Environment

Every regulatory body in the world has found that the weedkiller glyphosate is only harmful for plants. And huge studies of over 50,000 farmers have found the same. That hasn't stopped trial lawyers and trade groups that aid them or promote competitors to glyphosate, such as Organic Consumers Association or Center for Food Safety, from insisting the studies are flawed because they are "industry funded." They know their customers, and hopefully potentially jurors, aren't aware that all safety studies must be paid for by industry. It would be wrong to let companies create products and then hand…

University of Bonn environmentalists and economists say Peru's National Forest Conservation Program needs to do more ro protect the rainforest. Peru, on the other hand, is navigating the shackled man problem(1); that developed countries want the rest of the world to limit progress now that rich economies are already doing well. So in 2010 they launched a program to protect the rainforest but Europeans criticize that its effect is still too small. Further, they want Peru to enact three more stringent measures and if governments in Europe agree Peru has to at least consider it because they are…

I was astonished to find out that the BBC linked to this “paper” in a recent article about eco-anxiety without explaining to the reader that it is just “crap”. There I'm quoting the distinguished climate scientist Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University. This BBC article is here: Climate change: Are you suffering from ‘eco-anxiety’? - BBC Three All they say about it is "Meanwhile, an academic paper on climate change - that is so grim it apparently resulted in people going to therapy - has gone viral, with some reports suggesting…

The more intensive and narrow the agricultural process, the more intensive the greenhouse gas emissions - which means your organic vegetables, wild-caught salmon, and free-range grass fed beef is a larger contributor to climate change than modern farming techniques. And that means rich White people disproportionately affect the environment through their eating habits, according to a new report in the Journal of Industrial Ecology. The report looks at what different demographic populations eat and was undertaken to get a better understanding of the environmental impacts of the food consumption…

With a strange verdict by a jury in San Francisco, it became open season on glyphosate, a common weedkiller in use for generations. One new claim is that it leads to higher phosphorous levels. Yet glyphosate only contains trace nutrients, nothing like what fertilizer has. Overuse of phosphorus-based fertilizer in some areas have led to a saturation of the soil’s capacity to hold the nutrient, which increases the likelihood that any additional phosphorus applied to the land will run off into waterways and cause of harmful algal blooms and deoxygenation leading to fish death. Roundup as a…

Though the common refrain is that old growth rainforests are the only way to stave off global warming and must be preserved at all costs, a new analysis makes the case for logging and takes some hot air out of the environmental balloon.  It found that the world’s largest carbon sinks are located in young, regrowing forests. Forests are major carbon sinks and are a "green lung" for because they clean the air, remove dust particles, and produce oxygen. But the notion that old rainforests are vital to the ecosystem has been scientifically suspect. An international team agrees that…

Short summary. The journalist stories often don't even mention that studies are not agreed on whether it is carbon positive or even perhaps carbon negative. The amount in the worst case is around an extra quarter of a degree rise by 2100, a slow burner through to the next three or four centuries. That is for “business as usual”. For 3°C which we are close to already and easily achievable, then it is possible that it remains carbon negative and removes the equivalent of CO2 a fifth of a degree by 2299, and at most it is a fifth of a degree increase by 2299. According to Climate Tracker our…

This UN Report is not saying we are going to be unable to feed everyone. But we need to be careful to maintain the biodiversity of the wild relatives of our crops and also of our ecosystems to be most resilient. We don’t risk mass famine, they say that specifically in the interview with the BBC but we need the biodiversity to deal with future issues such as for instance pests and diseases of our crops. On this the situation is rather encouraging, especially if you read the report itself. This is another story running in the sensationalist press about harmless asteroids, leading to…

Cockroaches have a reputation for resilience, likely contributing to the belief that they could even survive a nuclear bomb and subsequent radiation exposure. And though Fukushima was not a nuclear bomb, or even a real disaster (more people died trying to escape than from radiation), the claim that cockroaches were found led weight to their constitutions.(a) But is it really accurate? In the future, if a disgraced doctor finds Alita: Battle Angel in a junk pile, will she be with a cockroach?    University of Melbourne School of Population and Global Health Professor Tilman Ruff, a…

Wildlife is abundant in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, found a month-long camera study which found 10 mammal and five bird species scavenging fish carcasses placed on the shoreline of rivers and canals there. Among the species were white-tailed eagles, American mink and river otter. A previous study also found abundant gray wolves in this ecological zone of about 1,000 square miles that was abandoned by humans after the 1986 nuclear accident which made the name Chernobyl famous.  The new results provide evidence that aquatic nutrient resources can flow to terrestrial landscapes and become…