being accused by rightwing Chilean politicians of effectively splitting the country in two in a conspiratorial land grab.

Together, they also fund numerous small activist NGOs, arguing that more established organizations such as WWF and Greenpeace have become too closely enmeshed with corporations.

“When WWF started out, they were doing some good stuff,” says Tompkins. “Now, they’re burning up money like crazy and they don’t really get too much done. Most all of these organizations grew too big for their own good”

Tompkins derides those who pin their hopes on technological developments in areas such as wind, solar and nuclear as coming from the smart resource management school, saying they fail to understand that this will not address the core issue, which is that capitalism is addicted to growth.

“Resource efficiency is the wrong metric,” he says. “We should use nature as the measure, using nature’s wisdom as a template for our economic systems.

“Capitalism doesn’t function when it starts to contract and we can see that quite clearly right here in the eurozone. It’s like pushing a giant monster underwater that’s gasping for air. It goes nuts. Capitalism may have all sorts of things that are good, but ultimately it’s bad for everyone.”

Tompkins believes most sustainability practitioners have made the mistake of spending their time creating strategies and projects, without taking the time to gain a deep understanding of how we got into a mess in the first place. As a result, they may end up doing more harm than good.

“As we get sucked more and more into the technosphere, we become less and less capable of understanding it because it becomes a technological milieu that we’re in,” he warns.

“It’s similar to air; we’re basically unconscious about the air. What we need is to understand what technologies themselves bring with them when they’re introduced into culture.

“If you extinct all the biodiversity and we end up living on a sandheap with a Norwegian rat and some cockroaches, that doesn’t have too much logic to it. That would show that our behavior as a civilization today is to the pathological. But, if you make a systemic analysis, that’s exactly where we’re going.”

A strategic embrace, not a substantive embrace

Tompkins was a friend of Steve Jobs and the two men had many arguments over the years, with the former Apple CEO trying to convince Tompkins that computers were going to save the world, and Tompkins insisting the opposite.

Tompkins recalls the Apple advertising campaign that highlighted the 1,001 great things that the PC was going to give to us and would tell Jobs that these represented a mere 5% of what the computer did while the other 95% was all negative and exacerbating the biodiversity crisis.

“He’d get mad at me when I’d tell him that,” says Tompkins.

“He was locked into a view that these technologies were going to bring all these good things. But that’s typical of the purveyors of new technology. They’re selling their product and their idea, and their prestige, their power and their influence. Their self-esteem is wrapped up in that. It’s impossible for them to see it or to admit it, you see? Because, it pulls the rug out from underneath their purpose, especially when it’s attached to a moral purpose.

“That’s typical of everybody who introduces a new widget into society. They don’t tell you the negative side effects that this introduction of this new invention could provoke.”

While there has been much talk of the democratization that the internet has brought, Tompkins points out that while individuals use it largely for their own narrow interests, large corporations are the big winners as they are able to take advantage of it to become ever more powerful.

Is technology stemming evolution?

Rather than adding to our knowledge, Tompkins argues computers and smartphones represent “deskilling devices; they make us dumber. We’re immersed in a system that now requires the use of a cell phone just to get around, just to function and so the logic of that cell phone has been imposed on us.

“The computer is a mechanism for acceleration, it accelerates economic activity and this is eating up the world. It’s eating up resources, it’s processing, it’s manufacturing, it’s distributing, it’s consuming. That’s what the computer’s real work does and it does that 24/7, 365 days a year, non-stop just to satisfy our own narrow needs.”

Tompkins foresees a dark future dominated as he puts it by more ugliness, damaged landscapes, extinct species, extreme poverty, and lack of equity and says humanity faces a stark choice; either to transition now to a different system or face a painful collapse. “The extinction crisis is the mother of all crises. There will be no society, there will be no economy, there will be no art and culture on a dead planet basically. We’ve stopped evolution.”


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China the epicenter of bacteria resistant to all antibiotics

Posted on July 13, 2013 by
Mara Hyistendahl  Science 18 May 2012: Vol. 336 no. 6083 p. 795

China Takes Aim at Rampant Antibiotic Resistance

Bacteria that cannot be stopped by common drugs are proliferating around the world (Science, 18 July 2008, p. 356). But a health care system that encourages doctors to churn out prescriptions, intensive marketing by pharmaceutical companies, and heavy use of antibiotics in animal husbandry and fisheries make China a special case. More than 60% of Staphylococcus aureus isolates from Chinese patients in surveyed hospitals in 2009 were methicillin-resistant—the dreaded MRSA—up from 40% in 2000. The proportion of Streptococcus pneumoniae isolates resistant to macrolides, meanwhile, now tops 70%. Roughly the same share of Escherichia coli isolates are resistant to quinolones—the highest rate in the world.

“Antibiotic resistance is a serious public health threat in China,” says Xiao Yonghong, an infectious disease specialist at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou.  Drug resistance is most acute in densely populated cities in the east. Erythromycin-resistant S. pneumoniae, for example, appeared in 94% of isolates from children tested in hospitals here in 2004 and 2005.

China’s woes are in part the consequence of earlier health care reforms. Until the early 1980s, China had government-provisioned care bolstered by “barefoot doctors”: minimally trained health workers who ministered to patients in remote areas. But near-universal care was ultimately scrapped in favor of a free-market approach. Hospitals needed new revenue streams.

A burgeoning drug industry came to the rescue. The government allowed hospitals to skim a 15% profit from pharmaceutical sales, and doctors’ pay was soon linked to sales. Over-prescription became rampant. “The whole thing really boils down to perverse incentives,” says Lucy Reynolds, a public health expert at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s European Center on Health of Societies in Transition. By the 1990s, Xiao, who then worked in a hospital in Chongqing, noticed that something was awry: “Patients weren’t responding to treatment.”

In the meantime, growing numbers of Chinese farmers discovered that rearing livestock on antibiotics yielded larger animals and boosted profits. In a 2007 survey, Xiao estimated that nearly half of the 210,000 tons of antibiotics produced in China end up in animal feed. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration warned in 2007 that Chinese farm-raised fish are laced with fluoroquinolones and other antibiotics not approved for use in U.S. seafood.

Those drugs find their way into the human gut. In an unpublished study, Zhu Baoli of the Institute of Microbiology in Beijing and colleagues sequenced gut microbes in Chinese, Danish, and Spanish people. Chinese guts had the highest number of antibiotic-resistant genes. They were also dominated by genes resistant to tetracycline, which in China is mostly used in animal feed. While that might not affect clinical treatment with drugs other than tetracycline, Zhu says, “some drugs that are used in animals are also used in humans.”

Some Chinese pop antibiotics the way Americans pop vitamins. Until 2004, antibiotics were legally available over the counter in China, and families sometimes kept a stash at home.

Even with further reforms, significant obstacles remain. In a survey in Guizhou Province in southwest China, Reynolds found that many doctors mistakenly believed their patients—not the bacteria inhabiting their bodies—had developed antibiotic resistance. Meanwhile, resistance is climbing. Says Zhu: “You now have genes resistant to almost every antibiotic available on the market.”

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Phytoplankton have declined 40%: they provide food and oxygen for all creatures on Earth

Posted on July 13, 2013 by

This article from NewScientist discusses how phytoplankton are disappearing — and they provide half of the food animals both in the ocean and on land depend on, plus produce a great deal of the oxygen we breathe.

Throw in overfishing, pollution, ocean acidification from rising carbon dioxide levels and ocean deoxygenation due to warmer water, and both the rate and amount of extinction of homo sapiens and most other species looks pretty grim.

7 April 2012. Bob Holmes. Too-blue oceans: The invisible famine. NewScientist.

The invisible world [of microscopic plants and animals in seawater] is absolutely vital to life on Earth:

  1. Most of the oxygen you are breathing was made by minuscule algae and bacteria.
  2. These plants, known as phytoplankton, provide half of the food on which all the animals on this planet depend.
  3. Not just ocean creatures, but land-dwellers too.  Three billion people depend in part on seafood for protein, and the livelihoods of nearly a tenth of the world’s population are linked to fisheries.
  4. Phytoplankton levels have dropped by almost 40 per cent since the 1940s (Worm, 2010. (Nature, vol 466, p 591).
  5. Their numbers have declined in 8 out of 10 ocean regions at about 1 per cent per year over the last 40 years.

Why?

What we do know is that in many parts of the oceans, phytoplankton growth is limited by a lack of “fertilizer” – vital nutrients such as nitrate, phosphate and iron.

Upwelling of deep water and big storms that stir the oceans are the main source of these nutrients.

What makes Worm’s decline so scary is that it seems to be happening worldwide at the same time.

The obvious suspect is global warming. More than 90% of the heat retained by Earth as a result of rising greenhouse gases ends up in the sea. Plankton do grow faster in warmer conditions, but warming has a far less desirable effect, too. As surface waters warm, they become less dense and this makes it harder for cold, nutrient-rich water to rise to the surface. Less mixing means less fertilizer, and if phytoplankton run out of nutrients they cannot grow however warm the water is. So on balance, warmer waters are expected to reduce phytoplankton growth, and this is just what Worm’s team found. Apart from in the Arctic and Southern oceans, there was a strong link between higher sea surface temperatures and lower phytoplankton levels.

Oceanographers almost all agree that warming will lead to a decline in phytoplankton, but most expected only a small fall over the coming decades. And while there have already been dramatic falls in fish catches in many parts of the world, these have been attributed to overfishing rather than falling phytoplankton.

Other scientists disagreed with these numbers, so Worm and his team went back to their original data, and pulled in other data from scientific teams studying this issue. Their initial results still point to a worldwide decline of somewhere between 20 and 70 per cent.

“From everything we have done so far, we’re seeing a decline,” says Worm. “No matter what we include or exclude, we are always seeing a decline. The magnitude of the decline, and the regional detail, is still in question – but that there is a decline, I have very little doubt.”

A similar study in 2006 came to much the same conclusions. “What we see in the satellite record, very clearly, is there is a very strong relation between climate-driven changes in the surface temperature and the plankton,” says team member Michael Behrenfeld of Oregon State University in Corvallis.

The Future

There’ll be winners and losers because of big regional differences —  phytoplankton levels rose in two-fifths of the ocean.

The bad news is that even in areas where productivity rises, there will not necessarily be more fish in the sea. In temperate regions, the phytoplankton tends to consist of large cells that are eaten by large zooplankton, such as copepods, and then by fish. Phytoplankton in the tropics, in contrast, tend to be tiny cyanobacteria, which are eaten by tiny zooplankton, which are eaten by slightly larger ones and so on. There are several more links in the food chain – and 90% of the energy is lost at each link. This is part of the reason why tropical waters tend to support fewer fish, and thus less vigorous fisheries, than cold waters.

As the oceans get warmer, some cold-water regions are shifting towards the longer-food-chain regime. In the North Atlantic, the boundary between the two types of food chain has already shifted 1000 kilometers north in recent decades.

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Whirlwind Power

Posted on July 11, 2013 by

Sounds great — but will it scale up?  That’s been the downfall of many projects that work small scale, like biofuels from algae & cellulosic, etc.  And as I say at the top of many of these posts, this is an oil crisis, that’s what 97% of our transportation system runs on.  Plus our electric grid is aging and falling apart, not being geared up for handling more electricity, which doesn’t solve our problems, and the grid and this whirlwind device depend on oil throughout their life cycle from mining, construction, transport, and maintenance.

11 March 2013. Hal Hodson. Reap the whirlwind for cheap renewable power. NewScientist

The Solar Vortex system (see diagram) is the brainchild of Mark Simpson and Ari Glezer at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. It relies on the temperature difference between hot air close to the ground and cooler air just a meter or so above it. As the hot air rises and cool air falls, convection currents form between these layers, leading to small whirlwinds or dust devils.

Solar Vortex channels these currents with an array of fixed blades or vanes. They funnel the airflow into a vortex, which turns a turbine at the device’s center. No power is needed to kick the process off as the position of the vanes helps the vortex to start spontaneously. As the warm air rises, more air rushes in, fueling the artificial whirlwind.

Maintenance and installation costs are much lower than for a conventional wind farm because there is no need to put turbines on high towers to catch the wind. Since ground temperature varies slowly through the day, the system’s energy output is more constant too, and stays steady for a few hours after sunset, when consumer demand is often highest.

Glezer had the idea after living in Arizona. “He had experienced naturally occurring dust devils and the kinetic energy they contain, and wanted to create a method for extracting that power,” Simpson says.

Simpson has tested a small, 1-meter version of the vortex that drives a turbine to create a few watts of power using nothing more than a hot, sun-baked metal sheet. However, the power output scales up rapidly as you increase the turbine’s diameter. Simpson calculates that a 10-meter turbine will produce 50 kilowatts of power using the same method. The team says that an array of these vortex turbines could produce 16 megawatts for every square kilometer they cover. This is not bad considering conventional wind turbines yield just 3 and 6 megawatts per square kilometer. In fact, the team estimates that the electricity produced by a Solar Vortex will be 20% cheaper than energy from wind turbines and 65% cheaper than solar power.

The US government’s clean energy start-up shop is convinced: the Advanced Research Projects Agency Energy (ARPA-E) announced its decision to fund some large-scale trials last week. Simpson is due to present a paper in July detailing the trials at the ASME International Conference on Energy Sustainability in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Working with ARPA-E, Simpson and Glezer plan to have a 10 kW model running within two years, with tests on intermediate models scheduled for July. They want to build a 50kW model in the future.

“The science is solid,” says Nilton Renno, who researches thermodynamics at the University of Michigan. “Once you induce circulation nearby, the vortex can be self-sustaining.”

Steven Chu, the outgoing energy secretary, is interested; he visited the team briefly at the ARPA-E conference in Washington DC last week. “We would like to start with building a small-scale farm of these things,” Simpson says. “At that point we start to produce real

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