Global, you know, warming

Governor Jan Brewer offers up a Palinesque explanation of her stand on climate change:

Everybody has an opinion on it, you know, and I, you know, I probably don’t believe that it's man made. I believe that, you know, that weather elements are controlled maybe by different things.

Or, you know, I might believe that it's maybe, you know, cause by all those decapitated heads and things that all the, you know, illegals leave out in our deserts. Also.

Worst disaster ever. Really?

On one hand we have BP executives, Rush Limbaugh, and various Southern politicians saying the Gulf oil contamination from the Deepwater Horizion disaster is no big deal. The Gulf is a big place, nature will clean itself up, and you won't be able to tell anything ever happened there in a few years. On the other hand, we have oil industry critics and environmentalists saying it is indeed a big deal and that the leak will cause permanent damage to the ecologies and economies of the US Gulf coast. And then we have this:

If even BP’s backup plans fail, it would cause a pollution disaster "heretofore unseen by humanity," said one expert.

It is this rapidly accelerating realization that is giving BP’s attempt Wednesday to cap the well new political and environmental urgency.

The worst-case scenario is hoped and believed to be a continued flow of 5,000 barrels per day, and by some estimates vastly more, until August, when BP completes “relief wells” to intercept the damaged well.

But, experts say, there are no sure things when operating equipment a mile under the water and 13,000 feet below the ocean floor.

Professor Tad Patzek, who heads the Department of Petroleum and Geosystems Engineering at the University of Texas-Austin, gives the relief well a 90 percent chance of success. But he’d rather not consider the other 10 percent.

"As a petroleum professional, I don’t even admit the possibility that that might be possible," he said when asked about a failure to stop the flow. "That would be an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity."

Keep in mind, this is not the ranting of a tree-hugging granola-head (like me); it is the professional opinion of someone within the oil industry. I think any one left of Limbaugh will agree that if we don't manage a permanent closure of the well, the environmental impact of the leak will be orders of magnitude beyond anything we've been able to watch on our teevees in recent years, but will it be "an environmental disaster of a caliber that was heretofore unseen by humanity?" I have no doubt that Mr. Patzek is a first rate engineer and geologist, but how does he rate as an historian? Has humanity ever witnessed a worse environmental disaster?

Ignoring the human economic impacts, here are some worst-case, long-term environmental impacts that leap to my mind:

• As the crude hits the beaches and soaks into the coastal marshlands, it will render the majority of that area unfit for most animal life. These marshlands are made up of several unique ecologies. As they die, a number of species will likely go extinct.
  
• The beaches are birthing grounds for endangered sea turtles and the marshes are a vital stop on the paths of many migratory bird species. Again, a blow like this could cause several extinctions and, at a minimum, will add a severe new pressure to the survivor species' life cycles.
  
• If the marsh grasses die, the barrier islands will wash away exposing the wetlands to sea storms and dramatic erosion all along the coast.
  
• In the sea, the oil has contaminated the entire water column, not just the top or bottom.
  
• The microbes that will slowly digest the oil on the seabed, suck up vast amounts of oxygen, creating anoxic (oxygen free) zones where virtually no life is impossible.

I'm sure I missed a lot, but these are the main points that I can think of. In short, the oil is going to create a dead zone that will extend, in places, dozens of miles inland and as far as two hundred miles off shore. The coastline itself will change in certain areas. Several species are already threatened with extinction by the leak. The longer the well leaks, the worse the local effects will be and the further afield it will spread.

That's pretty bad, but is it the worst environmental disaster humanity has ever witnessed? Right off the top of my head, global warming seems to be a real contender in that contest. Our part in the end-Pleistocene extinction of mammoths and other megafauna could be another contender. Any others? Leave your suggestions and arguments in the comments. The only rules I'll set are that the disaster has to have been clearly environmental in nature, that it must arguable have been human caused, and that it must have happened in the last fifty thousand years or so. Feel free to argue for other or different rules.

From "drill, baby, drill" to "burn, baby, burn"

Looking at the coverage of the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, I'm puzzled by something. Several of the commenters I've looked at have expressed horror at the idea of burning the oil at sea. Two things: first, we were planning on burning most of that oil any way; second, while bad, burning it at sea is orders of magnitude less horrible than letting it hit the beaches. The wreckage of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig has already pumped out about half as much oil as the Exxon Valdez lost in 1989. It will keep leaking for days, if not weeks, more. The oil from the Exxon Valdez spill traveled 460 miles and covered 1300 miles of shoreline with varying amounts of oil. In the Gulf, that would be equal to covering the beaches from the mouth of the Mississippi, across eastern Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and another 200 miles or so of the Florida panhandle. It would coat the Breton National Wildlife Refuge and the Gulf Islands National Seashore, penetrate into the lagoons behind the barrier islands, and foul Mobile Bay. It would cost billions to clean up, as far as that is even possible. The environmental damage would linger for decades. The economic damage would possible surpass Hurricane Katrina. With this alternative, I say "burn, baby, burn."

Oh No!!

The Antarctic polar bears are extinct. Now maybe they'll take global warming seriously.

One of our seas is missing

The Aral Sea (actually a lake) was a landlocked body of water in Central Asia. A half century ago, it was the world's fourth largest inland sea. It was fed by two rivers, the Syr Daria and the Amu Daria (the ancient Oxus). Beginning in 1959, the Soviet Union began a series of large irrigation projects aimed at increasing amount the amount of commercial crops, mostly cotton, grown in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan.

As less and less water reached the sea, it began to dry up. As the shoreline receded, fishing villages became landlocked. Soon, that ceased to be a problem as increasing salinity killed most of the fish in the sea. Dust blowing off the lake bed, carrying with it salt and various pollutants, has become a public health hazzard. With the loss of the moderating effect of a large body of water, the summers have been getting hotter and the winters colder in that part of Central Asia.


By 2000 the sea had separated into three, barely connected, parts. The larger, southern, part had divided into a shallow eastern lobe and a deeper western lobe. The northern part of the sea, which had always been somewhat seperate from the rest, was an independent lake. In 2005, Kazakhstan built a dam between the lake’s northern and southern parts to stop the loss of water from the north. While the northern lake has returned to a degree of health, this doomed the south. The eastern lobe completely dried up earlier this year. Ironically, the northern lobe, which was once called the Small Aral Sea, may soon be the only Aral Sea.




Last week

Illegal immigrants threaten life in Pacific Northwest!

I can't wait till Lou Dobbs gets hold of this story.

Beth Sanderson, of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center here in Seattle, just released the results of a study into the effect of invasive species on native salmon. The results are not good.

[Sanderson's team constructed an] explicit database that identified the presence of invasive species in roughly 1800-square-kilometer, hydrologically connected areas throughout Washington, Oregon, and Idaho. The number of invasive species in each area ranged between 86 and 486, the majority being plants and fish.

Sanderson and colleagues assembled reports of predation by six nonindigenous fish species: catfish, black and white crappie, largemouth bass, smallmouth bass, walleye, and yellow perch. Hundreds of thousands to millions of juvenile salmonids were being consumed by these species at just a handful of sites, and for some of the species, salmonids constituted a large fraction of their diet.

Salmon populations on the West Coast have dramatically dropped over the last few years. Till now, most of the research into the decline has focused on direct human impacts like over-fishing, dams, and environmental degradation in the spawning grounds. The indirect effects of invasive species on the salmon ecology has been neglected. This is a rather odd oversight. Every hiker, gardener, and forester in the Northwest is aware of the negative impact of invasive species on dry land.

If Dobbs and the Minutemen would do something about this kind of foreign invasion they might finally be worth a damn.

New Ecuador constitution recognizes evolution

On September 28, the people of Ecuador will vote on a new constitution and that constitution is expected to gain easy approval. The new constitution includes a five article section granting rights to nature as a whole. The section refers to nature as Pachamama, a local pagan goddess, the equivalent to Mother Earth or Mother Nature in Anglo-American idiom. Nature has the right to "integral restoration" and people of any nationality can petition the courts in the name of nature. The government Ecuador is obligated to protect nature and prevent extinction or harmful alteration of ecosystems and natural cycles.

In a choice of phrase that would be almost unthinkable in the Untied States, the first article states that nature has the right to maintain "its processes in evolution." While it's possible to read that use of the word "evolution" to mean simply "change" and not to refer to the transformation of species through Darwinian processes, the very presence of the word would be too controversial to survive in this country. But in Catholic Ecuador, things are different.

This is one of the most unambiguous extensions of rights to a nonhuman entity that any country has attempted in modern times. In the United States, corporations acquired individual rights over a century ago almost by accident. Laws in Western countries against cruelty to animals regularly dance around the issue of whether this constitutes rights. Indigenous populations often exercise rights as groups that are separate from their rights as individuals. And Fascist countries tried to reverse the whole Western trend of individual rights by reasserting the superiority of the rights of the nation and state over the individual. But this is something new. The Ecuadoran move to encode the rights of nature in the constitution goes beyond anything yet attempted. It might prove to be a dead letter in practice, but it is definitely a precedent to watch.