Fig 1. A description of this figure is found at the bottom of this posting

Recently I was reading about the Oregon coast and discovered that, since 2002, the region has experienced sudden periods during the summer months in which the shallow ocean water dramatically loses oxygen levels below those required to sustain normal marine life. The first occurrence of this event took place between Newport and Florence along the Oregon coast, and included Yachats, the small town where we stayed. Though I did not personally see any evidence of fish or invertebrate kills, these surges of hypoxic coastal ocean water take place further out in the shallow ocean water beyond the shores and are evident at depths up to about 50 meters or so: because of the intense wave action, tidal pools probably get effective oxygenation through wave aeration; its an excellent mechanism for mixing water and air and the Pacific ocean seems very adept at creating intense wave activity. I have always appreciated how much better the Pacific ocean is at generating large, strong waves when compared to its Atlantic cousin.

When hypoxic events occur, many fish are able to swim out of oxygen depleted regions into more sustainable water, whereas the slower invertebrates are stuck, and in the case of the Oregon coast, thousands of invertebrates have been dying every summer when the ocean becomes intolerably hypoxic. You can view a Quick Time video clip of a fish/invertebrate kill photographed underwater along the Oregon coast here: it amounts to a massive kill.

Marine biologists tell us that normal ocean surface water contains 5 to 8 ml of oxygen per liter of ocean. But during these anoxic spells in Oregon, the measured oxygen level was as low as 1.4 ml/l, too low for most fish and invertebrate survival. Many regions of the world have hypoxic ocean waters, some of which have been created by eutrophication, or fertilizer runoff from intense agriculture, which produces blooms of plankton that reduce the oxygen content of the water. But the scientists who initially investigated the Oregon coast hypoxia knew that it was unlikely to be caused by eutrophication, simply because farming along the Oregon coast didn’t seem sufficient to generate significant fertilizer runoff.  Initially, marine biologists thought that they were viewing a once-in-a-lifetime event, but anoxic waters along the coast of Oregon are now an annual event and have been detected each summer since the first large scale fish and invertebrate kills of 2002. From as early as mid-April to mid-October, hypoxic water has been the rule, though fluctuations in the intensity of oxygen depletion give variance to its magnitude. To this day, the cause of this phasic oxygen deprivation is unknown, though several theories seem to be prominent among oceanographers and marine biologists. Some have even considered this phenomenon to be part of a natural, long-term cycle of ocean behavior.  But, no significant letup has occurred and in 2006, the most extreme case of anoxia took place in which coastal waters lost all detectable oxygen levels for four weeks. In that instance starfish, mussels and rockfish died in large numbers, while other, more mobile fish were able to flee the hypoxic zone, which grew to 3,000 square kilometers. Furthermore the region has been monitored for oxygen content at different depths going back to 1950 and from 1950 to 1999, no anoxic events were recorded (see Fig 1).

The fishing industry along the coast of Oregon has been understandably alarmed about this recurrent hypoxic condition, as fishing brings in hundreds of millions of dollars each year into the economy. But Oregon’s hypoxic summer coastal waters are part a global problem, though the causes of ocean hypoxia vary for each region and always have a local component as well. Increasingly the oxygen content of our ocean waters has been receiving more attention and there is broad agreement on the impact that global climate change may have on ocean oxygenation levels, including i)  a failure to properly mix the water column through changes in oceanic currents, that could be seriously impacted by global climate change and its effect on the natural oceanic currents which exchange cool norther waters with warmer waters near the equatorial zones and ii) the warming of the ocean water itself reduces its capacity to dissolve oxygen, a strict reality of chemical reactions.  According to the 2007 IPCC report, from the period 1961 to 2003, global ocean temperature have risen by 0.10°C from the surface to a depth of 700 meters.

Biologists believe that the magic number for oxygen comes in at about 2 ml/l, below which much of the ocean fauna cannot exist; there are now large regions of our ocean, particularly those near tropical areas, where the intermediate depths of the water have reached this level of incompatibility.  While there is plenty of evidence for an increase in the temperature of the ocean over the last fifty years, so far, there is no evidence that the normal ocean currents have been altered by global climate change conditions, at least not for the major currents we concern ourselves with. If there is a compensatory side to global climate change, it is that tropical storms, whose frequency and magnitude can be correlated with ocean water temperature, help to force mixing of the ocean water with the more oxygen rich air, serving to overcome other tendencies to form oxygen-depleted zones, though the significance of this so called “benefit” has been hard to guesstimate. Who wants to be on the sidelines cheering on another Katrina?

The Oregon coast is part of a large West Coast ocean ecosystem, in which shallow, oxygen-rich ocean water, found at depths up to about 50 meters, leads to much deeper, oxygen deficient water found beyond the continental shelf, where depths become hundreds of meters or more. Those deeper regions are poor in oxygen but rich in nutrients. Measurements of oxygen levels as deep as 600 meters have been ongoing in the Oregon region for decades, which, until 2002, did not reveal coastal water hypoxia (Fig 1, left). So, if eutrophication doesn’t explain Oregon’s coastal oxygen deficiency, what does?

The most parsimonious explanation for Oregon’s summer anoxia seems to be that the deeper oxygen minimum zone (OMZ) has been upwelling at higher rates than normal and mixing with the more superficial oxygen-enriched waters in disproportionate ways that did not happen before, but might still be part of a very long periodic cycle that could last for decades or more. Others suggest the more obvious,  that what’s going on in Oregon is a perfect storm created by changes in weather, climate and ocean currents. If so, this should alarm all of us, because it illustrates how quickly the ocean environment can change. We must remember that 71% of the surface of the earth is covered by ocean water.

This new mixing between the two pools of ocean water not only tells us that the oceans can change quickly, but that they can do so with a surprisingly quick lethal outcome. There is clearly a balance force at work here in nature with ocean water mixing that is difficult to comprehend, but mind-numbing to appreciate when it doesn’t work to its historic perfection. It’s hard not to get analytical about this observation without thinking how finely tuned it all is, how interdependent the global system is and then wonder how badly out of tune we have forced mother nature’s engine for sustaining life on the land as well as the ocean. Surely we need to learn better than we ever have that land and ocean are joined at the hip. Excessive carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is acidifying the ocean, but doing so much more and in so many different ways, most of which we cannot yet articulate. Perhaps our very survival is the biological experiment. But for this experiment, mother nature is sitting on the sidelines, as we started the ball rolling on this one.

We use models to predict the impact of global climate change, but with the oceans, we have a laboratory. We should all be jumping into the oceans and making measurements! If we can’t save the country, let’s put everyone to work saving the planet!

RFM

(below is a copy of the figure illustration taken from the Chan et al Science article (note: hydrocasts are water samples obtained from a group bottles that are coupled to one another and sunk to get samples of water at different depths)

Fig. 1. Taken from a Science Brevia paper by Chan et al (Science, 319, 920, 2008). Dissolved oxygen profiles during the upwelling season (mid-April to mid-October) in the upper 800 m of the continental shelf and slope of Oregon (42.00°N to 46.00°N). (A) 1950 to 1999 from the World Ocean Database and Oregon State University archives (n = 3101 hydrocasts, blue). (B) (A) with additional data for 2000 to 2005 (n = 834 hydrocasts, green). (C) (A) and (B) plus data for 2006 (n = 220 hydrocasts,red). The black vertical line denotes the 0.5 ml/l threshold. (Insets) Overlapping locations of hydrographic (blue, green, and red) and remotely operated vehicle (black) stations through time and the 100-m and 1000-m isobaths.

Peak Oil Production and Imports in U.S.

In response to CNOOC’s offer for UNOCAL, the Republicans, ever anxious to demonstrate why the free market system doesn’t apply to essential commodities, moved to prevent the sale by attaching an amendment to the Energy Policy Act on July 26, 2005, calling for a four-month review of China’s energy policies. This effectively killed CNOOC’s chances for acquiring UNOCAL, as another bid for the company from Chevron was coming up. The Chinese saw the writing on the wall and withdrew their offer, but remained in hot pursuit of oil contracts throughout the far reaches of the globe.

The unsolicited offer from the Chinese to purchase UNOCAL brought chills to the American spine about energy policies and raised new questions about whether the United States had the right policies in place to secure its own energy future. If China was looking for oil in America’s backyard, maybe that’s because there isn’t any more oil in all the other backyards? That was a question for which Americans wanted an answer. Or maybe not.  One of the problems that traditional oil companies face is the rising tide of nationalism in oil company ownership.  Thirteen of the top fifteen oil producing and reserve holding companies are nationally owned, including Saudi Aramco, National Iranian Oil, Iraq National Oil, Kuwat Petroleum, Abu Dhabi National Oil, Pertoleos de Venezuela S.A., National Oil Corp of Libya and the  Nigerian National Petroleum. The top eight companies in terms of oil reserves are all nationally owned.  The only international oil companies in the top fifteen include Lukoil (Russia) and Chevron (USA).  Many have argued that with nationalization of such an essential economic commodity as oil, those companies that remain private will increasingly operate at a disadvantage, as nationalized companies form relationships between governments that enhance shared oil reserves but also go deeper to promote trade and solve other issues to enhance the arrangement. International oil companies, like Shell, Chevron and BP can’t negotiate such holistic deals. Thus, Saudi Arabia is increasingly selling oil to China.

The urgent state of Americans over oil reserves was a driving force for the new gas and oil drilling leases that the Obama administration announced earlier this year, many of which are now on hold because of the Gulf spill, though I doubt this action will last for very long–there’s too much American panic. A state of  urgency  has now reached every oil and gas producing organization around the globe, as countries and companies try to enter into new relationships to secure oil and gas reserves as far into the future as possible.  It appears that no stone will be too sacred in our global thirst for oil and gas. While we move sluggishly to think and talk about getting off the oil habit by becoming more self-sufficient in energy, and moving away from fossil fuels, the rest of the world is buying up as much of the reserve oil supply as new energies are unleashed to discover more. But, while drilling more, they are finding less. The United States could reach a permanent new oil crisis before any transition in energy dependency takes place. That fear will haunt every administration beginning with the current one. Suddenly, a new world order is taking shape out there, one based, not on the size and extent of one’s economy or military, but instead derived from the sense of national security that a country can bestow on its citizens by guaranteeing energy capacity well into the future. Right now that future seems to be measured in twenty year increments. So alarmed was the Bush administration over the future of oil in the American gunsights, that in January 2008, Bush met with the Saudi king Abudllah during a swing through the Middle East and and pleaded on behalf of the beleaguered American public for increased production to ease the price of gasoline. Normally that would be a role for an oil company executive, but those days are over. We are now talking about the future of our national economy.

The global need for energy promises to expand in a major way within the next twenty years, primarily because of the huge growth anticipated by the expansion of the Chinese and Indian economies. China’s energy demands were at 68.6 quadrillion BTUs in 2006, amounting to 15.6% of the world’s energy consumption. But in 2030, the Chinese energy projection is for 145.4 quadrillion BTUs and 20.1% of the world’s oil consumption.  In the next 20 years, China will have to add the equivalent of what Europeans currently consume if they are to meet this expectation. Projections for India are almost  equally  expansive, though less overall: in 2006 India energy consumption was at 17.1 quadrillion BTUs and in 2030, they are projected to need 31.9 quadrillion BTUs or about 4.5% of the world’s energy. Right now things look best for China. They have a lot of hard currency on hand and can afford to pay top $ for energy contracts. In the meantime, America is bogged down in wars that we cannot possibly win and we suddenly appear to be very disadvantaged in many cases when competing with nationalized oil companies.

The major unanswered question about our oil future is this: Obama recently used the BP Gulf oil spill to sound a clarion call for national action to get out from underneath the heal of oil companies, begin to diversify our energy sources and move away from fossil fuels. It seems simple enough: diversify our economy by expanding it into the production of renewable forms of energy and conservation and, as an added benefit, save the planet. But, if you were sitting in the White House and you had a choice to remove subsidies from oil companies, or better yet, begin to charge oil companies and gas consumers a tax to support this energy transition, would you do it,  given the new form of panic that seems to have set in by the CNOOC offer for UNOCAL and the ongoing BP Gulf oil spill? It will take a considerable and risky amount of political capital to make the sensible choice, because one oil shortage later and your ticket to Mount Rushmore, if you think that’s where you were headed, would be suddenly exchanged for a ticket to Palookaville.

Note added: the quantitative numbers on energy consumption and projections were taken from Michael T. Klare’s book “Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: the New Geopolitics of Energy.”

RFM

In case you haven’t heard, bottled water is not regulated and, in many cases, it is merely tap water or worse (one example pointed out in the documentary was one in which a small company drilled a hole for water next to a Superfund site for hazardous waste removal). Bottled water in this country is already a $10 billion business and worldwide the sales are more than $ 100 billion. The United Nations has estimated that for $30 billion, the entire population of the world could be provided with sufficient water for their daily  human needs. In the credit section of the documentary, they urge viewers join in signing a petition and contribute to a movement within the U.N. to provide safe, fresh water for all human inhabitants of the world, as an innate right of global  citizenship (that should extend to animals as well, but that’s getting a little ahead of the game). Doesn’t that sound simple and right?

The full wording of UN Article 31 is  “Everyone has the right to clean and accessible water, adequate for the health and well-being of the individual and family, and no one shall be deprived of such access or quality of water due to individual economic circumstance.” You can sign the petition by going here. This pursuit of privatized water is a growing multinational corporate menace created by the sinister for-profit drive by the amoral free market economy, the force that is increasingly impoverishing the globe, with no major obstacles yet standing in its way. The economic crash we are still enjoying, given to us by corporate greed, is being used to accelerate the move towards complete privatization of our water supply. Our public water supply is under a threat that extends to all corners of the globe.

I previously commented on how Bolivia managed to drive out Bechtel, a corporate giant, who had privatized the local water supply of Cochabamba (as one condition for receiving a World Bank loan), but had to leave one step ahead of the hangman when their enterprise went sour because of rapid increases in local water charges. Then too, I raised the issue a while ago about why bottled water is an unnecessary ripoff and serves to remove pressure to keep our drinking water supply safe and continuously evaluated.
This documentary on water is an easy, but disturbing introduction to the vast scope of our water supply future.  The impact of trapping water by damning rivers goes far deeper than we might think. By creating huge numbers of ever larger damns, we massively reduce the normal flow of nutrients that eventually find their way to the ocean and help sustain both river and ocean sea life.  Creating damns not only reduces the capacity of our oceans to support life, but the nutrients that are trapped by the damn sink and rot and contribute methane gas to our environment, one of the greenhouse gases that we have to worry about. The High Aswan damn built on the Nile in the 1960s, has reduced the flow of nutrients to farmers, such that some of the electricity generated by the damn has gone into the production of fertilizer to replace what was lost when the damn became operational. But the replacement fertilizer is very rich in phosphates, which in turn generate large algae blooms. While the high Aswan damn provides a large fraction of electricity to the region, many who have studied the impact of the damn over its 40 plus year history,  have concluded that its net effect for the population has been negative.

Global climate change, combined with poor distribution and conservation of our water supply (more golf courses in Arizona?) are creating a crisis of water distribution, that, like global climate change, many of us will increasingly experience as one component of our future life on this shrinking planet during the advancing decades of this century. It seems that nature picked this century to test our wisdom in managing natural resources and, in response to this dilemma, we selected GW Bush as the first leader of this potentially dangerous new century. Good choice America! You probably thought I would not be able to squeeze in a reference to GWB in this short article, but there you have it! You may recall that GWB has purchased a huge piece of property in Paraguay, near one of the largest aquifers (the Guarani aquifer) in South America. What do you think a free marketeer like GWB is planning for his property development? It has the added feature that it is protected by a nearby secret U.S. military base.

RFM

While it looks as though this salmon may soon be in the marketplace,  it is unclear whether the fish will be given special labeling indicative of its genetic makeup. While the public has not been in on the decision-making process during the approval  by the FDA, they will have an opportunity to evaluate the fish once it enters into the market place.  Although AquaBounty claims that these fish will help bring fish to market with fewer resources, it is not entirely clear in which way that works. A fish that gets larger, faster will require more food to get there, though the human effort in supplying that food will presumably be reduced, hence the savings.  But, will the genetically-altered salmon be as resistant to infection and parasitic disease compared to their normal genomic cousins? Only time will tell whether these changes are maladaptive when the entire panoply of generational  life’s experiences are taken into account. But the fact is that virtually all Atlantic salmon that we eat today come from commercial fish farms.

The FDA has already signed off on the idea that the animal has a stable genetic makeup  and that the fish are not harmed if you follow multiple generations. AquaBounty is expecting approval in the next few months to begin selling the eggs to fish farmers. What a super-voracious salmon will to do the environment is not clear.  AquaBounty has indicated that all of their fish will be grown in inland tanks, so that they cannot escape into the wild. This arrangement will be different from other commercial salmon fish farms that have their fish cages inserted into bays and inlets to take advantage of natural water conditions. Such arrangements have been criticized for the influence they have on normal migrating salmon and especially on the salmon fry that come back from fresh water hatching, heading for the sea. Such fry often get infested with parasites that flourish in the overcrowded fish farm cages as they pass through, often with a lethal outcome.

This is only the beginning of the brave new world of genetically modified commercial  farm animals. Look next for the “enviropig” which has been genetically modified to produce less phosphorus pollution in its manure.  The American public already seems to have accepted genetically modified plant food sources, while our European cousins remain skeptical.  It remains to be seen whether we will accept genetically modified meat sources; it appears that the AquaBounty salmon will be the first public test of the acceptability of such animals. Will they have less mercury? However, since it is possible that these fish will not be labeled to indicate their genetic status, we may never know from whence they came. That’s the way AquaBounty wants it and there are some indications that’s they way it will be.

RFM

BP has denied there are any health hazards to which cleanup workers get exposed and claims to have taken measurements of the air quality to prove it. But, but those measurements have yet to appear in public. Mr Guidry, knowledgeable about air quality issues, brought respirators to the commercial fisherman who were employed by BP for the cleanup, but they were all informed that BP would fire anyone caught using a respirator. Guidry claims that this experience goes all the way back to the Exxon Valdez oil spill, when respirators were not allowed to be used so that the company limited its liability; the use of respirators is an indication that the oil company believes there is an environmental problem with air quality and, as such, exposes them to the liability for respiratory ailments, a situation that could lead to long-term legal problems for the company. BP has stated that nothing is wrong with the air quality in the cleanup areas. If so, what made the workers ill a few weeks ago? Guidry claims it was exposure to toxins in the air. As it turns out, EPA (Environmental Protection Agency), the Federal agency responsible for monitoring air quality has no jurisdiction for air quality over the water, but would have jurisdiction once the air moves onto land. It appears that the Coast Guard and MMS have jurisdiction over air quality issues in the water and so far these organizations have not made any decisions about air quality or cleanup worker safety. Measurements of air quality seem to be limited to those provided by BP. Mr Guidry reported that when he did work in cleaning up oil refineries, all workers had protective clothing and boots, as well as respirators as part of the normal routine worker protection. He has claimed that the lack of such protection exists solely so that BP limits its liability.

It would seem that The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA), a regulatory branch of our Federal Government, should have jurisdiction over environmental standards facing Gulf workers, since one could extrapolate work on the Gulf oil spill as as constituting a “workplace.” And, OSHA has standards for worker protection, which includes the need for respirators when adequate air quality conditions are not met. Under OSHA rules, respirators are supposed to be provided by the company. But, so far the respirators that have been showing up, though banned for use by BP, have all been provided by individuals, or in one case by the NRDC (Natural Resources Defense Council).

Beginning today, the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences, is sponsoring a two-day workshop in New Orleans, LA, to discuss environmental health issues that face workers and residents in the region, related to the oil spill and the cleanup operation. You can watch a webcast of the meeting and even submit questions by going here. To view this properly, you will need Microsoft’s Silverlight which you can get here. The government of the United States needs to step in and take control of the environmental issues that are now apparent in many locations of this oil spill. Everyone in the region smells “oil.” Those workers closest to the source where the oil comes to the surface of the ocean must experience the most serious air quality problems. Why isn’t BP releasing measurements from these regions? Already we see in BP a company with a long history of safety violations, with little interest in responding to them, followed by subsequent disasters, followed in turn by minor fines which they treat as the cost of doing business. And, all of this takes place in a country that doesn’t matter to them, because corporate headquarters are in Great Britain. So far, our government has basically rewarded BP for their unresponsive attitude towards our safety regulations, and, their behavior in the Gulf oil spill is simply an example of continuity with their long-established corporate traditions, going as far back as when the company was Anglo-Persian, then Anglo-Iranian, at which time every drop of oil that fed the entire British economy, including fuel for ships, cars and lawnmowers, came from Iran, while the people in Iran got little in return and were treated as impoverished workers. BP would like to treat the people of America as they did the people of Iran and will continue to do so unless the people of America finally grasp the deficiencies in this arrangement.

There is straight line continuity in the BP we see operating in the Gulf today and the BP that felt it had exclusive rights to all Iranian oil, without adequate compensation to the Iranian people some seventy years ago. BP as a company should only survive so that its resources can be used to fund the study and cleanup of the Gulf oil spill, followed by company profits that will be funneled into the development of alternative energy sources. In other words, forcing the company to live up to their ads which talk about bp meaning “beyond petroleum.” What is yet to be established is whether BP will stand for “beyond prosecution.” We have plenty of safety standards that we could impose tomorrow should we choose to do so. Wouldn’t this be a great opportunity for Obama and his administration to finally take the wheel of this out of control vehicle we call BP?

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   One must keep in mind that if our planet Earth had no means of losing heat from the Sun, but only absorbing it, like a perfect black body, the Earth would eventually, perhaps over millions of years or longer, become as hot as the Sun. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Explorer I

It is a bit tiresome to see the horrible news coming out about the Gulf oil spill, only to be accentuated by the incessant emphasis on whether or not this event will be Obama’s Katrina or the defining moment of his Presidency. We hear this a lot, particularly on stations like CNN (I never go to Fox, but I assume they have already pinned the entire Gulf oil spill on Obama, since he toils daily as the Antichrist, or if not, then certainly he is working as one of his primary agents). Now, I don’t remember CNN ever suggesting that Katrina would be the defining moment of GW’s presidency, do you? It seems to me that, at best, that was an after thought. These charges against Obama are absurd of course unless they’re repeated 10,000 times in the news media, then, by the definitions given to us through modernity, the assertion automatically gets placed in the “truth file.” Let’s put this issue in a very fresh and simple way: we don’t have a government agency that drills for oil as we might if oil was a nationalized industry–which it is in some countries. Because of this, we are at the mercy of the international oil companies themselves–it’s part of our free market economy, and,  just as credit default swaps and sub-prime mortgages brought down our economy, so too does the U.S. government give sway to the oil giants to do what they want in exploring for the black gold of our economy.  The government merely hands out permits to drill within U.S. territorial lands and waters and apparently has done a very sloppy if not corrupt job, giving the oil companies what they want, whenever they wanted it. Oil companies are currently allowed to write their own environmental impact studies, usually copied from a prior one, which is how seals and walruses got into the Gulf environmental studies application from BP, despite the fact there are no seals or walruses in the Gulf. This level of incompetence on the part of our government is clearly the result of the hollowing out of Federal functions and regulatory oversight over the years by Republicans from Reagan to GW Bush, with a few Democrat participants, acting like Republicans, thrown in for good measure: it is part of the “kill the beast” program of Republican cowboys.  GW Bush and Cheney (remember Cheney’s his famous meeting with oil and energy executives, where the energy future of the United States was laid out, but never made public. That was the official inauguration of “drill baby drill,” plus launching the idea to replace Middle East despots, such as Saddam Hussein, with regimes favorable to our ever-expanding demand for oil. That’s why it’s very unlikely that we will ever get out of Iraq, unless of course the Chinese manage to get all the oil contracts).

With the competency of the Federal government under daily challenge over the Gulf oil spill, I couldn’t help but think back to a day and a time when government agencies worked very effectively and how we all admired the skill and dedication of its workers, including technicians, engineers, scientists and even a few administrators. Take for example how this oil spill is being handled, with BP having virtually no fall-back technique once the most unlikely methods failed and now compare that to how we formed and executed our space program and successfully brought back the astronauts aboard Apollo 13, when it was announced: “Houston, we have a problem.”   NASA, the government agency that developed our space program (the comparative equivalent of having a nationalized oil system),  and sent men to the moon in 1969, was originally formed as a direct result of “Sputnik.” The year that Sputnik was launched by the Russians in 1957, the Army and Navy had separate missile development programs, each trying to develop their own space-orbiting vehicles (this was the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58). NASA was put together in 1958, through the National Aeronautics and Space Act in order to circumvent what was viewed as a failure by our military to match the ingenious Russian success (Sputnik I was followed a month later by Sputnik II). Never mind that when the Russians launched Sputnik I, which lacked an instrumentation recorder and could not record any scientific information (though it had scientific instrumentation aboard) and never mind too, that a few months after Sputnik, Americans launched Explorer I into space (January 1958, which did have recording instrumentation and discovered the first  Van Allen Radiation belt) and never mind as well that once Explorer I was launched, Americans never lost their lead in the science of space exploration, only in the public relations war that ensnared our space exploration policies and put scientific research on hold, in favor of the PR victory of putting a man on the moon before the Russians did. It was nevertheless  an admirable technological achievement, but in the process it led to the overly costly commitment of using manned space exploration, rather than robotic control which would emphasize science and minimize costs. But we all cheered at seeing an American flag put on the moon and undoubtedly, many Americans got drunk that night.

Apollo 13 was the third lunar mission, launched on April 11, 1970. During the flight to the moon, an electrical fault caused an explosion and loss of electrical power to the service module. The crew was successful in shutting down the command module and using the lunar module as a lifeboat to return safely to earth. This was achieved by acts of serial and parallel competence on the part of the well-trained astronauts and the ingenious group of engineers and scientists centered in Houston. A hit movie was made of this remarkable success story and Americans marveled at how well its new government agency worked and appreciated the competency of those who ran it. I was in the military (Navy) during the early development of the space program and got to see some of the first-hand, relevant issues related to the early days of NASA’s growth. In fact, my own electrophysiological setup in the Navy Medical Research Laboratory in Pensacola Florida, that I embellished while doing research in the Navy, benefited indirectly from the space program which set super new standards for making electrical connections and wiring harnesses more reliable. The standards for everything from transistor heat tolerances and resistance to the vibration for wire and panel connections, were dramatically improved and almost everything had a backup. Special tools were designed to apply proper pressure when making electrical connections and unique panels were made to support quick changes in electrical connectivity. Astronauts trained in unique, environmentally constrained surrounds, including underwater space simulations. When one of those implementations failed, as it did on Apollo 13, sufficient ingenuity, and the reliably of the remaining circuits, brought the astronauts back to Earth with a safe landing. We don’t have anything comparable to NASA involved in oversight responsibility for deep sea oil drilling. We have placed our environment on the back burner, while oil exploration  consumes and dictates our policies, irrespective of the risks we are taking with the our fragile ocean ecosystems. No one knows the impact this will have on the ecosystem of the Gulf, but we can see already the economic devastation this is causing the tourism and the fishing industries in the region. Remember that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was going to be a target for oil drilling under GW Bush, until environmentalists successfully defeated the measure, all to the screaming outrage of Republicans like Tom Delay and President GW Bush.

The admiration we all felt about the performance of NASA after the first few Apollo trips to the moon, and the rescue of the Apollo 13 crew, did not last all that long. Major objections about the size of the NASA’s budget in the face of other, pressing national needs led to budgetary reductions and forced NASA to cancel the remaining Apollo missions to the moon. After Apollo, doubts about the future of NASA, the size of their budget and the nature of their mission began to erode and confuse the agency. Nevertheless, the unmanned flights made by Voyager  explored planets and gave us scientifically valuable information about space and our planetary surrounds. In contrast, manned space exploration was carried out with the Space Shuttle program and NASA experienced their own retrospective “Gulf oil disaster” when, in January 1986,  the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated within seconds after takeoff, killing all seven astronauts aboard. The cause of this accident reflected the refusal of NASA managers to listen to their field engineers who warned them that critical O-rings were not designed to tolerate the low temperatures encountered on the January launch date. In retrospect, the Challenger disaster represents a reversal of how NASA was put together. During the buildup of NASA, it was the engineers who made the critical decisions, but for the Challenger disaster, engineering input was disregarded by management. Another disaster occurred in February 2003, when the Space Shuttle Columbia“ disintegrated on re-entry, killing all seven astronauts on board. In this case, damage to the shuttle had been encountered during the launch, when a small piece of insulation tore loose from the shuttle and damaged the thermal protection system necessary to insure against excessive heat build-up during re-entry. If you want to read further about our space program, a book I recommend is “Vodoo Science: the Road From Foolishness to Fraud” by Robert L. Park

Without doubt, the greatest scientific achievement of NASA was when the Space Shuttle launched the Hubble telescope in 1990. Unfortunately the main mirror used for focusing was improperly ground and was not fixed until another Shuttle repaired the problem in 1993. Once properly running, the Hubble telescope provided many of the most remarkable photographs and scientific data ever achieved in space. Since then, the Hubble has been repaired by astronauts several times, the last one taking place in 2009. The Hubble is expected to function until 2014, at which time it is scheduled for replacement. Stunning images of space, taken by the Hubble telescope, can be viewed at a variety of sites, including that of NASA.

The meteoric rise and slow decline of NASA’s public image was punctuated by many significant achievements, including the recent repair of the Hubble telescope, which is now giving better images of space than we ever had before. But the problems that NASA has experienced began from its inception, when the political choice was made by President Kennedy in  choosing manned flight over unmanned space exploration. Inserting manned space exploration into the Cold War, as we did in response to Sputnik, put science on the back burner (as we do so often), and allowed political decisions to dominate NASA’s early mission objectives. We gained almost nothing of any scientific value by putting a man on the moon, though NASA did generate significant improvements in the technology of heat-tolerance, ceramics and we got Teflon out of the deal.  But in doing so, we distorted and confused the mission future of NASA, whose major scientific achievement was the launching and repair of the Hubble telescope. Nevertheless, if you contrast the successful rescue of the crew of Apollo 13 and compare that achievement with the crude strategies that BP is applying to the Gulf oil spill, one sees that executives are in charge of decision-making in the Gulf and they are already jockeying to reduce company liability and limit the public exposure of seeing oil impregnated birds and turtles. No, our government is not in charge of fixing this leak. We gave that option away from the get-go when we turned loose our free market economy and, in the Gulf oil spill, we are seeing just one example of the rewards for allowing this kind of unchecked freedom to generate huge profits, while doing nothing for improving our renewable energy future. The other night, I heard on the PBS Jim Lehrer report, a venture capitalist forewarn the future of America’s energy strategy. At a time when everyone agrees that we must develop sources and technology of renewable energy, as if we are in an emergency to save our planet and reduce our oil dependency, America has only four members of the top 30 companies in the business of renewable energy! That’s what the Gulf oil spill represents to me–the free market economy of oil exploration done at the expense of letting the rest of the world generate the new jobs that need to be created for renewable energy. Will we pay the Chinese to build solar panels (already they are the largest manufacturer of solar panels and have hired American engineers and scientists to assist them in making better panels), or will be build them ourselves and will we continue to be the innovators of science related to energy production and planetary safety? Today, the future does not look bright for American emergence into world leadership for alternative energy.

RFM

Red Knot Shorebird

Perhaps we need another century or two to understand the species of the world and their inter-dependencies before we make judgments about who should go and who should stay: say goodbye to one and you may have to do the same for a seemingly diverse group of animals for reasons that are highly counter-intuitive. It’s foolish of course to even suggest that we are in a position to make decisions about species survival, because we aren’t knowingly making those judgments, even though events, such as species extinction, are very likely occurring on a regular basis as a result of human interventionism. But, species extinctions are taking place without our knowledge of the cause or even, in most cases, an understanding of the species involved. We keep track of big animals, like lions, tigers, elephants and other large mammals and, though  the future for them is not looking particularly bright, we are completely ignorant about animals a step or two below on the evolutionary ladder–like the now extinct, Gastric-Brooding Frog. Who said goodbye to that species? But, here’s one to ponder for the short-term: are you kidding me?–shorebirds and horseshoe crabs? This survival dynamic may play itself out over the next few years.

The interconnectedness of nature almost dictates that you don’t lose single species, that in in losing one, some other species or fauna will also be put into harm’s way:  the loss of one species may precipitate the loss of one or more others, largely because we are unaware of the biological forces that unite them. I don’t know who else we lost or which other species might have been changed when the Gastric-Brooding Frog disappeared, but it didn’t disappear without impacting other species. Of that we can be certain. But, what connection for example does the continued vitality of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, an ancient marine arthropod, have with survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shore bird that makes an annual stopover in the region in which the horseshoe crab breeds? The Limulus is virtually unchanged since it first appeared in the Paleozoic, 570-248 million years ago. Though most people have barely heard of the Limulus, anyone who studies vision is well versed with this species, as its compound eye was first used by H.K. Hartline to reveal fundamental mechanisms of visual physiology, for which he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his pioneering work. Horseshoe crabs are abundant on the shoreline of Woods Hole Massachusetts, where Hartline did much of his early work. One of Hartline’s students, Robert Barlow, went on to show that the male Limulus uses its eyes to search aggressively for females and looks for the outlines of the carapace as a visual cue for finding a suitable female, at a time when the animals come into the shoreline for laying and fertilizing their eggs, an activity that usually takes place at night. But, who would ever have thought that the seasonal breeding of this ancient marine species, which takes place big time in Delaware Bay on the East coast, would have a dramatic impact on the survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shorebird that flies 20,000 miles each year, from South America to the Arctic, where it breeds, and then flies back again. Surely the biologists got this one wrong!

The Red Knot arrives in Delaware Bay just at the time the Limulus has come near the shore for breeding and egg laying. Eggs are laid by the female in the sand and then fertilized externally by the male or males that surround her. It is the nourishment derived from feeding on the newly released Limulus eggs that provides a critically needed source of food for the Red Knot to regain its stamina and prepare for resuming its long journey North.  Once the Red Knots arrive at the Delaware shore, they only have about two weeks to get sufficient nourishment, rebuild their wing muscles and store fat for the flight ahead to their Arctic breeding grounds, where they lay their own eggs and raise their young over the short summer of the region. If  insufficient Limulus eggs are available, the Red Knot does not seem to have a plan B and may be ill-equipped to finish the long journey to the Arctic. In some regions where Red Knots used to breed in the Arctic, they have not been seen in recent years and insufficient Limulus egg nourishment has been regarded as the main deficiency in their failed migratory outcome. In preparation for the long flight from South America (Tierra del Fuego, in Chile/Argentina) the bird’s digestive system shuts down, such that the intermediate stop, to feed on Limulus eggs, provides the bird with a very digestible meal, rich in proteins–apparently the ideal food for building up muscle and fat for an animal with a reduced capacity digestive system. Despite the aggressive feeding of the Red Knot on Limulus eggs, the horseshoe crab population in the region was stable into the 1990s, when fishing with Limulus bait became popular.

The shortage of Limulus eggs seems to reflect an overly aggressive harvesting of animals, particularly gravid females used by fisherman as bait for catching eels and conch (marine snails): this has led to a significant decline in the number of Limulus eggs laid on the shoreline, down to perhaps 2/3 of previous estimates and the magnitude of this decline has been implicated in the reduced numbers of Red Knot birds making it to their Arctic breeding grounds. Indeed, it was the alarmingly fast reduction in the Red Knot population, by about 70%, that led to the discovery of their dependence on Limulus eggs in Delaware Bay.  The decline in Limulus breeding and egg-laying seems to be the tipping point that could wipe out the Red Knot and could do so very quickly if a better balance isn’t restored.   There is now a two-year moratorium on using Limulus for fishing bait in the region and researchers are busy trying to find artificial bait substitutes that could be used in place of the real thing. An excellent video about this species interdependency was shown recently on PBS and can be seen here.

How long this interconnectedness between a marine animal that is roughly 350 million years old and a bird, whose evolutionary record goes back 150 million years, is not a matter that can be resolved through the fossil record. At some point, the Red Knot’s migratory flight to Delaware Bay was initiated to be well-timed to the breeding season of the Limulus.  This synchrony could be seriously interrupted further by global climate change which might affect one or the other of these tightly timed mechanisms. Some biologists believe the Red Knot could be extinct within five years. At some point, you reach a bird density wherein birds can’t find one another to mate.

Limulus polyphemus

The fishing industry is not the only survival challenge that Limulus faces. The blood of  Limulus has been used for many years because of its unusual properties. Limulus blood is blue because it uses a copper protein as an oxygen carrier. But, of more importance is the fact that Limulus blood clots whenever it comes into contact with endotoxins. Extracts of Limulus blood have been used for decades to test for bacterial contamination. One quart of Limulus blood is valued at about $15,000. Currently, the FDA insists that all intravenously administered drugs should be exposed to a Limulus blood amebocyte lysate as a test for endotoxins. This is a significant improvement over the prior process of injecting a rabbit with the substance and then waiting to see if the animal gets sick and develops a fever!  The discovery of Limulus amebocyte lysate also took place at Woods Hole, through the observations of scientist Fred Bang. This insight and its technological development has reduced the endotoxin analysis test from days to about 45 minutes. Instead of killing the horseshoe crabs and then bleeding them, the pharmaceutical industry harvests blood from live animals, who are then returned to their native habitat. Thus, some former fisherman, who used them for bait, now collect them for blood letting in a laboratory environment and then release them to the same location. Last year, 300,000 horseshoe crabs were bled and then released; about 13% do not survive this blood-letting procedure, which extracts about 2/3 of their blood.

The counter-intuitive interconnectedness of the Red Knot and the horseshoe crab could only be revealed by extensive field studies that involved capturing, tagging and measuring birds along the pathway of their extensive, almost incomprehensible, migratory flight pattern. These are dedicated scientists who share a passion for this bird and its preservation. Why a bird would exist under the harsh conditions of the Tierra del Fuego, near the Strait of Magellan, then fly to the even harsher climate of the Arctic for breeding and the early rearing of their young, before flying off again on another 10,000 mile trip, is well beyond our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps it got started before tectonic plates rearranged the land masses. The migratory pattern of North America by non-indigenous Homo sapiens was primarily East to West, which is a little easier to understand. In contrast to the rational, the Red Knot flight plan is not one that any of us would recommend to serve as the basis for a committed, routine lifestyle, unless it was one we recommended to our Republican friends. I can imagine Rush Limbaugh feeding on Limulus eggs in search of a new high. Let us hope that the Red Knot survives and the current iteration of the Republican Party goes the way of the Dodo bird as its major flight plan glides it  into extinction. There are many signs that such a glide pattern is already underway. We will undoubtedly hear more about each species in the coming years.

RFM

Today the Justice Department has initiated a criminal investigation against BP, but one has to wonder whether this isn’t more of a defensive operation than an offensive plan  of action. Is this legal investigation really based on something that can be criminally prosecuted, or is this, as BP contends, an industrial “accident?” Meanwhile, the gushing of oil into the Gulf could go on all summer. BP’s  intention was to cap the current well and move the drilling rig so that new sites could be drilled, some of which were intended to begin far deeper than the current problematic drilling site. I just watched the Jim Lehrer News Hour on PBS and noticed that a reporter went to a shoreline region in Prince William Sound, where the Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred. While the surface looked as if it was clean, the reporter dug down into the rocky shoreline and came up with oil-drenched rocks that smelled like “roofing tar.” Once it comes, it never goes away unless perhaps you think more in terms of geological time.

RFM

While the Obama administration does not have the same  “drill baby  drill” attitude of its predecessor, there are no environmentalists within the administration, at least none with the passion of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Stewartl Udall; historically, it seems that spending time in the wondrous U.S. West was essential training experience to acquire a protective attitude about the environment–the physical wonders that your eyes report to you.  The “I want to save this for my children and grand children syndrome,” is a mind state which you could acquire while seeing for the first time places like the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, or any of the other places that are included in our fabulous national park system. Those searing experiences, faced with our inherent tendency to exploit and destroy the natural environment or privatize it,  has historically served as the stimulus for environmentalism and site preservation. But, that was then and this is now. Today, whether it’s an oil spill or the threat of global climate change, we need a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable plan that can begin to sort out the   “species interconnectedness;” this will require more knowledge of biology and environmental preservation, an emphasis which does not resonate well with the short-term problem solving that seemingly exists in the culture of the Obama cabinet meetings and our need for more oil resources. But, the biology we need to be studying can no longer be seen with the naked eye, for it is microscopic in size, yet fundamentally huge in its impact–it’s the ecosystem of our oceans and the threats that exist from oil spills, over fishing and salinity changes that might impair the fundamental biodiversity of the water and impact on the bottom of the food chain where life support is critical and the point at which it all begins.

So, how do you gain knowledge of species interconnectedness by watching birds drenched in oil and being treated with detergents? You don’t! Unless we are watching the event in the company of environmental and marine biologists and toxicologists. Yet, even these experts have limited knowledge of what the long-term impact of an oil spill will do to all the species in the ecosystem. Like global climate change, it’s too incomprehensible to imagine and, unlike global climate change, we don’t have computer models to help us figure out the real dangers of an oil spill of this magnitude. The historical reaction applies here: we can only shrug our shoulders and assume that eventually, all will be back to normal, that the ocean can and will deal with this problem, fixing it in ways that we don’t yet understand. After all, there is an equilibrium to nature, even when faced with increasing global temperatures or a slippery oily interface. We may not like the new steady-state, and it may be far less compatible with our expectations from the oceans of the world, but a new equilibrium point will be established and so far, we have shown ourselves to be completely impotent to facilitate one outcome over another. Ocean ecology is perhaps evolving in something less than a geological time scale. Something short enough that we will be able to gauge some of the impact of the Gulf oil spill, but we will be unable to do anything about it. By the time we recognize what happened, and a validate that a new balance point has been established, we will not be able to return to the old one, no matter how much we miss it, or what we do to restore it. New counter forces will be in place to preserve the new point of equilibrium and oppose any efforts we make to restore an older point of balance.

Krill are tiny crustaceans found in all oceans. They feed on phytoplankton and serve as one of the essential elements at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow we expect that these essential organisms will be unaffected and that no large mammals will start washing up on shore because of starvation. Should that ever begin to happen, the human population would of course already be stressed, yet probably  knowledgeable about the unfavorable imbalances within our oceans and its implications for planetary balance. What do we really know about the influence of oil on the ecology of a region? Did we lose species in the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the one in Santa Barbara? In the case of the Exxon Valdez, the salmon and herring fishing industry in the region collapsed. Slowly the salmon came back, but the herring never returned. One mayor in the region committed suicide, apparently related to his despair over the oil spill and its impact on the local economy. Have we done enough studies to understand the changes in the ecosystem that invariably happen with a major oil spill? Each major spill is probably very unique, given the variance in species and habitat of the surrounding region and relative size of the ocean volume involved.  We know that for each spill, the lives of commercial fishermen will be permanently changed and their chances of getting a fair compensation for their lost livelihood is about zero, as it will take many years to resolve the impending issues and suits within our heavily biased court system, one that rewards and protects big business and allows lower income recipients of the calamity to serve as mere cannon fodder. According to some studies, significant oil residue remains in Prince Williams Sound where the Exxon Valdez spilled oil onto 1200 miles of beach, killing thousands of animals. In some areas, oil was three feet thick. Current estimates are that it will take decades more or even centuries more for the oil to fully dissipate from the region: Litigation against Exxon continues.

If you’re wondering about long-term damage liability, to compensate for lost jobs and continued clean up operations, here is what happened on that issue with Exxon (From Democracy Now): “In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.” You can see how favorably the courts treat these jury-determined settlement costs. For Exxon, it’s just a few days of profits and they have more lawyers to throw at these issues than almost anyone else on the planet, unless it’s our own government that operates by bringing criminal charges.

This country is badly in need of re-implementing the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and staffing the organization with field and marine biologists who can participate in efforts to understand oil spills and the devastation they generate on species and their interconnectedness. I have commented on this acute need in a previous posting. We only see the damage at the top, on the shores, in the form of dead and oily birds, turtles and a few mammals. We don’t have the capacity to see the impact on the ecosystem beneath or the effects of the new menace–the large subsurface oil plumes riding at mid-level depths in the ocean; the oil companies would like to keep it that way. For them too much knowledge is a bad thing. They would like us to remember that the oil platforms they put down become havens for fish to collect in the service of sport fisherman. Isn’t that a good enough benefit?

The lack of a strong, passionate environmental presence sitting at the Obama cabinet meetings has made it difficult for our urban president to find his voice on the Gulf oil spill. Someone needs to drive home the environmental disaster to Obama in such a way that an urbanite, who seems to have learned nothing about species interdependency and the potentially disastrous magnitude of the BP spill, can quickly get up to speed talking about phytoplankton, krill and other members of the Zooplankton group. He very badly needs to go out on a boat with a group of marine biologists and toxicologists, who can explain to him the dimensions of the problem and how seeing a bunch of oily birds, while visibly shocking, coupled to the regular summary of the spill on CNN (mostly consumed by showing the undersea footage of the oil leak bulging out if the drill rupture), is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the local fishing economy and the long-term health of the Gulf ecosystem. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a lawyer by training, doesn’t quite have the sophistication or experience to recruit the kind of scientific expertise and visibility required to assure the public that some level of scientific accumen is being applied to this disaster. In keeping with the corporate motif of the new world order, science and scientists don’t speak for BP, except through the corporate elites of the company, who know virtually nothing about biology; their objective is solely the public relations message and BP’s liability. Yet, biology is what this spill is all about and it is where the effort must be focused with education, research and a good dose of corporate honesty. School children in the region could be enlisted in the research effort to gather samples, make measurements, much like school children in Minnesota discovered and studied three-legged frogs. How refreshing it would be to see and hear the BP CEO tell us that BP has no idea what the long-term damage of this spill will do to the environment, but that they will begin to fund significant grants for the region to be studied as the long-term laboratory environment they helped to create.  At least that would be a starting point from which we could launch some serious research. Yet, we have to admit that the problem cannot be researched in the sense that no long-term projections can be made because we do not understand, nor do we have models for comprehending the impact we are witnessing from this spill. The new oil plumes beneath the surface represent a form of oil we have not encountered before and we don’t even know the cause. But, they potentially represent vast dead zones due to the lack of oxygen that has been reported near these sites.

Hurricane season is nearly underway and each day we experience continued oil gushing from the well, we run the risk of a single hurricane serving like an ocean Hobart machine, circulating and mixing the oil and water until it reaches the loop current and begins marching up the Atlantic coast. The city of Fort Lauderdale, a major oil import region, has begun discussions on the impact of Gulf oil that might find its way moving into the Atlantic coast, an event that could devastate the tourist economy of the region, to say nothing of the damage already done to the seafood industry that serves Florida and much of the country.

But, back to Alaska. If a spill should occur anything close to what we are seeing in the Gulf, once drilling in the Beaufort and and Chukchi seas begins, it will be impossible to devote anything significant to the cleanup operation, at least not for many months. Even Shell executives have agreed that “there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice.” The government has acknowledged that a major spill in the Arctic waters of the area could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up. How about impossible? However, they concluded that a large oil leak was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis. Well that was then (December, 2009) and this is now. The permit for drilling in the Arctic sea has been suspended, but that suspension could be lifted soon enough to see drilling this summer. Should a spill occur in these cold waters, the nearest Coast Guard facility is a 1,000 miles away, the nearest cleanup vessels and equipment are too few and at least 100 miles away, and the nearest airport where major supplies could be transported is Seattle, a few thousand miles away.

The Alaska waters where drilling permits have been issued, are vastly colder than the Gulf and any oil spill will take far longer to dissipate, no matter what the mechanism, be it biochemical breakdown or micelle formation and dispersal. For another, during the winter, weather patterns often include 65 mile per hour winds at temperatures in the -40 degree range, making rescue operations for any troubled rig virtually impossible. In the summer, the area serves as a huge breeding center for multiple species of birds that migrate from six different continents, including all of the other 49 states. Huge herds of caribou congregate on the Arctic coastal plane and Beluga whales have their calving season in these waters. To become more familiar with the region, check out Subhankar Banerjee‘s interview on TomDispatch.

Several years ago, GW Bush wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Fortunately, environmental organizations defeated this idea. But that took place when every environmental organization, everyone interested in sane ecological management, knew they had a hostile President to deal with and opposition to his leadership on almost every front was widespread and passionate. Today, in the current climate, with a Democratic President, the environmental movement has been much more subdued and has become more passive about the ocean drilling plans of Shell Oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, particularly since Obama announced permits for that drilling operation a few weeks before the BP Gulf oil spill. Perhaps the Gulf oil spill will serve to re-invigorate the environmental opposition to drilling and help the country move rapidly to a state of reduced oil dependency. It is not clear to anyone that the drilling demands of the international oil giants is really necessary. You might want to read Michael Klare on this important topic. So far however, Obama has shown himself to be just as much of an oil man as we had with GW Bush. The Minerals Management Service, the government oversight function for the oil companies has for years been deeply corrupted. The recent shake-up in the government oversight structure may improve this relationship, but Obama has a lot of repair work to do if these oil companies are ever going to conform to the needs of our society, rather than their own needs of high profits and reckless drilling practices, with little financial risk to their bottom line. Maybe this will be his wake-up call for the environment and Big Oil.

RFM