Dot Earth Blog: Of Humans, Oil, and Whales
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An artist's rendering of a bowhead whale diving. (Richard Ellis) Our endless quest for that wondrous liquid fossil fuel, oil, is expanding toward the ends of the Earth as higher prices justify more extreme extraction efforts. Jad Mouawad, my friend and colleague covering the global oil industry, ventured to frigid Barrow, Alaska, recently to write about [...].
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It's time for a research resurgence into using small water plants to produce oil and ethanol. In Autopia.
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If everyone on Earth generated the 20 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by each United States citizen yearly, the global tally now would be 134 billion tons a year, instead of 29 billion. That's a lot of billions.
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The oceans are absorbing carbon dioxide that has built up in the air, turning water more acidic and creating potentially catastrophic conditions for marine life.
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Life & style: We burn fossil fuel in the developed world - and plant trees in Africa. It sounds like a win-win situation. But is it? Mark Honigsbaum reports.
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Yes, it's dirt-cheap and will mobilize people throughout the developing world. And that is exactly why it poses a threat to the environment and global energy supplies.
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A writer and a reader see both sides of ExxonMobil.
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Not all of the Arctic thaw is caused by man. Nature plays a role, too, but that doesn't let us off the hook for the damage we've done.
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( Philadelphia -- November 28, 2004) --  Dozens of birds have fallen victim to a big oil slick on the delaware river. A tanker spilled 30-thousand gallons of crude oil into the river between Philadelphia and southern New Jersey.
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Science & environment: Ben Goldacre: Wondrous, amazing, buy-more-now positive results of even more trials of fish oils have started appearing all over the media.
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When environmental protestors boarded a Japanese whaling ship in the Southern Ocean, images of the action quickly flashed on the world&#39;s TV sets, followed by photos from the Japanese ship after the protestors were taken into custody. Getting these images out is crucial if either side is to win the global PR battle, but doing so can be problematic when you&#39;re at sea, thousands of kilometers from the nearest cell phone network or broadband connection.To solve their problems, both sides take advantage of digital video and photo technology to get the footage, then look to the skies and tap into the global satellite communications network run by London-based Inmarsat. The company specializes in providing voice and data services to maritime vessels and other users at sea, or in remote areas that traditional telecommunications networks don&#39;t reach.On Tuesday, as the protestors approached the Japanese whaling vessel &quot;Yushin Maru 2,&quot; a digital video camera was rolling onboard the small inflatable craft sent from the Sea Shepard Conservation Society&#39;s ship, &quot;Steve Irwin.&quot; The camera caught the moment when two of the conservationists jumped aboard, and within seconds the video was speeding back toward the Steve Irwin on the inflatable.Once back onboard, the video was fed into a Macbook Pro laptop and edited into a 13MB MPEG2 clip that was just 12 seconds long, said Jonny Vasic, a spokesman for the society.&quot;One of our big tools in these whale wars is these video and digital still cameras. They really help us expose the bad guys,&quot; said Vasic.The clip was then sent via satellite to the society&#39;s FTP server and made available to the world&#39;s media.The ship&#39;s satellite communications system is a $35,000 &quot;Sailor Fleet 77&quot; unit that was donated to the society last year by Australia&#39;s Bluetongue Brewery. It supports up to 256Kbps&#160;transmission, although actually getting that speed depends on several factors. In calm seas, a gyro-based mount keeps the antenna pointed at the satellite, but in heavy seas, maintaining a reliable signal can be a problem. Keeping the link gets increasingly difficult as the ship goes further south because the satellite appears very low on the horizon.&quot;It&#39;s about 90 percent reliable,&quot; said Vasic.Crew onboard the &quot;Steve Irwin&quot; are also using the satellite link to attempt to send e-mail to the Japanese ship, in addition to marine-band radio calls, in an attempt to secure the release of their two members, who remain aboard the &quot;Yushin Maru 2.&quot;The Institute of Cetacean Research, the Tokyo-based organization that operates the &quot;Yushin Maru 2,&quot; declined to comment on the technology at its disposal, citing security reasons.&quot;I&#39;m sorry to say, you might be Greenpeace posing as a journalist,&quot; said Gabriel Gomez, a spokesman for the group in Tokyo, when contacted by telephone on Thursday.The systems employed by the Japanese group don&#39;t appear as sophisticated. Only a handful of still images from the ship have been released by the group to the media, and they are a relatively low VGA (640 pixels by 480 pixels) resolution. No video has been made available.The satellite communications technology being employed by the two ships is increasingly being used by media, governmental and relief organizations in remote areas. Earlier this month, Cable News Network (CNN) won a Technology and Engineering Emmy Award for its satellite news gathering system based on Inmarsat&#39;s BGAN broadband system. The BGAN system offers a standard IP (Internet Protocol) connection as fast as 492Kbps and is small enough that it can be built into a backpack.
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40 per cent 'heavily affected' by human activities A new global map compiled by analysing 17 different factors including fishing, global warming and pollution has revealed that 40 per cent of the world's oceans are heavily affected by human activities, while just a small percentage of seawater has completely escaped the effects of man's heavy hand.â¦
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Oil prices, poor management, terrorism -- what's not to hate about the airline industry?
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GENEVA -- Humanity's reliance on fossil fuels, the spread of cities, the destruction of natural habitat for farmland, and exploitation of the oceans are destroying earth's ability to sustain life, the environmental group World Wildlife Fund warned yesterday.
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International Oil Daily, 27 October 2004 - With oil prices at record highs, governments must accelerate technological innovations &quot;that radically alter how we produce and use energy&quot; to create a sustainable energy system, the International Energy Agency
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AP DE BON DESIR, Quebec, Aug. 11 - A few miles from this spit along the pink granite coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, there is a sheltered cove that has witnessed the full span of the human relationship with whales.
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Seabirds' blood can hold vital clues about the long-term ecological impacts of oil spills, researchers suggest.