Daily Science Dose

A Woods Hole grad student, now working at the University of Southern Florida’s Mann Lab for Marine Sensory Biology, has released the finding from a study he conducted on marine mammal brains, and the news is not good. It seems that human’s propensity to use the oceans as a dumping ground (as well as our ineptitude in realizing that dangerous chemicals don’t just go away when we no longer see them) has resulted in bio-accumulation of some nasty substances in marine mammals.

Yes, again with the flame retardants…

Eric Montie went to work with Environment Canada to “learn the painstaking techniques required to extract and to quantify more than 170 different pollutants and their metabolites.” He brought back the methods to Woods Hole and started analyzing the brains of 11 whales and dolphins and a grey seal. The animals came from around the Cape Cod area, and darned if you didn’t guess, some not-so-nice chemicals were present in the cerebrospinal fluid as well as the grey matter.

And yes, our dear friends DDT, an overly effective pesticide that has been banned around the world, but doesn’t seem to want to go away; PBDEs, or flame retardants which are only know being scrutinzed despite their ubiquity; and PCBs, again a banned chemical family that just doesn’t go away have all been found in the marine mammalian brain studied by Montie. In fact, the levels of PCBs in the seal were in the parts per million, which may seem small, but according to Montie, “you rarely find parts per million levels of anything in the brain.”

So what’s the big deal? Well, PCBs kind of trick a body into thinking that they are thyroid hormones and instead of healthy and needed thyroid hormones, the body gets PCBs. That can lead to all sorts of neurological issues and problems when it comes to brain development and can disrupt the sensory functions of mammals like dolphins, seals and whales that really depend on their sense of hearing to live.

Just how these chemicals might impact marine mammal health is something Montie plans to pursue. This summer, Montie, [David] Mann [the man behind the aforementioned Mann Lab], and Dr. Mandy Cook (from Portland University) will partner with scientists from NOAA to test the hearing in dolphins living near a Superfund site in Georgia and compare it to dolphins from locations where ambient concentrations of pollutants are significantly lower. Montie is also working with Frances Gulland, director of the Marine Mammal Center in Sausalito, CA, to examine how California sea lions’s exposure to PCBs may increase their sensitivity to domoic acid, a naturally produced marine neurotoxin associated with “red tides.” –WHOI news release

Great…

Related: Pelicans Dropping From Sky for Reasons Unknown

marine biology, marine science, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, Woods Hole, Eric Montie, Environment Canada, University of Southern Florida, David Mann, seals, whales, dolphins, brains, chemicals, DDT, PCB, PBDE, flame retardants, pesticides, cerebrospinal fluid, contaminants, ocean, pollution, banned substances, bio-accumulation, thyroid, hormones, senses, hearing, health, mammals, dumping

It seems that Entergy’s CEO and chairman Wayne Leonard is the one of the few energy industry leaders that doesn’t oppose a proposed cap and trade system that is being debated in Congress. In fact, Leonard is not only not opposed, but he supports the legislation — as long as it is the right cap and trade system.

Entergy Corporation, based in Louisiana, is blessed with natural gas and a sizable “fleet” of nuclear power generation stations. And we all know that nuclear power is clean* and natural gas, according to energy experts like Sarah Palin, is clean and green. And that means that Entergy produces electricity from some of the cleaner sources around in terms of carbon dioxide emissions.

*But not in terms of radioactive waste that lasts and lasts.

So, let’s say that Congress passes cap’n trade legislation that would auction off credits for companies to be allowed to produce carbon emissions. A company like Entergy would have to buy fewer of those credits or permits in order to cover its rather low levels of emissions. That means less costs are passed down to you, the consumer. That makes Entergy’s Leonard happy.

However, Entergy has not done much to expand its renewable power portfolio. And one form of the cap and trade law could include a government mandate as to how much renewable energy a company has to produce. That would make Leonard sad. He doesn’t think the Fed should mandate this renewable component, as he feels that the free market will prevail in encouraging companies to invest in the most economical renewables (if there are any in Leonard’s eyes) in order to decrease costs for pollution permits.

And then, there is the whole idea of the Fed giving away the credits to companies based on its individual emissions based on say a year chosen at random, like 2005. And if your company can reduce its emissions and not have to use all of those permits, your company can sell them to companies that still pollute. Well, Entergy had already reduced what emissions they could have by 2005, because they were responsible and did it way back in 2000. So, now all that hard work they already did, when it was voluntary, will work against them, as Entergy will get a smaller amount of credits to sell off to the the coal plant down the street, who never did anything in the first place or even now to reduce its emissions levels.

So, this insight into how one energy company views the current debate over cap and trade legislation is interesting to me, but also rather irritating. Think about it. Entergy is but one of many, many large and rich corporations that produce energy and do in it a way that pollutes the Earth. Each company is going to do its best to pressure someone in Congress to adjust, rewrite or add an amendment to the cap and trade law, if it even passes, that will be advantageous to that company, perhaps to the detriment to another company, who will then fight the new law. I just don’t see cap and trade passing any time soon, but then again, I’m not sure if it will make a difference in the long run.

And then again again, it’s not fair to blame the energy companies. They are only giving us what we want — cheap energy and a lot of it.

Reading the article in the Times-Picayune, I noted that Entergy is spending more than 4 million dollars on lobbying Congress to pass a cap and trade law that will benefit them. It makes you wonder how much the Coal Industry as a whole is spending to fight cap and trade altogether? What if all that money were spent on research and development of new technologies, more efficient energy infrastructure, and a better way to deal with spent nuclear fuel?

energy, Entergy, electricity, renewable energy, nuclear power, natural gas, Louisiana, cap and trade, Congress, carbon emissions, pollution

I was happy with the “talk the talk, but does he walk the walk” comment.

Thank you, CBS, for covering this charade foisted on the American Public for far-too-long. I can bitch and bitch about coal, but when it comes right down to it, nothing is going to change anytime soon.

What I don’t get is this fanatical need for the US Energy Kings to push the “grow the economy” paradigm. Maybe our economy is built on the same inflated values of Wall Street. It’s like we just found this cheap energy trough, and like pigs, we are stuffing ourselves with no thought to the consequences (like why is the farmer fattening us up in the first place?).

I am seeing the same scary consumptive trend in anything eco- or green or earth-friendly. Earth friendly would mean cutting back on all that sh*t you buy every day. If we all go out and replace our entire wardrobes with organic cotton and bamboo, we are still creating a waste stream that undermines our efforts to live lightly. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it. That’s as eco- as you can get, but then that doesn’t “grow our economy,” does it?

Back to 60 Minutes…it’s about time that a major news organization calls our the Emperor’s nudity. Will it make a difference? Ah, heck no. Seriously, I hate to be pessimistic here, but we are doomed. Like I mentioned yesterday, we are not all going to die, but it’s going to be bad.

Here’s my great idea, and you heard it here first. Use carbon dioxide in fission-style reactions and capture the energy released while producing oxygen and carbon monoxide, which can then be converted into liquid fuels. Oh, crap, someone beat me to it.

After reading this next study, I am kind of wondering as to why looking at toenail clippings would be the preferred method for measuring the level of arsenic in a human body. Is it because it is easy and non-intrusive, cheap, and a part of the body that is ripe for the study of bioaccumulation? Or is it some foot fetish’s odd way of getting his jollies? I’m hoping it’s the first reason.

Anyway, without further ado, today’s dose is about toenails and arsenic and England. England was the original hotbed for environmental degradation back in the earlier years of the Industrial Revolution — you know, lots of mining and no consideration of producing and disposing of rather nasty waste by-products. Well, some of that nasty stuff was arsenic, and in addition to that, there were arsenic mines that also lead to a issue of arsenic pollution in Great Britain.

Scientists from the University of Leicester, Notthingham Trent University, and the British Geological Survey have developed a relatively easy and painless (although perhaps a little gross) way to measure environmental arsenic in a person’s body — toenails. Toenails grow slowly, building matter and along the way picking up chemicals and in this case, elements that accumulate in our bodies. Add a little acid to those nails, let them dissolve and a little “inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry” and you’ve got yourself a good way of finding out how much arsenic that person has been exposed to over long periods of time.

Mark Button [of the University of Leicester] added: “This preliminary research indicates that people living close to a former arsenic mine have elevated levels of arsenic in their toenails. However, the potential health risks in this case, if any, are not yet clear and no arsenic related health issues have been reported. A large-scale and more detailed biomonitoring study is required to confirm these initial results.”

Dr Jenkin, lecturer in Applied Geology at the University of Leicester said: “This is the first time that the chemical form of the arsenic in the toenails has been measured - that can tell us something about how it got in there and possible risk factors. — SPX via TerraDaily

The only problem with the testing is that as of yet, the researchers are not quite sure how “concentrated” the amount of arsenic in a toenail is and how that affects the measurement of said arsenic. It could be that the human toenail concentrates arsenic and makes it look as though there are high levels, when in fact it’s very low levels over a longer period of time. That makes it harder to determine how it relates to harmful effects that can occur from exposure to arsenic, like cancer of the lungs or kidneys.

But it’s a start…

arsenic, toenails, bioaccumulation, chemicals, mining, waste, England, Industrial Revolution, Leicester, Nottingham Trent, University, British Geological Survey, cancer

Last week, a US satellite collided with a Russian satellite. And this accident could be just the beginning.

Since the launch of Sputnik, Americans and the former Soviet Union raced each other to send more and more satellites into space. And most of that hardware is still up there. It’s called space debris, and in the fifty years that man has been exploring the vacuum that envelopes the planet, there have been more than 6,000 satellites launched into orbit, half of which are not longer functioning. And now, as more and more nations are joining the Americans, Russians, and the Europeans in placing more potential debris into the low-orbits, the problem of space debris may get a whole lot worse.

There is an estimated 14,000 objects that are larger than 4 inches or 10 centimeters. The US and Russia actively track about 17,000 objects that are floating around in space for fear that these objects may collide or even penetrate something like the International Space Station, the Hubble Telescope and its cousins, or the ever-smaller US Space Shuttle fleet.

Worse yet, some of that junk up there is radioactive.

Currently, 44 radiation sources from Russia are parked in the burial orbit. They are: two satellites with unseparated nuclear power units (Cosmos-1818 and Cosmos-1867), fuel assemblies and 12 closed-down reactors with a liquid metal coolant, 15 nuclear-fuel assemblies, and 15 fuel-free units with a coolant in the secondary cooling loop. They are to spend no less than 300 to 400 passive years in the orbit. That is enough for uranium-235 fission products to decay to safe levels.

The United States is another contributor to the high levels of radiation in near-Earth space. In April 1964, its Transit-SB navigation satellite with a radio isotope generator aboard failed to enter orbit and broke into pieces. While burning up in the atmosphere, it scattered about a kilogram of plutonium-238 over the western part of the Indian Ocean north of Madagascar. The result has been a 15-fold increase in background radiation around the world. A few years later, the Nimbus-B weather satellite with a uranium-235 reactor crashed into the Indian Ocean. Today, there are seven American radiation sources circling the Earth in orbits ranging from 800 kilometers to 1,100 kilometers, and two more in near-geostationary ones. –Ria Novosti

After the US-Russian collision, Russia is being warned by scientists that wreckage could land in Siberia. The Kosmos line of military satellites have been known to carry nuclear reactors on board. So far, the Russians are not confirming if the satellite involved in the collision is indeed radioactive, but they seem to be taking the warnings seriously, especially as Lake Baikal is in the area that wreckage may affect.

satellite, US, Russia, collision, space debris, Sputnik, Siberia, military, radioactive, wreakage, Lake Baikal

In a very creepy Children of Men kind of way, this recent development in the state of our world’s water resources could be the first step to lower fecundity in humans, which yes, in an extreme case like the world of 2027 in Children of Men, could lead to diminished birth rates.

Guess I’ll stop worrying about overpopulation…

A British joint-research project finds that increasing numbers of new chemicals such as those used in pharmaceuticals and fertilizers — the very things that make life worth living, am I right? — are showing up in our water supplies. These chemicals may have a rather harmful and decidedly less fruitful side effect on a man’s reproductive system.

And on a fish’s reproductive system. Studies in the past have shown that male fish are being “feminized” due to female hormones in the water supply. Certain hormones in the water are turning the fish into girl fish, kind of in some cases and literally in others. These estrogens are making it through the water treatment process after passing through women taking birth-control pills. To be fair, chemicals that act like estrogen also have the same effect on fish, and those chemicals are coming from industrial manufacturing.

Now, researchers are finding new chemicals they are calling “anti-androgens.” These are acting much like the estrogen and faux-estrogen. Androgens are male hormones like testosterone, and serve to support sperm production.

In fact, the researchers says they really don’t know where some of these chemicals are coming from.

“We have identified a new group of chemicals in our study on fish, but do not know where they are coming from. A principal aim of our work is now to identify the source of these pollutants and work with regulators and relevant industry to test the effects of a mixture of these chemicals and the already known environmental estrogens and help protect environmental health.” [quote from Lead author on the research paper, Dr Susan Jobling at Brunel University's Institute for the Environment]

Senior author Professor Charles Tyler of the University of Exeter said: “Our research shows that a much wider range of chemicals than we previously thought is leading to hormone disruption in fish. This means that the pollutants causing these problems are likely to be coming from a wide variety of sources.

“Our findings also strengthen the argument for the cocktail of chemicals in our water leading to hormone disruption in fish, and contributing to the rise in male reproductive problems. There are likely to be many reasons behind the rise in male fertility problems in humans, but these findings could reveal one, previously unknown, factor.”–SPX via TerraDaily

These anti-androgens are known to cause a condition called testicular dysgenesis syndrome. Even the name tells us what is going on — dys means “ill” and genesis means “birth“. The anti-androgens can cause developmental damage to the reproductive system in embryos and the syndrome is becoming more and more common unfortunately.

We are what we drink. The ultimate anti-androgens, Women.

Yet more bad news for our water supply.

fertility, reproductive health, men, mens health, water, water pollution, androgens, anti-androgens, fish, feminizing, fecundity, Children of Men, overpopulation, sperm, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, hormones, estrogen, testosterone, manufacturing, chemicals, water treatment, testicular dysgenesis syndrome, embryos, developmental damage

How sad is it that it takes television commercials to inform the American public of, well, anything.

I have complained in the past about the Clean Coal ad campaign. So-called clean coal is not an economically viable alternative to simply allowing all kinds of bad stuff — carbon dioxide, methane, mercury, arsenic, to name a few — to enter the air we breathe. Furthermore, no one has actually built a successful large clean coal power generating plant.

Well, finally, environmental groups are entering the ad campaign game to counter the Clean Coal ad campaign. And Al Gore is putting his Nobel-prize-winning-weight behind the campaign.

A group of environmental organizations concerned about global warming, including one backed by former vice president Al Gore, is launching an advertising campaign this week to counter the coal industry’s efforts to promote what it calls “clean coal.”

The groups will spend millions of dollars on television, newspaper and outdoor ads, the first of which shows a factory door in the middle of a barren landscape and the slogan: “In reality, there is no such thing as ‘clean coal.’ ” The ads say that “there isn’t a single commercial coal power plant in America today that captures its global warming pollution.”

The campaign is a response to a $15 million-plus ad campaign that began earlier this year by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, an industry-backed group that has tried to spruce up coal’s image. –Washington Post

Gore is super-serial about this greenwashing of the coal industry. He goes on to say that “We cannot base the strategy for human survival on the illusions of the industry that coal is already clean. It is not. What they want to do is build hundreds, if not thousands, of new coal plants on a vague promise that they might be able to retrofit those plants with a technology that does not exist.”

Of course, the Big Coal lobby’s public facade known as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity had a response.

… Joe Lucas, vice president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, says that technology has helped coal plants meet environmental standards for sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide, and that it will ultimately help reduce carbon dioxide emissions too. “To use the words of a new resident of Washington, ‘Yes we can’ invest in the technologies to make us capable of storing and capturing carbon from coal plants,” Lucas said.

“Ultimately”…hmm, that’s a funny word, as it describes a time, but that time could be a long, long time away. I give the coal industry credit for trying, but to come out with an ad campaign that plainly sells lies to Americans (and to the world, ultimately)is, frankly, irresponsible.

Instead of pumping hundreds of millions of money into researching clean technology for a resource that is limited and will run out, why not invest that same money into a renewable, clean source of energy? I may be talking crazy to some shareholders of energy companies that rely on coal — which is, like, all of them — but are we as a species really that stupid to not only believe in wasting money on short-term R&D, but also to believe the Coal Industry’s lies?

coal, clean, energy, industry, mining, technology, ad campaign, commercials, Al Gore, greenwashing, American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, renewable, resources

I tend to think that if you are sweeping dirt under a rug, you are avoiding the real problem of the dirt being there in the first place. I kind of feel the same way about carbon sequestration.

The US Department of Energy has recently published its Carbon Sequestration Second Atlas, and in that atlas, it is estimated that there is enough space underground to store the next 1,100 years worth of carbon emissions from both the United States and Canada. Of course, it is only an estimate of available storage space that hasn’t exactly been tested yet.

Unfortunately, despite my reluctance to accept the efficacy of carbon dioxide being pumped into porous rock formations, saline formations, depleted oil and gas reservoirs, or unmineable coal seams, carbon sequestration may be one of many steps we humans have to take in order to turn back the tide on global warming due to increasing levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.

It seems to me that if you first try to cut carbon emissions via clean energy technology, then maybe drilling into these deep underground spaces wouldn’t be necessary. However, I don’t see any drastic cuts in emissions any time soon. I wish it were otherwise, but this world is too fractured by both national and corporate interests to come to any kind of smart plan to combat our own pollution.

What makes carbon sequestration a silver bullet? No one can say with any degree of certainty that trapping carbon dioxide underground would stay trapped. Seems like it is just more “burying our problems”, a out of sight, out of mind mentality. And Yucca Mountain comes to mind. Or your friendly, necessary(?) muncipal landfill. Is it just a natural human tendency to want to bury things?

However, regulations have to be passed in order for anything to happen on a large scale, said Howard Herzog, a principal research engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The only way carbon capture will occur in any meaningful way is if there are policies that give businesses an incentive to do it, Herzog said.

“Until there are policies that restrict the emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere, it’s always going to be cheaper to emit” instead of capture and store the gas, he said.

If businesses do receive incentives to put carbon dioxide underground, federal regulations and inspections will have to ensure the gas doesn’t leak out.

“If you put it in the ground, you want to make sure it stays in there,” Herzog told UPI. “You don’t want to pay for something if you don’t get it.”

And make no mistake about it, someone will have to pay for it. Herzog and his colleagues at MIT estimate current investments in carbon capture and storage need to triple for wide-scale implementation to occur. For the federal government, that would mean increasing the annual carbon storage budget from about $300 million to $1 billion.–UPI via Terra Daily

Oh, wait, it’s going to cost us taxpayers money and big business is going to have to be urged to bury their/our carbon emissions responsibly? Add to that the increased costs for the energy produced at those power plants that will be passed down to the consumers (who will know be paying twice for this carbon sequestration service).

Yeah, that’ll work.

carbon sequestration, clean coal, US, United States, Canada, Department of Energy, atlas, porous rock, formation, saline, oil mine, power plant, carbon dioxide, greenhouse gases, global warming, Yucca Mountain, landill, business, consumers, energy costs

While I was watching NOVA last night, which was called “Ocean Animal Emergency” and truly saddening, I was struck by a small seal pup that had facial tumors growing out of its mouth. The tumors were found to be inoperable, and the poor, little Harbor seal had to be euthanized.

The moment I saw the seal’s tumors I was reminded of another creature that has become afflicted with grotesque facial tumors, the Tasmanian Devil.

Are the facial tumors afflicting the harbor seal on NOVA and Tasmanian Devil related? Could there be something more to this? What is it that is causing these odd, devastating growths? In January 2008, reports came out detailing that Tasmanian Devils have elevated levels of chemicals used as flame retardants in their blood stream. Could these chemicals be causing this kind of growth? Or are the chemicals just enabling this kind of cancer, making some animals more susceptible to disease?

The science is still out on the Tasmanian Devil, but as more than 60% of the wild population has died in the last decade since this facial cancer was first discovered, there may not be much time for scientists to figure it out.

The facial growth I saw on the harbor seal did not look quite as gruesome as that which I have seen in pictures of tasmanian devils. The harbor seal’s tumors looked more like big “toes” sticking out of its mouth. The seal didn’t look bothered by them, so it is unsure if the tumors were causing pain of any kind. I have to wonder if there is some correlation between the toxins we keep dumping in the ocean and this poor seal’s face.

NOVA explained that the seal and sea lions that are euthanized at the Marine Mammal Center are given a post-mortum examination, and blood and tissue samples are collected. I have to wonder what the MMC will find, if anything. Of course, it may simply be a birth defect, and I am worrying over nothing. But as seals are higher up on the food chain and consume other marine creatures, they could be the front line when it comes to realizing the effects of the many, many substances we allow to flow into our waters.

The MMC and other marine researchers are finding that another toxin, domoic acid, is killing sea lions and the numbers are only increasing. The domoic acid is a toxin released by the Pseudo-nitzschia algae, an algae that needs sunlight and nutrient-rich water, which are usually not the same water. However, with increasing amounts of nutrients in the form of fertilizers running into our near-shore waters, like Southern California where many sea lions are dying, algae blooms are becoming common in the spring and early summer.

seals, NOVA, pbs, ocean, animals, marine, mammal, tumors, growths, flame retardants, chemicals, toxins, cancer, tasmanian devil, water, pollution, algae, bloom, California, Marine Mammal Center, sea lions, domoic acid, Pseudo-nitzschia, harbor seal

Ah, again, I write about coal. This time it is good news indeed.

The Environmental Protection Agency has had to swallow its own hot air over new coal-fired power plants. This week, the EPA’s Environmental Appeals Board (kind of an independent oversight) decided that the EPA had no reason to not regulate carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants.

This all started when the Supreme Court ruled that carbon dioxide (CO2) is indeed a pollutant last year. As such, and as all pollutants, the EPA has a responsibility to regulate the amount of said pollutant into our environment. However, the EPA (with the Bush-appointed Stephen Johnson — booooo!) didn’t seem to see why it should bother to regulate the coal industry and its lobby (or any other industry that emits CO2), as Big Coal is Big Biz, and we all know that when the environment and Big Biz are competing for George W. Bush’s attention and favor, Big Biz will always win.

But cooler and smarter and fairer heads have prevailed. Now, over 100 coal plants that are in the pre-production process across the US, have to rethink their business plan and their blueprints. Any new coal-fired power plant will have to take its CO2 emissions into account, which essentially means that it is doubtful that the US will see new coal plants anytime soon.

The Sierra Club had originally sued to stop the construction of Deseret Power’s Bonanza Generating Station in Vernal, Utah, part of their nationwide campaign to stop new coal. The 110-megawatt plant, which received its EPA permit in July 2007, would have emitted 3.37 million tons of CO2 a year — the equivalent to putting another 660,000 cars on the road. In detail, Thursday’s decision means that any new air pollution permits for coal plants will require that Best Available Control Technology (BACT) be used to reduce CO2 emissions, the same criteria currently used for other pollutants, like sulfur dioxide or soot. BACT requires companies involved in power plants to use the best available technology to control pollutants — it’s a tool to keep pollution controls up to date as both safety technology and our understanding of pollution impoves. In the past, CO2 wasn’t affected by BACT because the EPA didn’t recognize it as a pollutant. This decision changes that.

Right now, however, there is no definition of BACT for CO2, and environmentalists estimate it will take six months to a year to figure that out. In the meantime, all other coal plants in the permitting process, or stuck in the courts, will be frozen. Over the longer term, it’s possible that new coal plants may be impossible to certify at all until a technology exists to greatly reduce or sequester carbon emissions from coal plants — and currently none has been proven. “The decision says the EPA can’t ignore CO2,” says Nilles. –Time

It is nice to see this kind of justice happen, not only in regards to keeping more coal plants from being built, but also that George W. Bush’s plans to gut the EPA’s protections in regards to CO2 are being frustrated — well, finally.

Still, it doesn’t help that China and India are building coal plants. Check out this graphic below for a wake up call. Click on the image to see the details better.

EPA, environment, coal, power, plants, coal-fired, carbon dioxide, CO2, pollution, George Bush, George W Bush, China, India

The title may not refer to you, as an individual, unless you happen to be a owner of a coal mine, but what some may see as a blight on the environment — a coal mine — the Dutch have converted into a geothermal power plant.

Your basic geothermal power plant

From a story on Energy Daily:

Claimed by its originators to be the world’s first such energy generator, the “Mine Water Project” in the south-western Limburg province went into operation last month, heating some 350 homes and businesses in a newly built neighbourhood in Heerlen.

It emits 55 percent less polluting carbon dioxide than other water heating systems.

“The global energy question can no longer be solved with fossil fuels,” Christion Cornips, executive of the residential company Weller that initiated the project, told AFP.

“Energy shortages have to be addressed at a local level, and mine water is an example of that.”

The project saw five new wells being drilled into the ground at five different locations. The wells reach depths of 700 metres (2,300 feet), from which are pumped nearly 80 cubic metres (2,800 cubic feet) of water per hour.

“The water temperature measures 32 degrees C (89 degrees F) at the bottom (of the well) and 28 degrees when it arrives at the surface,” explains Jan-Jaap van Bergermeer, who supervises the project.

What does this mean? It means that the areas of this world that may not have their own inherent potential for geothermal energy production may be able to fake it — if the area happens to have some deep mines.

The Province of Limburg and its former coal mines.

It’s quite simple. When you get past a certain depth down in the Earth’s surface, things start getting hotter. The closer to the Earth’s mantle, the hotter it becomes, and we humans can use that heat in the form of geothermal energy. We take the heat (thermal) from the Earth (geo) and we use that heat, better thought of here as potential energy to create steam. The steam, due to its expansive nature, takes its potential heat energy and turns a turbine, thus converting the potential energy to kinetic energy, which creates electrons to flow through power lines, and voila, electricity! Ok, that is a really simplified explanation, but give me a break, I teach kids and I try to make things understandable for everyone involved in this silly little muddle called Daily Science Dose.

The Dutch Province of Limburg was once a prosperous coal-mining region, but coal became more and more expensive to mine in that part of Europe, as the government did not artificially make coal more competitive with other energy sources with the help of subsidies, as in the United States.

The Minewater Power Plant is not quite at the point where it is generating electricity, but instead employs the heat from the water to heat radiators in homes. Scientists had discovered that water had seeped into the abandoned mines over time, and that water was hot. 89 degrees Fahrenheit at the bottom, and a bit cooler at the surface. The Minewater Power Plant pumps up the hot water, pumps it through pipes to heat residential water systems that run radiators in 350 homes in a small neighborhood in the Netherlands.

The flip side of the Minewater Power Plant is that homes can also be cooled by the same methods, the difference being that cool water in shallower wells is used instead of the hot water from almost a half-mile below the Earth’s surface.

When you think about how much energy is used to heat and cool buildings, it can be quite a lot of non-renewable resources used and a whole lotta carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere. So even if these minewater projects are feasible in former (soon to be former when the coal runs out) coal mining regions, it could still cut into conventional energy demand and conventional energy pollution.

Dutch, geothermal, energy, electricity, coal, mine, mining, abandoned mines, Limburg, power, Minewater power plant, pollution, carbon dioxide

Earlier this month, Science Magazine reported that an international collaboration of scientists have published a comprehensive database of everything mammalian. The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) pulled together information from all parts of the world as well as going back into records from the 1500’s in order to get a total picture of what is going on in the world of warm-blooded vertabrates.

The database, part of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, updates and expands a survey from 1996 and includes both land and marine species. Taking 5 years to compile, the effort involved more than 1700 researchers from 130 countries. They combed their literature and pooled their unpublished knowledge of ecology, taxonomy, distribution, population trends, threats, and conservation efforts. The species were then classified according to their extinction risk. “We wanted to make this one-stop shopping for scientists and policymakers,” says IUCN and Conservation International mammalogist Jan Schipper, who coordinated the project.

The bad news is that one quarter of those 5487 species are on the fast track to extinction. Half are experiencing declining numbers. Out of the total number, more than 860 species are too poorly known to be properly assessed in terms of population health.

The good news is that since the last published database, 700 new species of mammals have been discovered. Also encouraging is that well-established and funded conservation programs are working for the most part in many areas.

More numbers…

29 of the species in the database may already be extinct, including China’s freshwater dolphin the baiji.

188 species are critically endangered.

1 in 5 species that are not already showing danger of extinction are showing decreases in population.

1139 species are presently threatened with extinction.

Habitat loss is the major reason for declining numbers in addition to hunting for land mammals. Marine mammals face the same threats, but also suffer more acutely from pollution issues and fishing including by-catch of species that are not regulated by fishing agencies. The larger the animal, the higher the risk of extinction, such as in such animals as gorillas and rhinos. Marine mammals are facing the biggest threat in the North Atlantic and Pacific as well as in the waters around Southeast Asia.

The new database “is the most valuable effort to date to summarize the state of conservation and threats to the world’s mammal populations,” says mammalogist Don Wilson of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. “By detailing threats at the species level, it will now be possible for management agencies in every country in the world to prioritize their efforts to try to mitigate these threats.”

With more and more people needing more and more room, I cannot say with any conviction that we can save some of these mammals. That brings up an interesting question: What do we save? What can we save? And who decides?

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You may have heard something about India and China and the threat of their current industrialization and how that industrialized pollution in the way of increased emissions of greenhouse gases will affect the world’s climate. It is true that this is and will be a huge problem for all of us, but another issue with industrialization is the more localized pollution that comes with it.

Image by Nicolle Rager Fuller, National Science Foundation

India and China are playing catch-up with the rest of the industrialized world. That is one of the Bush’s administrations sticky points when it comes to not signing on to the Kyoto Protocol for all these years. Why should the US and Europe bother to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions when China and India are just starting to pump millions of tons of carbon into the air (and water) via new yet inefficient coal-fired power plants? I know, the admin’s attitude is mind-boggling and childish, but I didn’t vote for him, so it’s not like I can apologize for him and his handlers here. Instead of the US perhaps leading the innovation and technological boom in green industries and then exporting that technology and equipment to India and China, both the US economy would be doing well and China and India could go “green.” But no matter, I don’t have the space here to ruminate on the topic today.

India and China are currently heavily reliant on coal (so is the US, if you care to know). The problem with coal is that it is very dirty in addition to releasing tons of carbon upon being burned. Coal creates “brown clouds,” that is localized pollution of tiny soot particles that collect and act like their own mini-greenhouse.

Last year, National Geographic News covered a new study on these brown clouds.

But the latest study suggests that aerosols can be responsible for regional warming. Specifically, the clouds of aerosols over India enhance atmospheric warming there by 50 percent.

“We found this brown cloud can cover the entire North Indian Ocean, an area the size of the continental United States,” said lead author Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a climate scientist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California, San Diego.

The haze of brown clouds over the region can be up to two miles (three kilometers) thick, Ramanathan said.

And the haze touches the lower parts of the glaciers in the Himalaya mountain range, said study co-author David Winker, principal investigator of the CALIPSO satellite at NASA’s Langley Research Center.

This suggests that the brown clouds may be contributing to glacial melting in the Himalaya.

Now there are differences in aerosols. Some are light colored and some dark. It is the dark aerosols that are the contributors to these brown clouds.

Brown clouds contain dark aerosols such as soot that are released into the atmosphere by burning organic matter.

These particles absorb solar energy and then release it to the surrounding air as heat.

Natural forces such as forest fires can create soot, but so can human actions such as burning fossil fuels.

…

But unlike greenhouse gases, light and dark aerosols are not distributed uniformly throughout the globe, said Peter Pilewskie, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who was not involved in the study.

Averaging the effects of aerosols worldwide masks regional processes that “we need to truly understand when we put all the pieces of the planet together,” Pilewskie said.

Why does this all matter? The Himalayan ice cap is vital to the survival of China, India, and all their neighbors. And this ice cap, a network of thousands and thousands of glaciers, is melting, and fast.

The 15,000 Himalayan glaciers that create the “Water Tower of Asia” — the largest block of fresh water outside the Polar Ice Caps — have been melting forever. But they are suddenly melting so fast that they are drying up. It will take decades, but at the rate the earth is warming, they may simply disappear.

“Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world,” the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned last year. “If the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate.”

If you are bothered by the “oil wars” we see today, just wait for the “water wars” of the future.

India, China, global warming, climate change, pollution, brown clouds, aerosols, greenhouse gases, industrialization, coal, power, energy, air pollution, soot, National Geographic, National Science Foundation