AMY HUBBARD, - Los Angeles Times
Stephan: Here is more about what is happening in the Arctic. Entire ecosystems are undergoing massive change. Is this good? Is it bad? As this report makes clear no one knows yet.
NASA has revealed its discovery of a massive algae bloom under the slowly diminishing Arctic ice — a finding that made scientists’ eyes pop. But does this never-before-seen phenomenon change the fate of this microscopic algae?
Not long ago, this crucial plant life — which produces much of the world’s oxygen — was reported in a century-long tailspin.
Here’s the back story.
The same year that NASA researchers launched the Icescape expedition to the Arctic — the project that resulted in NASA’s astounding new discovery — there was a dire report on the world’s phytoplankton.
A Canadian team said in the journal Nature, as The Times reported in July 2010, that the world’s phytoplankton had been disappearing at a rate of about 1% a year for the previous 100 years.
‘A global decline of this magnitude? It’s quite shocking,’ Daniel Boyce, Dalhousie University marine scientist and lead author of the 2010 study, told The Times.
Phytoplankton — the basis of the marine food chain — ‘are key to the whole ecosystem,’ he said. ‘In terms of climate changes, the effect on fisheries, we don’t know exactly what these effects will be.’
Could his latest discovery of a mass of phytoplankton in the Arctic signal […]
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ALEX DEMARBAN, - Alaska Dispatch
Stephan: The extreme regions of the earth, particularly near the poles are beginning to show serious climate change. The corporate media doesn't really cover this on a systematic basis, but I have been trying to do so in SR because this is the sort of change we are going to see all over the world. The Rightist deniers bleat on, the earth doesn't hear them. It only hears and responds to the choices we make... or don't. Get ready. It is coming to your town too.
Melting ice cellars and rotting whale meat, the arrival of beaver fever in a once-pristine land, and water supplies that might go dry are just a few of the health risks posed by climate change in the Arctic.
Now, in a newly released fifth report examining looming threats to villages, the Center for Climate and Health at the Alaska Native Tribal Health Consortium zeroes in on the Arctic Alaska village of Selawik, population 830,
The Inupiat village has been called the ‘Venice of Northwest Alaska’ because of the settling ground. Stairs to some houses no longer reach the ground. Shifting water pipes break more easily. And some homes tilt so much toilet bowls can’t fill with water for flushing, forcing families to return to the old-fashioned honeybucket.
Sheefish threatened
The Inupiat community straddles both sides of the Selawik River, in a roadless coastal plane pitted with lakes. The village now experiences more rain and snowfall than it did five decades ago. Average monthly temperatures have risen during that period, including by 4 degrees in January, according to the report.
Threatening the village are sinkholes that have formed beside the river, sending landslides of silt, rock and gravel tumbling into spawning areas for sheefish — an […]
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ROBERT SANDERS, - University of California - Berkeley
Stephan: This came out several days ago and I have held it waiting to see what kind of response it engendered, with the idea of devoting an entire edition of SR to the announcement and the reactions it generated. I was not surprised, but deeply saddened, that it stimulated almost no discourse in the Congress and almost nothing in the media, particularly the cable media. Listen closely. That sound you hear is the smoke alarm of civilization ringing like a fire siren in the night.
BERKELEY — A prestigious group of scientists from around the world is warning that population growth, widespread destruction of natural ecosystems, and climate change may be driving Earth toward an irreversible change in the biosphere, a planet-wide tipping point that would have destructive consequences absent adequate preparation and mitigation.
‘It really will be a new world, biologically, at that point,
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GARETH COOK, - Scientific American
Stephan: Back in the early 1970s two friends of mine, Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, wrote a lovely book, The Secret Life of Plants. It drove materialists crazy, but time has shown their basic points about the consciousness of plants, and the interconnectedness and interdependence of all life were correct. Here is the latest concerning this trend. It doesn't really fully address the nonlocal aspects of consciousness, but it touches upon them, and that is a big move.
How aware are plants? This is the central question behind a fascinating new book, ‘What a Plant Knows,
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GEORGE SCIALABBA, - The New Inquiry
Stephan: This essay is polemic, but it has a mass of the relevant statistics that now define America. It's not pretty. Fifteen per cent of Americans cannot locate the U.S. on a world map. Sixty per cent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. No wonder 'values' trump all rational arguments.
Pretty bad. Here is a sample of factlets from surveys and studies conducted in the past twenty years. Seventy percent of Americans believe in the existence of angels. Fifty percent believe that the earth has been visited by UFOs; in another poll, 70 percent believed that the U.S. government is covering up the presence of space aliens on earth. Forty percent did not know whom the U.S. fought in World War II. Forty percent could not locate Japan on a world map. Fifteen percent could not locate the United States on a world map. Sixty percent of Americans have not read a book since leaving school. Only 6 percent now read even one book a year. According to a very familiar statistic that nonetheless cannot be repeated too often, the average American’s day includes six minutes playing sports, five minutes reading books, one minute making music, 30 seconds attending a play or concert, 25 seconds making or viewing art, and four hours watching television.
Among high-school seniors surveyed in the late 1990s, 50 percent had not heard of the Cold War. Sixty percent could not say how the United States came into existence. Fifty percent did not know in which century […]
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