1. Hyo Jin, CHO 2. Collective reaction to the tragedy of commons does not always solve the tragedy. 3. According to the article, the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species(CITES) rejected bans on trade of bluefin tuna and polar bears. The population of bluefin tuna and polar bears is decreasing because of global warming which is melting polar bears’ habitat, and overfishing on bluefin tuna. A spokesman for the CITES secretary general said currently countries are not ready to stop trade of species which are still commercially important. Among 175 nations, nearly 40% were against the proposal, ban on trade of tuna and polar bear. I think this article well show ‘the tragedy of commons’. Polar bears and bluefin tunas are natural resources that people have used commercially. However, because of human beings’ indiscreet acts, directly and indirectly natural resources are stuck in tragedy. According to last lecture, Elinior Ostrom argued that the tragedy of commons will not happen as people would not stand back just watching the common pasture being destroyed. She said people will collectively react not to scarcity of resources happen. Since the number of endangered species rise, CITES has been organized and nations regularly meet to curb the trade on those species. People are trying to react to the worrying situation. However, according to the article, it seems collective reaction does not always guarantee sustainability of species and environment. As a director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group said, this well shows that nations still ignore environment and wildlife just for short-term economic gain, which is not a quite rational way. I thought the way of collective reaction to common pasture is what we should look again ostrom’s idea. If people or nations’ values still stay in economy-best thought, we cannot always say that tragedy of commons will be solved by collective efforts. Government’s ethic is also very important. --------------------- 4.Global conference rejects bans on trade in bluefin tuna, polar bear By Juliet Eilperin, In the contest between commerce and conservation, a global conference this week aimed at protecting imperiled wildlife seems to be giving commerce the upper hand. Delegates gathered in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday rejected proposals pushed by the United States to impose restrictions on trade in polar bears and Atlantic bluefin tuna, despite arguments that climate change was endangering the polar bears and that bluefin tuna has been fished to precipitously low levels. The group earlier defeated a measure aimed at exposing problems in the global shark trade. The 175 nations represented at the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora could reconsider the decisions before the meeting ends next week, but they have shown little inclination to make economic sacrifices for the sake of conservation. CITES, which meets every 2 1/2 years to decide whether the world should curb trade in an array of coveted plants and animals, has over four decades restricted the sale of such things as rhino horns, elephant tusks and mahogany trees in the Amazon. This year, delegates are considering an unprecedented number of commercially valuable marine species, including eight kinds of shark and more than two dozen corals. U.S. officials and environmentalists thought the case for protection was strong, with the prospect of climate change melting polar bears' sea-ice habitat and the dramatic drop in the adult population of bluefin tuna. But while the conference serves to focus public attention on the plight of vulnerable species, it does not always result in heightened environmental protections. (...) -------- http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031805031.html?referrer=emailarticle
3. In my last week's blog article, I mentioned a little about the negative sides of nuclear power plants. I actually remembered that it was bad, but couldn't remember exactly why. So I looked up an article about it. What I read was more shocking than I had thought - not the waste part but the part where government is planning to build 12 more plants by 2022 and that the lifespan of the existing plant is already over. Are we really using that much electricity? It seems urgent that we develop other alternatives like sunlight and wind!
---
Fatal Trap of Nuclear Energy "Renaissance"
By PRESSian Published: March 17, 2010
"Nuclear energy has blossomed." The media has been making a fuss that we have now entered the Nuclear Energy Renaissance. Nuclear energy has become so popular these days that it is even compared to a flower.
The Lee administration has put "nuclear energy" and "4 rivers project" in its frontline, and his popularity has been rising ever since winnin the contract for nuclear plants in Arab Emirates. People now seem to think that 'nuclear energy' equals 'national benefit.' The media continues to deliver the economic benefits and success of exporting nuclear plants and didn't give a balanced report. Now, even in the cyber space, people who speak against nuclear energy has been treated as if they have no 'patriotism.'
The government plants to build 12 more nuclear plants by 2022. But what worries me more is that there is no one to give correct information about nuclear energy. A parent recently told me that at her kid's elementary school, there are so many events and programs related to nuclear energy that she unconsciously becomes friendly with the idea, that the school must be educating this since it's good energy. If there was anti-communism education in the 20th century, there is nuclear energy education in the 21st century.
Government's PR of Nuclear Energy Goes Overboard
3.7% of the electric charge is used as a base fund for electric power sector. Nuclear Energy Cultural Foundation receives over 10 billion Won from the base fund and uses the money to advertise nuclear energy on TV and o on. It means even people like I who is against nuclear energy is funding the advertisements just by using electricity. The government claims in the ads that "nuclear energy is cheap, it produces little greenhouse gas, and it's the green energy for green growth." However, there are too many problems to solve to call it a green energy yet.
Nuclear power plants are also facing "Aging Society." The 30-year lifespan of Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1, built in 1978, ended in 2008, but the government is planning to run it for 10 more years. The lifespan of Wolsung Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 and Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 2 are also expected to end in 2012 and 2013. This means that, if we have only been using the electricity produced by nuclear power plants, now it's time to close down the plants and pay its expenses.
Aging Society of Nuclear Plants, Where do the Wastes Go?
Radioactive wastes from the nuclear power plants is the biggest problem. The government was building a middle and low level radioactive waste repository, expected to be finished by this June, in Kyungju. However, because the location turned out to be a soft ground, the construction was delayed for 30 months. The suitability of the site is now in debate.
The safety investigation group reported on 13th that "there is big deviation in the rocks of Kyungju site, so much caution is needed for design and construction, but if we come up with a solution, it will be safe." The residents question "how the conclusion came to be safe when the site is dangerous." The debate is expected to continue. This problem has been already expected when the government focused on residents' acceptance rather than the suitability of the site, in the process of selection 5 years ago.
When a crack developed at Asse middle and low level radioactive waste repository, Germany decided to close it down, saying there is possible danger of underground water leaking in. Relocating the 126,000 drums of wastes will take 10 years, and the expected cost is around 4 billion Euros. I may be wrong, but I can see the future of Kyungju in Asse case. Moreover, we still have the no solutions for how to deal with high level radioactive wastes.
The Hidden Costs Behind New Nuclear Power Plants
According to government's plans, 32 nuclear plants will be running by 2022. Tension against residents in selecting new sites is inevitable. If New Kori Unit 1 to 8 is completed, in addition to the currently running 4 units, it will become an unprecedented case where 12 nuclear plants are running in one place. Not only will be safety be an issue, but there will be a lot of social and environmental problems. More nuclear plants mean more wastes, and we would also need more transmission towers.
...
Renewable energy industry will suffer from the expansion of nuclear power plants. The bigger role nuclear energy takes, the less important renewable energy will seem like. It will waste money, time, and effort that should be invested in transferring to renewable energy system. International environmental organizations like "Greenpeace" and "Friends of the Earth" recently reported that if Finland had used the 1.5 billion Euros, put into Olkiluoto 3 for the last 8 years, into wind power plants instead, it would have been producing same amount of electricity.
Transfer to more Democratic and Sustainable Energy
...
Germany, who uses more electricity than Korea, introduced the law to discard nuclear power plants in 2002 and is trying to close down all nuclear power plants and replace it with renewable energy step by step. Some people still insist expanding the lifespan of nuclear power plants, but it's not strong enough to affect the discard policy. Greenpeace is working on a scenario where we can close down nuclear power plants and both get necessary electricity and deal with climate change through "The Energy Revolution."
2. Why people dont practice recycling as willingly
3. I brought up the issue of recycling because I think of it as an unresolved are which is not being dealt with properly, even though it is not a new, current issue of the environment. Even though the concept of recycling is a simple, easy way of participating in protecting the environment, and maybe even one of the most effective, it seems that even the developed countries have a hard time implementing it. I think this is a good example which shows what I think is a very big barrier in effectively protecting the environment: the pursuit of convenience. Because it is simply more convenient to throw away everything at once, whether it be food wastes, plastic, or paper, people do not want to be in the hassle to waste their time and energy. As in Korea it is mandatory to recycle and many recycling bins are available, I was shocked when I went to the U.S. and saw this. I thought this article was interesting because it showed various reasons why people didn’t recycle. The reason I just mentioned being dominating, other reasons was that it wasn’t economical, or because they don’t feel the need to. As an exchange student in the U.S., the country of freedom, individuality and convenience, I could understand why people living there would regard recycling a hassle. When you get accustomed to that kind of lifestyle, you don’t really want to go through all that, and we they have a right to live conveniently. Even myself, -- and I regard myself as environmentally conscious—even though I try to recycle as much as I can, there are moments when I would have too much luggage on me or when I’m short of time or when I’m just want to get rid of my trash I don’t really feel like recycling. So where do you draw the line. How do you get people to recycle when individuals’ conceptions are different and they should be able to make free choices? A structural change to make the recycling program more accessible and convenient would be a first step but fundamentally, to change the values and views of the people, I think is the biggest challenge to creating a environmental friendly environment so that it is not thought as a hassle, but as a must. ----------------------------------------------
A lot of people just don't recycle. While there may be a temptation to imagine them as conspiring Earth Haters who take orders directly from Skeletor, they are usually normal people who try to contribute positively to society in other ways.
... Economically speaking, some recycling isn't cost effective, he argues, citing plastic as an example of a controversial material while others are agreed to be cost-effective, such as aluminum cans.
"What I wish everyone would learn in Economics 101 is that there are trade-offs in life. There are both benefits and downsides to recycling," Darren explains. "Individually, time is the most precious resource we use when we recycle. You could have done something else with that time used to recycle, and you can never get back spent time. On the city level, it's time, effort and money. It is a question of whether recycling is the best use of that money, or if it would be better spent on education or health care. There are always trade-offs."
But people differ in what they consider to be the best trade-off. "I think a lot of people recycle because it makes them feel good, and that's fine. For me personally, I get no benefit from recycling, so I don't' do it," he says.
... "The way recycling is set up around here, the burden falls on the recycler, not the company doing the recycling," he says. "I'm not going to take that pop can and drive it around town searching for a recycling bin, but if they pick it up from me without charge, that's a different story ----------------------------------------------
1. Franziska Mittelstädt 2.Why Germany Is Behind in the Race for Electric Cars
3.After speaking in the class about policies concerning electric cars in Korea and Japan, I was pretty curious about the situation in Germany. When I was young (10 years or so) I learned already in school about the "solution electric car" - so it's quite well-known in Germany. Also I can remember to have watched an explanaition how a electric car is working in a children tv show. Since the beginning of the year you can even watch this advertisment for electric power for cars (watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cjxAHi29K8&feature=related ) So I was really surprised to notice that Germany has only a "symbolic" tax reduction for buyers of electric cars (circa 140€). This seems to be even more weird if you consider that the German government spent 4 Billion € (circa 6.175.200.000.000 Won) on the so-called scrappage bonus in 2009. Hereby the government gave every owner of an at least 9 years old car 2.500 € if he would "recycle" his old vehicle in a car compactor and buy a brandnew car in the same time. The government called it officially "Environment Bonus" because it would help to reduce the numbers of old cars in Germany. But actually its real consequences and its supposed benefits for the environment are much discussed.
Motorists in the US or China who buy electric cars receive hefty subsidies from the state. But Germany, where the car was invented, is not supporting the vehicles of the future -- and risks being overtaken.
The race for the cars of the future has not yet started in earnest, but the participants are already jostling for pole position. US President Barack Obama recently stressed that investment was needed in electric vehicles now otherwise an opportunity would be missed, while Britain's Business Secretary Peter Mandelson claimed the leadership in the "low-carbon economy of the future" for his country. Meanwhile German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee considers "cars powered by fossil fuels" to be "ready to be phased out."
There are good reasons for these fine words. A rapid increase in the use of electric vehicles could reduce CO2 emissions, not to mention emissions of particulate matter and other pollutants. Electric vehicles are more efficient, easier to maintain and cheaper to operate than cars with internal combustion engines. "The future belongs to electric cars" believes Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn. It's an opinion shared by his colleagues at Daimler and Renault.
As a result, a growing number of countries are making a lot of money available in order to help electric vehicles make a quick breakthrough. Americans receive a tax credit of up to $7,500 (€5,800) when they buy an electric car. As of 2011, British drivers will receive almost the same amount -- in cash. In China, motorists get the equivalent of over €6,700. And in Germany?
Motorists who buy an electric car are exempted from the German car tax for five years. The savings compared to a normal car -- based on middle-of-the-road prices -- add up to a total of a massive €140.
An Expensive Mistake
In the country where the automobile was born, there are practically no measures to promote alternatives to gas-powered engines. This is all the more amazing when you consider that the German government has just made another €3.5 billion available for the so-called "scrapping bonus," whereby motorists receive €2,500 when they scrap an old car and buy a new one. The scheme, which is officially called the "environmental bonus," is the biggest program to promote new car sales in German history.
This omission could prove expensive for Germans in the medium term. Admittedly auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and BMW also benefit from subsidies for electric cars in China or the US. But if the costly development of new engines is going to be worth it for German carmakers, then they will need strong demand in their domestic market. And with the current lack of support for electric cars, this demand may well be weak when the first vehicles are delivered to dealers between 2010 and 2012.
It's not as if the government has ignored the technology. Some €500 million is allocated for electric and hydrogen vehicles under Berlin's second economic stimulus package -- except that Germany has not granted the money to its citizens, but to its car industry. The practice has a long tradition: The government was already promoting alternative engine projects back in the 1980s and 1990s. Daimler, BMW and others tinkered around with batteries and electric engines for years using taxpayers' money. But a product which was suitable for series production never appeared.
That miserable failure was due to a banal fact of the market economy: Research grants, regulations and persuasive words are limited in their ability to influence the actions of companies. The only thing that really makes corporations sit up and take notice is the prospect of a juicy profit. If VW and their peers believed electric cars would soon be selling like hotcakes, electric vehicles would be on the road sooner rather than later.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the Chinese, of all people, have realized this connection earlier than others. The People's Republic pays the highest electric car subsidies in the world -- in the hope that a rapid uptake of the technology will give a competitive advantage to domestic electric car manufacturers like BYD.
The deputy finance minister, Zhang Shaochun, rejects lavish research grants. A direct subsidy, he says, "gives consumers a choice" -- and means that the market decides which electric cars are successful.
The unlikely eco-capitalist is correct. That is why Germany needs a new "environmental bonus" for buyers of electric cars -- - and one which actually deserves the name. Otherwise Germany's fleet of cars, which is currently being renewed courtesy of the scrapping bonus, will soon be looking pretty old-fashioned.
3. Last class, we studied “Neo Malthusianism.” I think there is a close connection between population and environment. It seems natural result when people increase more the pollution or consumption also is increased, because people only can survive as using natural resources. Our actions which take advantages of environment always bring “trash.” According to EPA survey, 2.1kg trash is produced by an American per day. It is enormous quantity when we multiply 2.1kg by the population of U.S.A. We regard China as the largest nation in the world. The nation has not only big territory but large population. It earns many profits due to population; on the other hand, it has some problems related to it. Even though there is no exact survey about how much waste would be produce by a Chinese, I assume that it would show great quantity. According to the article, the people fight against garbage incinerators. Incinerators are efficient ways to remove trash so most country prefer this way to reclamation. However, it causes some harmful diseases to people by making toxic material through the process. Therefore, they resist building incinerators. Even though burning trash has side effects, there is no clear alternative. The consumption and garbage are increasing keeping step with population, and it is impossible to bury all garbage on ground. In this situation, the only solution could be “new technology.” As we learned in last class, advanced technology would bring about new and environmental-friendly method to deal with lots of garbage. Some researchers have studied ‘microorganisms’ which decompose trash to harmlessness material. But it takes a lot of time to apply it, since these studies are at a beginning stage. Also these need some supports from government. Separate garbage collection and volume-rate garbage disposal system are useful way to handle this problem, too. If people separate waste which would be harmful when it is burned from other things, they can use incinerating trash in safe way. The volume-rate garbage disposal system will be helpful to reduce the amount of garbage. Even if many people are in the world, I believe, we can preserve environment as long as we try to solve pollution. The most important factor to pollution is not population (they could be, but not absolute factor), but our mind toward nature. ---------------------------------
------------------------- 4. BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of China's urban elite took to the streets last year in protest against expanding garbage incinerators, angered by the threat to both their health and the value of their homes, a report launched on Friday said. The stability-obsessed government fears growing public anger among the country's middle class, who once focused largely on securing jobs and homes but are becoming increasingly assertive -- sometimes forcing authorities to back down on unpopular plans. City residents in the capital Beijing and the relatively well-off coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Guangdong all came out in 2009 to try and block new constructions or expansions of incinerators, an annual review by one of China's oldest and best known environmental groups, Friends of Nature, said. "Health and safety are people's bottom line. When they feel threatened, and there's no other way to defend themselves, they protest," said Yang Changjiang, a journalist and co-author of the fifth annual "Green book of the Environment" report. ...... But China has already surpassed the United States as the world's largest producer of household garbage as increased prosperity brings increased consumption. The government is struggling to find new ways and places to dispose of the growing heap of rubbish, the report said. With space already at a premium in a country struggling with a shortage of farmland, incineration is an obvious alternative. Beijing and Guangzhou now generate around 18,000 tons of garbage per day, but only have capacity to process 10,400 tonnes and 12,000 tonnes respectively, state media have reported. Protests included rallies, petitions, sit-ins, online forums and group efforts to dig into the financial affairs of officials who might be benefiting from any construction. "We're tired of what the experts and officials said," one user of an anti-garbage-burning forum set up by residents of southern Guangdong province wrote. "We had no choice but to obey their decisions. It's time for change." They are part of a sea-change in the nature of environmental protests that first gained widespread attention with efforts to block a chemical plant planned for the port of Xiamen in 2007. Previously, most of those who challenged officials were farmers living with huge levels of pollution. The impact on their lives or livelihood was disastrous enough to outweigh the potential risks of taking on the government. The concerns of the middle classes, about the future of their health or assets, brought a different kind of protest. "Many people involved in 2009 cases are rich," said Xie Xinyuan, project coordinator at Friends of Nature. "They are able to hire people to do professional research and present it to the public. Or they are so well-educated that they can do it by themselves," Xie said. "People who live in less developed areas may also be harmed by the garbage crisis, but there is not so much they can do." So far Beijing at least has stuck to plans for more incinerators, adding three by 2012, and a further four by 2015. By then, 8,200 tonnes of garbage could be going up in smoke -- much of it foul-smelling and potentially toxic -- around the capital each day. "I'm not optimistic about the situation this year," Yang said. "Nationwide, 41 new incinerators will be built. It could cause some very serious problems." (Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
1. Dingyuan Hou 2. What's stopping us getting solar power from deserts? 3. If we are to phase out fossil fuels and avoid nuclear, we must find some very large new sources of electricity if we want to replace some of the oil used in transport with electricity. One of the few such sources is the Desertec project to bring solar energy from North Africa to Europe. I think it is a classic big solution to the problem of over consumption. A major advantage of this technology is that a part of the sun’s heat can be collected and stored during the day and then run through steam circuits at night or during peak hours, depending on the demand so that the energy can fully exploited. But we need to be held responsible for our appetites. If we need electricity, we must have a moral duty to bear the burden ourselves as much as possible.
Given the fact that this aspect is completely new to me, here I actually have some questions to ask. Doesn’t it make more sense to import wind energy from the Sahara since wind energy is much cheaper than solar energy? The Dersertec project sounds pretty, but is the cost of it too high to enforce the operation? Is it really practical? In addition, I figure that water is still demanded during the cleaning and cooling process. Do you think it is a problem in dessert areas?
---------------------------------- Plans to use concentrating solar power plants in the Sahara to generate and export electricity have been on the table for years. Now, it looks as though political will might help move things forward The logic of the idea would seem obvious to a child: the human race needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, so why don't we build solar power plants in the world's deserts, to give us all the energy we need?
This concept has long been promoted by Desertec, a European network of scientists and engineers, which argues that just 1 per cent of the surface area of the world's deserts could generate as much electricity as the world is now using.
Desert solar power Desertec envisages a massive deployment of solar technology in Middle Eastern and North African countries, exporting electricity to Europe. The vision may seem idealistic, but there have been signs recently that politicians and industry are starting to take the Desertec proposals seriously.
A recent Desertec seminar at the House of Commons was attended by the energy minister Lord Philip Hunt, as well as the Conservative shadow energy minister Charles Hendry and the Liberal Democrat shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, Simon Hughes.
All three professed support for the concept, with Lord Hunt declaring, 'I am very interested in the work that you are doing.' Just words? Maybe. But Hunt promised that the Desertec will be seriously considered by the European Commission as it tries to make plans for future supplies of renewable energy for the whole region.
The sheer cost of solar power is another obstacle.
Electricity produced by even the cheapest solar technology still works out at $160 per megawatt hour (MWh), compared with just $60 per MWh for electricity produced by coal-fired power stations and $80 per MWh for the most efficient gas-fired power stations, according to Jenny Chase, senior solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which analyses investments in renewable energy.
Chase acknowledges that government subsidies in Spain and Germany have already helped bring down the cost of solar power dramatically, but she finds the Desertec concept unconvincing.
'The idea is to generate an expensive form of power and then transport it across long distances. That doesn't stack up without significant amounts of subsidy. I don't know if that will come, but I suspect that given the timescales involved, solar power may become cheap enough to deploy widely in Europe without needing to transport it from north Africa,' she says.
African solar industry North African governments are taking steps to build their own solar industry.
The seminar at the House of Commons included a presentation from the Morroccan energy minister, Amina Benkhadra, who is seeking $9bn of investment to build 2000 megawatts of solar capacity in Morocco by 2019.
Tunisia has launched a similar scheme, the Plan Solaire, and Schellekens expects further solar plans will soon be launched by other North African countries. For the moment, he doubts there is much enthusiasm among investors:
'We are at a point in the [economic] cycle where lots of money has been lost and what is left is being looked after carefully.'
The private sector has also begun to investigate Desertec. Last July in Munich, 12 energy and financial companies including Deutsche Bank and E.On agreed to finance a three-year feasibility study, known as the Desertec Industrial Initiative.
The group has been convened by Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurance group, which believes solar power in North Africa could deliver 15 per cent of Europe's electricity by 2050.
Concentrating solar power
Desertec supporters say the technology needed to carry out the plan already exists. It advocates the use of concentrating solar power, whereby mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight into small areas to generate heat. This heat is used to generate steam, which in turn drives turbines to generate electricity, just like a conventional power station.
The advantage over conventional solar panels is that it does not need expensive silicon. It does, however, need lots of direct sunlight, which makes it ideal for deserts but less suitable for most European countries.
Another advantage is that generation can continue at night, using spare heat that has been stored in tanks containing melted salts or in concrete blocks. Six concentrated solar power plants are already up and running in Spain and several more are under construction.
Lord Philip Hunt warns, however, that the technology will need to prove itself on a large scale - running at hundreds of megawatts rather than demonstration-scale plants producing merely tens of megawatts - before Desertec can take off. He also pointed to the massive scale of investment that would be needed, most of which will have to come from the private sector, plus the importance of creating the right regulation across Europe, 'which will not be easy'.
Encouragingly, Hunt concluded, 'none of these challenges is insurmountable'.
2. U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna
3. This article is about United States trying to persuade delegates of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites, to provide strong international protection for the bluefin tuna and polar bears. Unfortunately, the result was unsuccessful. United Nations rejected the proposal because U.S government did not seem to be ready to adopt trade bans as a measure to protect the two species. I saw a documentary from Discovery channel that polar bears are eating each other because the ice is melting and fishing is became hard for the polar bears. I was very shocked by this documentary and realized how indifferent I was about global warming. I feel there is not much solutions for the existing global warming but if technology focus on hybrid cars and such there might be a way to prevent further damages.
------------------------------------
4. Delegates at a United Nations conference on endangered species in Doha, Qatar, soundly defeated American-supported proposals on Thursday to ban international trade in bluefin tuna and to protect polar bears.
Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks of bluefin, a fish prized especially by Japanese sushi lovers for its fatty belly flesh, have been severely depleted by years of heavy commercial fishing, while polar bears are considered threatened by hunting and the loss of sea ice because of global warming. The United States tried unsuccessfully to persuade delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites, to provide strong international protection for the two species.
The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly 80 percent of the bluefin catch, argued that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or Iccat, should be responsible for regulating the fishery, not the United Nations. European Union nations, whose fleets are most responsible for the overfishing of bluefin, abstained from voting in the second round after their own watered-down proposal was rejected.
“The bluefin tuna is an iconic fish species,” said Tom Strickland, assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks. “The science is compelling, the statistics are dramatic. That species is in spectacular decline.”
“We believe the bear is under great pressure,” he said from Washington. “It should not be traded internationally.”
The Arctic Assessment concludes, "global warming could cause polar bears to go extinct by the end of the century by eroding the sea ice that sustains them." According to the assessment, the threat to polar bears is threefold: changes in rainfall or snowfall amounts or patterns could affect the ability of seals, the bears' primary prey, to successfully reproduce and raise their pups; decreased sea ice could result in a greater number of polar bears drowning or living more on land, negatively affecting their diet (forcing them to rely on their fat stores prior to hibernation); and unusual warm spells could cause the collapse of winter dens or force more bears into less-desirable denning areas.
Though polar bears are uniquely adapted to the Arctic region, they are not wedded solely to its coldest parts nor are they restricted to a specific Arctic diet. Aside from a variety of seals, they eat fish, kelp, caribou, ducks, sea birds and scavenged whale and walrus carcasses. In addition, as discussed above, Arctic air temperatures were as high as present temperatures in the 1930s and polar bears survived.
Interestingly, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international organization that has worked for 50 years to protect endangered species, has also written on the threats posed to polar bears from global warming. However, their own research seems to undermine their fears. According to the WWF, about 20 distinct polar bear populations exist, accounting for approximately 22,000 polar bears worldwide. As the figure shows, population patterns do not show a temperature-linked decline:
* Only two of the distinct population groups, accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total population, are decreasing. * Ten populations, approximately 45.4 percent of the total number, are stable. * Another two populations - about 13.6 percent of the total number of polar bears - are increasing.
The status of the remaining six populations (whether they are stable, increasing or decreasing in size) is unknown.
Moreover, when the WWF report is compared with the Arctic air temperature trend studies discussed earlier, there is a strong positive (instead of negative) correlation between air temperature and polar bear populations. Polar bear populations are declining in regions (like Baffin Bay) that have experienced a decrease in air temperature, while areas where polar bear populations are increasing (near the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea) are associated with increasing air temperatures. Thus it is difficult to argue that rising air temperatures will necessarily and directly lead to a decrease in polar bear populations.
Polar bear expert barred by global warmists Mitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.
Christopher Booker Published: 5:20PM BST 27 Jun 2009
Comments 195 | Comment on this article Ap Polar bears Polar bear expert barred by warmists According to the world?s leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago Photo: AP
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.
Related Articles
* A pipedream of six turbines a day until 2020 * Army chief kills off plans for European Army * Climate change: The elements conspire against the warmists * 2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved * The Ashes: England v Australia live, fifth Test day two * The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".
Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents...
So where are all the pictures of drowned and drowning polar bears?
Last fall, as a massive media campaign reminded us, the extent of Arctic ice was at an all-time (since 1979) low, yet we cannot recall a single report of a drowned polar bear as a result. Surely, with all the attention on polar bear well-being that arose as the Interior Department considered its ESA decision, if there were evidence of polar bears drowning last summer, it would have been held up front and center. But it wasn’t. Because they weren’t.
So where does this now omnipresent notion come from that polar bears—famously strong swimmers—will perish in droves under the warming waves as the distance between the ice edge and the shore becomes too great to overcome? Let’s have a look-see.
The original source of the drowning polar bear story is a series of studies conducted by Charles Monnett and colleagues from the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) out of Alaska which as been observing and counting polar bears on Alaska’s north shore for the past 30 years or so as part of a broader efforts to survey bowhead whale populations in the region and assess any impacts that oil and gas exploration activities may be having on them. Since the late 1970s, aerial surveys have been conducted from small airplanes flown during the late summer/early fall documenting the numbers of whales, polar bears, and other large marine mammals.
In December 2005, Monnett et al. presented a poster at the Marine Mammals Conference in San Diego (followed soon thereafter by a publication in the journal Polar Biology in early 2006) in which they documented a change in the patterns of late-summer polar bear sightings. During the first part of the record, polar bears were usually spotted on ice floes lying off the Alaskan coast, between say Barrow and Demarcation Point, near the Alaska/Canada border. During the latter part of the record, from 1992-2005, most of the bears were spotted on land as there was little ice to be found within tens to hundreds of kilometers of the coast. Alone, these observations indicated that the behavior of the polar bears was changing as the environmental conditions around them were changing. Hardly newsworthy in and of itself—polar bears adapting as best they could to climate change.
But the part of the study that garnered the press attention so much so that it has become ingrained in global warming lore was that Monnett et al. reported the sighting of four polar bear carcasses floating in the sea several kilometers from shore, presumably having drowned. All four dead bears were spotted from the plane a few days after a strong storm had struck the area, with high winds and two meter high waves. Since polar bears are strong swimmers, the authors concluded that it was not just the swimming that caused the bears to drown, but that the swimming in association with high winds and waves, which made the exertion rate much greater, sapping the bears of their energy and leading to their deaths. The authors also suggested that the frequency and intensity of late summer and early fall storms should increase (as would the wave heights) because of global warming and thus the risk to swimming bears will increase along with the number of bears swimming (since there will be less ice) and subsequently more bears will drown. But they didn’t stop there—they suggested that the increased risk will not be borne by all bears equally, but that lone females and females with cubs will be most at risk—putting even more downward pressure of future polar bear populations. And thus a global warming poster child (or cub) is born.
But does all of this follow from the data? Again, we haven’t heard of any reports of polar bear drownings in Alaska in 2005, 2006, or 2007—all years with about the same, or even less late-summer sea ice off the north coast of Alaska than in 2004, the year of the documented drownings.
In 2004, the researchers saw four, that’s right 4, polar bear carcasses floating at sea where they had never seen any in previous surveys. The 4 dead bears, coupled with 10 other bears that were observed to be swimming in open water, more than 2 km from land, led them to conclude that global warming was making the bears swim long distances and then drowning as the exertion overcame them when they got caught in a storm.
But is this really true? This NASA web site shows the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice each summer since 1979. As you scroll down through the list of years, notice that in many if not most late summers, the edge of the sea ice is quite a ways from the north coast of Alaska. So, the sea ice conditions along the northern coast of Alaska were hardly that unusual during September 2004. No more so than they were in the years since or in many prior. So bears weren’t encountering unusual ice conditions in 2004. In fact, in the period 1992-2004, more than 50% of bear sightings were in regions of no ice (Monnett et al., 2005). Why an elevated number of bears were observed swimming in open water in 2004 is unclear, but it could be from any number of reasons, sampling effort, bear population dynamics, bear food dynamics, to name a few—but an unusual expanse of open water doesn’t seem to be one of them.
What was potentially unusual was a big storm that caught them off guard. But even that seems unlikely. True it was windy for a several day stretch in mid-September 2004, but such a windy stretch is not particularly unusual there during that time of year.
What all of this means is that the number of drowning polar bears is not very significant in terms of the overall population of bears, which number in the low thousands in Alaska. In fact, polar bears drowning seems to be quite rare and unusual events, perhaps brought about by a confluence of ice free ocean waters and an especially strong storm. However, as summer ice conditions off the north Alaskan coast couldn’t get much worse than they were in 2007, when there was hardly at all, and since there has been no evidence yet presented that a large number (if any) bears drowned as a result, it would seem that death by drowning is not putting any meaningful downward pressure on the population of Alaskan polar bears.
But, truth be told, we have been withholding a piece of information this whole time—there were reports of drowning polar bears in 2007, and they were directly attributable to human activities. But they didn’t drown because of global warming, instead, they drowned because they had first been shot with tranquilizer darts and then slipped into the sea and were unable to be recovered.
This goes to show what we have been proclaiming all along—the real reason polar bears may suffer under climate warming is their increased encounters with humans as the bears change their adaptive behavior.
And this is where the application of the ESA to polar bears could prove most effective.
References:
Monnett, C., Gleason, J. S., and L. M. Rotterman, 2005. Potential effects of diminished sea ice on open-water swimming, mortality, and distribution of polar bears during fall in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, 12-16 December 2005, San Diego, CA.
Monnett, C., and J. S. Gleason, 2006. Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. Polar Biology, 29, 681-687.
A very down to earth* kind of guy. I'm an environmental sociologist interested in establishing material and organizational sustainability worldwide. I'm always looking for interesting materials/technologies, inspiring ideas, or institutional examples of sustainability to inspire others to recognize their choices now. To be fatalistic about an unsustainable world is a sign of a captive mind, given all our options.
*(If "earth" is defined in a planetary sense, concerning comparative historical knowledge and interest in the past 10,000 years or so anywhere...) See both blogs.
1. Hyo Jin, CHO
ReplyDelete2. Collective reaction to the tragedy of commons does not always solve the tragedy.
3. According to the article, the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species(CITES) rejected bans on trade of bluefin tuna and polar bears. The population of bluefin tuna and polar bears is decreasing because of global warming which is melting polar bears’ habitat, and overfishing on bluefin tuna. A spokesman for the CITES secretary general said currently countries are not ready to stop trade of species which are still commercially important. Among 175 nations, nearly 40% were against the proposal, ban on trade of tuna and polar bear.
I think this article well show ‘the tragedy of commons’. Polar bears and bluefin tunas are natural resources that people have used commercially. However, because of human beings’ indiscreet acts, directly and indirectly natural resources are stuck in tragedy. According to last lecture, Elinior Ostrom argued that the tragedy of commons will not happen as people would not stand back just watching the common pasture being destroyed. She said people will collectively react not to scarcity of resources happen. Since the number of endangered species rise, CITES has been organized and nations regularly meet to curb the trade on those species. People are trying to react to the worrying situation. However, according to the article, it seems collective reaction does not always guarantee sustainability of species and environment. As a director of international policy at the Pew Environment Group said, this well shows that nations still ignore environment and wildlife just for short-term economic gain, which is not a quite rational way. I thought the way of collective reaction to common pasture is what we should look again ostrom’s idea. If people or nations’ values still stay in economy-best thought, we cannot always say that tragedy of commons will be solved by collective efforts. Government’s ethic is also very important.
---------------------
4.Global conference rejects bans on trade in bluefin tuna, polar bear
By Juliet Eilperin,
In the contest between commerce and conservation, a global conference this week aimed at protecting imperiled wildlife seems to be giving commerce the upper hand.
Delegates gathered in Doha, Qatar, on Thursday rejected proposals pushed by the United States to impose restrictions on trade in polar bears and Atlantic bluefin tuna, despite arguments that climate change was endangering the polar bears and that bluefin tuna has been fished to precipitously low levels. The group earlier defeated a measure aimed at exposing problems in the global shark trade.
The 175 nations represented at the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora could reconsider the decisions before the meeting ends next week, but they have shown little inclination to make economic sacrifices for the sake of conservation.
CITES, which meets every 2 1/2 years to decide whether the world should curb trade in an array of coveted plants and animals, has over four decades restricted the sale of such things as rhino horns, elephant tusks and mahogany trees in the Amazon.
This year, delegates are considering an unprecedented number of commercially valuable marine species, including eight kinds of shark and more than two dozen corals. U.S. officials and environmentalists thought the case for protection was strong, with the prospect of climate change melting polar bears' sea-ice habitat and the dramatic drop in the adult population of bluefin tuna.
But while the conference serves to focus public attention on the plight of vulnerable species, it does not always result in heightened environmental protections.
(...)
--------
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/18/AR2010031805031.html?referrer=emailarticle
1. Wonmi Nam
ReplyDelete2. Nuclear Energy
3. In my last week's blog article, I mentioned a little about the negative sides of nuclear power plants. I actually remembered that it was bad, but couldn't remember exactly why. So I looked up an article about it. What I read was more shocking than I had thought - not the waste part but the part where government is planning to build 12 more plants by 2022 and that the lifespan of the existing plant is already over. Are we really using that much electricity? It seems urgent that we develop other alternatives like sunlight and wind!
---
Fatal Trap of Nuclear Energy "Renaissance"
By PRESSian
Published: March 17, 2010
"Nuclear energy has blossomed." The media has been making a fuss that we have now entered the Nuclear Energy Renaissance. Nuclear energy has become so popular these days that it is even compared to a flower.
The Lee administration has put "nuclear energy" and "4 rivers project" in its frontline, and his popularity has been rising ever since winnin the contract for nuclear plants in Arab Emirates. People now seem to think that 'nuclear energy' equals 'national benefit.' The media continues to deliver the economic benefits and success of exporting nuclear plants and didn't give a balanced report. Now, even in the cyber space, people who speak against nuclear energy has been treated as if they have no 'patriotism.'
The government plants to build 12 more nuclear plants by 2022. But what worries me more is that there is no one to give correct information about nuclear energy. A parent recently told me that at her kid's elementary school, there are so many events and programs related to nuclear energy that she unconsciously becomes friendly with the idea, that the school must be educating this since it's good energy. If there was anti-communism education in the 20th century, there is nuclear energy education in the 21st century.
Government's PR of Nuclear Energy Goes Overboard
3.7% of the electric charge is used as a base fund for electric power sector. Nuclear Energy Cultural Foundation receives over 10 billion Won from the base fund and uses the money to advertise nuclear energy on TV and o on. It means even people like I who is against nuclear energy is funding the advertisements just by using electricity. The government claims in the ads that "nuclear energy is cheap, it produces little greenhouse gas, and it's the green energy for green growth." However, there are too many problems to solve to call it a green energy yet.
Nuclear power plants are also facing "Aging Society." The 30-year lifespan of Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1, built in 1978, ended in 2008, but the government is planning to run it for 10 more years. The lifespan of Wolsung Nuclear Power Plant Unit 1 and Kori Nuclear Power Plant Unit 2 are also expected to end in 2012 and 2013. This means that, if we have only been using the electricity produced by nuclear power plants, now it's time to close down the plants and pay its expenses.
** continued **
** continued **
ReplyDeleteAging Society of Nuclear Plants, Where do the Wastes Go?
Radioactive wastes from the nuclear power plants is the biggest problem. The government was building a middle and low level radioactive waste repository, expected to be finished by this June, in Kyungju. However, because the location turned out to be a soft ground, the construction was delayed for 30 months. The suitability of the site is now in debate.
The safety investigation group reported on 13th that "there is big deviation in the rocks of Kyungju site, so much caution is needed for design and construction, but if we come up with a solution, it will be safe." The residents question "how the conclusion came to be safe when the site is dangerous." The debate is expected to continue. This problem has been already expected when the government focused on residents' acceptance rather than the suitability of the site, in the process of selection 5 years ago.
When a crack developed at Asse middle and low level radioactive waste repository, Germany decided to close it down, saying there is possible danger of underground water leaking in. Relocating the 126,000 drums of wastes will take 10 years, and the expected cost is around 4 billion Euros. I may be wrong, but I can see the future of Kyungju in Asse case. Moreover, we still have the no solutions for how to deal with high level radioactive wastes.
The Hidden Costs Behind New Nuclear Power Plants
According to government's plans, 32 nuclear plants will be running by 2022. Tension against residents in selecting new sites is inevitable. If New Kori Unit 1 to 8 is completed, in addition to the currently running 4 units, it will become an unprecedented case where 12 nuclear plants are running in one place. Not only will be safety be an issue, but there will be a lot of social and environmental problems. More nuclear plants mean more wastes, and we would also need more transmission towers.
...
Renewable energy industry will suffer from the expansion of nuclear power plants. The bigger role nuclear energy takes, the less important renewable energy will seem like. It will waste money, time, and effort that should be invested in transferring to renewable energy system. International environmental organizations like "Greenpeace" and "Friends of the Earth" recently reported that if Finland had used the 1.5 billion Euros, put into Olkiluoto 3 for the last 8 years, into wind power plants instead, it would have been producing same amount of electricity.
Transfer to more Democratic and Sustainable Energy
...
Germany, who uses more electricity than Korea, introduced the law to discard nuclear power plants in 2002 and is trying to close down all nuclear power plants and replace it with renewable energy step by step. Some people still insist expanding the lifespan of nuclear power plants, but it's not strong enough to affect the discard policy. Greenpeace is working on a scenario where we can close down nuclear power plants and both get necessary electricity and deal with climate change through "The Energy Revolution."
...
---
[http://www.pressian.com/article/article.asp?article_num=10100317114339&Section=03]
1. Sung Yeon Lee
ReplyDelete2. Why people dont practice recycling as willingly
3. I brought up the issue of recycling because I think of it as an unresolved are which is not being dealt with properly, even though it is not a new, current issue of the environment. Even though the concept of recycling is a simple, easy way of participating in protecting the environment, and maybe even one of the most effective, it seems that even the developed countries have a hard time implementing it.
I think this is a good example which shows what I think is a very big barrier in effectively protecting the environment: the pursuit of convenience. Because it is simply more convenient to throw away everything at once, whether it be food wastes, plastic, or paper, people do not want to be in the hassle to waste their time and energy. As in Korea it is mandatory to recycle and many recycling bins are available, I was shocked when I went to the U.S. and saw this. I thought this article was interesting because it showed various reasons why people didn’t recycle. The reason I just mentioned being dominating, other reasons was that it wasn’t economical, or because they don’t feel the need to. As an exchange student in the U.S., the country of freedom, individuality and convenience, I could understand why people living there would regard recycling a hassle. When you get accustomed to that kind of lifestyle, you don’t really want to go through all that, and we they have a right to live conveniently.
Even myself, -- and I regard myself as environmentally conscious—even though I try to recycle as much as I can, there are moments when I would have too much luggage on me or when I’m short of time or when I’m just want to get rid of my trash I don’t really feel like recycling. So where do you draw the line. How do you get people to recycle when individuals’ conceptions are different and they should be able to make free choices? A structural change to make the recycling program more accessible and convenient would be a first step but fundamentally, to change the values and views of the people, I think is the biggest challenge to creating a environmental friendly environment so that it is not thought as a hassle, but as a must.
----------------------------------------------
4. Why people don't recycle
ReplyDeleteBy Ashley Schiller
Provided by Earth911.com
A lot of people just don't recycle. While there may be a temptation to imagine them as conspiring Earth Haters who take orders directly from Skeletor, they are usually normal people who try to contribute positively to society in other ways.
...
Economically speaking, some recycling isn't cost effective, he argues, citing plastic as an example of a controversial material while others are agreed to be cost-effective, such as aluminum cans.
"What I wish everyone would learn in Economics 101 is that there are trade-offs in life. There are both benefits and downsides to recycling," Darren explains. "Individually, time is the most precious resource we use when we recycle. You could have done something else with that time used to recycle, and you can never get back spent time. On the city level, it's time, effort and money. It is a question of whether recycling is the best use of that money, or if it would be better spent on education or health care. There are always trade-offs."
But people differ in what they consider to be the best trade-off. "I think a lot of people recycle because it makes them feel good, and that's fine. For me personally, I get no benefit from recycling, so I don't' do it," he says.
...
"The way recycling is set up around here, the burden falls on the recycler, not the company doing the recycling," he says. "I'm not going to take that pop can and drive it around town searching for a recycling bin, but if they pick it up from me without charge, that's a different story
----------------------------------------------
http://www.koamtv.com/Global/story.asp?S=12171510
1. Franziska Mittelstädt
ReplyDelete2.Why Germany Is Behind in the Race for Electric Cars
3.After speaking in the class about policies concerning electric cars in Korea and Japan, I was pretty curious about the situation in Germany.
When I was young (10 years or so) I learned already in school about the "solution electric car" - so it's quite well-known in Germany. Also I can remember to have watched an explanaition how a electric car is working in a children tv show.
Since the beginning of the year you can even watch this advertisment for electric power for cars (watch: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8cjxAHi29K8&feature=related )
So I was really surprised to notice that Germany has only a "symbolic" tax reduction for buyers of electric cars (circa 140€).
This seems to be even more weird if you consider that the German government spent 4 Billion € (circa 6.175.200.000.000 Won) on the so-called scrappage bonus in 2009. Hereby the government gave every owner of an at least 9 years old car 2.500 € if he would "recycle" his old vehicle in a car compactor and buy a brandnew car in the same time. The government called it officially "Environment Bonus" because it would help to reduce the numbers of old cars in Germany. But actually its real consequences and its supposed benefits for the environment are much discussed.
---------------------
**continued**
ReplyDeleteMotorists in the US or China who buy electric cars receive hefty subsidies from the state. But Germany, where the car was invented, is not supporting the vehicles of the future -- and risks being overtaken.
The race for the cars of the future has not yet started in earnest, but the participants are already jostling for pole position. US President Barack Obama recently stressed that investment was needed in electric vehicles now otherwise an opportunity would be missed, while Britain's Business Secretary Peter Mandelson claimed the leadership in the "low-carbon economy of the future" for his country. Meanwhile German Transport Minister Wolfgang Tiefensee considers "cars powered by fossil fuels" to be "ready to be phased out."
There are good reasons for these fine words. A rapid increase in the use of electric vehicles could reduce CO2 emissions, not to mention emissions of particulate matter and other pollutants. Electric vehicles are more efficient, easier to maintain and cheaper to operate than cars with internal combustion engines. "The future belongs to electric cars" believes Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn. It's an opinion shared by his colleagues at Daimler and Renault.
As a result, a growing number of countries are making a lot of money available in order to help electric vehicles make a quick breakthrough. Americans receive a tax credit of up to $7,500 (€5,800) when they buy an electric car. As of 2011, British drivers will receive almost the same amount -- in cash. In China, motorists get the equivalent of over €6,700.
And in Germany?
Motorists who buy an electric car are exempted from the German car tax for five years. The savings compared to a normal car -- based on middle-of-the-road prices -- add up to a total of a massive €140.
An Expensive Mistake
In the country where the automobile was born, there are practically no measures to promote alternatives to gas-powered engines. This is all the more amazing when you consider that the German government has just made another €3.5 billion available for the so-called "scrapping bonus," whereby motorists receive €2,500 when they scrap an old car and buy a new one. The scheme, which is officially called the "environmental bonus," is the biggest program to promote new car sales in German history.
This omission could prove expensive for Germans in the medium term. Admittedly auto manufacturers like Volkswagen and BMW also benefit from subsidies for electric cars in China or the US. But if the costly development of new engines is going to be worth it for German carmakers, then they will need strong demand in their domestic market. And with the current lack of support for electric cars, this demand may well be weak when the first vehicles are delivered to dealers between 2010 and 2012.
**continued**
**continued**
ReplyDeleteIt's not as if the government has ignored the technology. Some €500 million is allocated for electric and hydrogen vehicles under Berlin's second economic stimulus package -- except that Germany has not granted the money to its citizens, but to its car industry. The practice has a long tradition: The government was already promoting alternative engine projects back in the 1980s and 1990s. Daimler, BMW and others tinkered around with batteries and electric engines for years using taxpayers' money. But a product which was suitable for series production never appeared.
That miserable failure was due to a banal fact of the market economy: Research grants, regulations and persuasive words are limited in their ability to influence the actions of companies. The only thing that really makes corporations sit up and take notice is the prospect of a juicy profit. If VW and their peers believed electric cars would soon be selling like hotcakes, electric vehicles would be on the road sooner rather than later.
There is a certain irony in the fact that the Chinese, of all people, have realized this connection earlier than others. The People's Republic pays the highest electric car subsidies in the world -- in the hope that a rapid uptake of the technology will give a competitive advantage to domestic electric car manufacturers like BYD.
The deputy finance minister, Zhang Shaochun, rejects lavish research grants. A direct subsidy, he says, "gives consumers a choice" -- and means that the market decides which electric cars are successful.
The unlikely eco-capitalist is correct. That is why Germany needs a new "environmental bonus" for buyers of electric cars -- - and one which actually deserves the name. Otherwise Germany's fleet of cars, which is currently being renewed courtesy of the scrapping bonus, will soon be looking pretty old-fashioned.
-------------
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,620185,00.html
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete1. Hye Jung, Choi
ReplyDelete2. Trash Wars.
3.
Last class, we studied “Neo Malthusianism.” I think there is a close connection between population and environment. It seems natural result when people increase more the pollution or consumption also is increased, because people only can survive as using natural resources. Our actions which take advantages of environment always bring “trash.” According to EPA survey, 2.1kg trash is produced by an American per day. It is enormous quantity when we multiply 2.1kg by the population of U.S.A.
We regard China as the largest nation in the world. The nation has not only big territory but large population. It earns many profits due to population; on the other hand, it has some problems related to it. Even though there is no exact survey about how much waste would be produce by a Chinese, I assume that it would show great quantity.
According to the article, the people fight against garbage incinerators. Incinerators are efficient ways to remove trash so most country prefer this way to reclamation. However, it causes some harmful diseases to people by making toxic material through the process. Therefore, they resist building incinerators. Even though burning trash has side effects, there is no clear alternative. The consumption and garbage are increasing keeping step with population, and it is impossible to bury all garbage on ground.
In this situation, the only solution could be “new technology.” As we learned in last class, advanced technology would bring about new and environmental-friendly method to deal with lots of garbage. Some researchers have studied ‘microorganisms’ which decompose trash to harmlessness material. But it takes a lot of time to apply it, since these studies are at a beginning stage. Also these need some supports from government. Separate garbage collection and volume-rate garbage disposal system are useful way to handle this problem, too. If people separate waste which would be harmful when it is burned from other things, they can use incinerating trash in safe way. The volume-rate garbage disposal system will be helpful to reduce the amount of garbage.
Even if many people are in the world, I believe, we can preserve environment as long as we try to solve pollution. The most important factor to pollution is not population (they could be, but not absolute factor), but our mind toward nature.
---------------------------------
-------------------------
ReplyDelete4.
BEIJING (Reuters) - Thousands of China's urban elite took to the streets last year in protest against expanding garbage incinerators, angered by the threat to both their health and the value of their homes, a report launched on Friday said.
The stability-obsessed government fears growing public anger among the country's middle class, who once focused largely on securing jobs and homes but are becoming increasingly assertive -- sometimes forcing authorities to back down on unpopular plans.
City residents in the capital Beijing and the relatively well-off coastal provinces of Jiangsu and Guangdong all came out in 2009 to try and block new constructions or expansions of incinerators, an annual review by one of China's oldest and best known environmental groups, Friends of Nature, said.
"Health and safety are people's bottom line. When they feel threatened, and there's no other way to defend themselves, they protest," said Yang Changjiang, a journalist and co-author of the fifth annual "Green book of the Environment" report.
......
But China has already surpassed the United States as the world's largest producer of household garbage as increased prosperity brings increased consumption.
The government is struggling to find new ways and places to dispose of the growing heap of rubbish, the report said. With space already at a premium in a country struggling with a shortage of farmland, incineration is an obvious alternative.
Beijing and Guangzhou now generate around 18,000 tons of garbage per day, but only have capacity to process 10,400 tonnes and 12,000 tonnes respectively, state media have reported.
Protests included rallies, petitions, sit-ins, online forums and group efforts to dig into the financial affairs of officials who might be benefiting from any construction.
"We're tired of what the experts and officials said," one user of an anti-garbage-burning forum set up by residents of southern Guangdong province wrote. "We had no choice but to obey their decisions. It's time for change."
They are part of a sea-change in the nature of environmental protests that first gained widespread attention with efforts to block a chemical plant planned for the port of Xiamen in 2007.
Previously, most of those who challenged officials were farmers living with huge levels of pollution. The impact on their lives or livelihood was disastrous enough to outweigh the potential risks of taking on the government.
The concerns of the middle classes, about the future of their health or assets, brought a different kind of protest.
"Many people involved in 2009 cases are rich," said Xie Xinyuan, project coordinator at Friends of Nature.
"They are able to hire people to do professional research and present it to the public. Or they are so well-educated that they can do it by themselves," Xie said.
"People who live in less developed areas may also be harmed by the garbage crisis, but there is not so much they can do." So far Beijing at least has stuck to plans for more incinerators, adding three by 2012, and a further four by 2015.
By then, 8,200 tonnes of garbage could be going up in smoke -- much of it foul-smelling and potentially toxic -- around the capital each day.
"I'm not optimistic about the situation this year," Yang said. "Nationwide, 41 new incinerators will be built. It could cause some very serious problems."
(Reporting by Emma Graham-Harrison and Beijing Newsroom; Editing by Sanjeev Miglani)
-------------------------
http://uk.reuters.com/article/idUKTRE62I1Z620100320?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0
1. Dingyuan Hou
ReplyDelete2. What's stopping us getting solar power from deserts?
3. If we are to phase out fossil fuels and avoid nuclear, we must find some very large new sources of electricity if we want to replace some of the oil used in transport with electricity. One of the few such sources is the Desertec project to bring solar energy from North Africa to Europe. I think it is a classic big solution to the problem of over consumption. A major advantage of this technology is that a part of the sun’s heat can be collected and stored during the day and then run through steam circuits at night or during peak hours, depending on the demand so that the energy can fully exploited. But we need to be held responsible for our appetites. If we need electricity, we must have a moral duty to bear the burden ourselves as much as possible.
Given the fact that this aspect is completely new to me, here I actually have some questions to ask. Doesn’t it make more sense to import wind energy from the Sahara since wind energy is much cheaper than solar energy? The Dersertec project sounds pretty, but is the cost of it too high to enforce the operation? Is it really practical? In addition, I figure that water is still demanded during the cleaning and cooling process. Do you think it is a problem in dessert areas?
----------------------------------
Plans to use concentrating solar power plants in the Sahara to generate and export electricity have been on the table for years. Now, it looks as though political will might help move things forward
The logic of the idea would seem obvious to a child: the human race needs to wean itself off fossil fuels, so why don't we build solar power plants in the world's deserts, to give us all the energy we need?
This concept has long been promoted by Desertec, a European network of scientists and engineers, which argues that just 1 per cent of the surface area of the world's deserts could generate as much electricity as the world is now using.
Desert solar power
Desertec envisages a massive deployment of solar technology in Middle Eastern and North African countries, exporting electricity to Europe. The vision may seem idealistic, but there have been signs recently that politicians and industry are starting to take the Desertec proposals seriously.
A recent Desertec seminar at the House of Commons was attended by the energy minister Lord Philip Hunt, as well as the Conservative shadow energy minister Charles Hendry and the Liberal Democrat shadow secretary of state for energy and climate change, Simon Hughes.
All three professed support for the concept, with Lord Hunt declaring, 'I am very interested in the work that you are doing.' Just words? Maybe. But Hunt promised that the Desertec will be seriously considered by the European Commission as it tries to make plans for future supplies of renewable energy for the whole region.
(continued)
(continued)
ReplyDeletePrice barrier
The sheer cost of solar power is another obstacle.
Electricity produced by even the cheapest solar technology still works out at $160 per megawatt hour (MWh), compared with just $60 per MWh for electricity produced by coal-fired power stations and $80 per MWh for the most efficient gas-fired power stations, according to Jenny Chase, senior solar analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance, which analyses investments in renewable energy.
Chase acknowledges that government subsidies in Spain and Germany have already helped bring down the cost of solar power dramatically, but she finds the Desertec concept unconvincing.
'The idea is to generate an expensive form of power and then transport it across long distances. That doesn't stack up without significant amounts of subsidy. I don't know if that will come, but I suspect that given the timescales involved, solar power may become cheap enough to deploy widely in Europe without needing to transport it from north Africa,' she says.
African solar industry
North African governments are taking steps to build their own solar industry.
The seminar at the House of Commons included a presentation from the Morroccan energy minister, Amina Benkhadra, who is seeking $9bn of investment to build 2000 megawatts of solar capacity in Morocco by 2019.
Tunisia has launched a similar scheme, the Plan Solaire, and Schellekens expects further solar plans will soon be launched by other North African countries. For the moment, he doubts there is much enthusiasm among investors:
'We are at a point in the [economic] cycle where lots of money has been lost and what is left is being looked after carefully.'
The private sector has also begun to investigate Desertec. Last July in Munich, 12 energy and financial companies including Deutsche Bank and E.On agreed to finance a three-year feasibility study, known as the Desertec Industrial Initiative.
The group has been convened by Munich Re, the world's largest reinsurance group, which believes solar power in North Africa could deliver 15 per cent of Europe's electricity by 2050.
Concentrating solar power
Desertec supporters say the technology needed to carry out the plan already exists. It advocates the use of concentrating solar power, whereby mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight into small areas to generate heat. This heat is used to generate steam, which in turn drives turbines to generate electricity, just like a conventional power station.
The advantage over conventional solar panels is that it does not need expensive silicon. It does, however, need lots of direct sunlight, which makes it ideal for deserts but less suitable for most European countries.
Another advantage is that generation can continue at night, using spare heat that has been stored in tanks containing melted salts or in concrete blocks. Six concentrated solar power plants are already up and running in Spain and several more are under construction.
Lord Philip Hunt warns, however, that the technology will need to prove itself on a large scale - running at hundreds of megawatts rather than demonstration-scale plants producing merely tens of megawatts - before Desertec can take off. He also pointed to the massive scale of investment that would be needed, most of which will have to come from the private sector, plus the importance of creating the right regulation across Europe, 'which will not be easy'.
Encouragingly, Hunt concluded, 'none of these challenges is insurmountable'.
-------------
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_analysis/413657/whats_stopping_us_getting_solar_power_from_deserts.html
1. Ye Eun Cho
ReplyDelete2. U.N. Rejects Export Ban on Atlantic Bluefin Tuna
3. This article is about United States trying to persuade delegates of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites, to provide strong international protection for the bluefin tuna and polar bears. Unfortunately, the result was unsuccessful. United Nations rejected the proposal because U.S government did not seem to be ready to adopt trade bans as a measure to protect the two species. I saw a documentary from Discovery channel that polar bears are eating each other because the ice is melting and fishing is became hard for the polar bears. I was very shocked by this documentary and realized how indifferent I was about global warming. I feel there is not much solutions for the existing global warming but if technology focus on hybrid cars and such there might be a way to prevent further damages.
------------------------------------
4. Delegates at a United Nations conference on endangered species in Doha, Qatar, soundly defeated American-supported proposals on Thursday to ban international trade in bluefin tuna and to protect polar bears.
Atlantic and Mediterranean stocks of bluefin, a fish prized especially by Japanese sushi lovers for its fatty belly flesh, have been severely depleted by years of heavy commercial fishing, while polar bears are considered threatened by hunting and the loss of sea ice because of global warming. The United States tried unsuccessfully to persuade delegates to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, or Cites, to provide strong international protection for the two species.
The rejection of the bluefin proposal was a clear victory for the Japanese government, which had vowed to go all out to stop the measure or else exempt itself from complying with it. Japan, which consumes nearly 80 percent of the bluefin catch, argued that the International Commission for the Conservation of Atlantic Tunas, or Iccat, should be responsible for regulating the fishery, not the United Nations. European Union nations, whose fleets are most responsible for the overfishing of bluefin, abstained from voting in the second round after their own watered-down proposal was rejected.
“The bluefin tuna is an iconic fish species,” said Tom Strickland, assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife and parks. “The science is compelling, the statistics are dramatic. That species is in spectacular decline.”
“We believe the bear is under great pressure,” he said from Washington. “It should not be traded internationally.”
------------------------------------------
5. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/19/science/earth/19species.html?ref=science
The Arctic Assessment concludes, "global warming could cause polar bears to go extinct by the end of the century by eroding the sea ice that sustains them." According to the assessment, the threat to polar bears is threefold: changes in rainfall or snowfall amounts or patterns could affect the ability of seals, the bears' primary prey, to successfully reproduce and raise their pups; decreased sea ice could result in a greater number of polar bears drowning or living more on land, negatively affecting their diet (forcing them to rely on their fat stores prior to hibernation); and unusual warm spells could cause the collapse of winter dens or force more bears into less-desirable denning areas.
ReplyDeleteThough polar bears are uniquely adapted to the Arctic region, they are not wedded solely to its coldest parts nor are they restricted to a specific Arctic diet. Aside from a variety of seals, they eat fish, kelp, caribou, ducks, sea birds and scavenged whale and walrus carcasses. In addition, as discussed above, Arctic air temperatures were as high as present temperatures in the 1930s and polar bears survived.
Interestingly, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an international organization that has worked for 50 years to protect endangered species, has also written on the threats posed to polar bears from global warming. However, their own research seems to undermine their fears. According to the WWF, about 20 distinct polar bear populations exist, accounting for approximately 22,000 polar bears worldwide. As the figure shows, population patterns do not show a temperature-linked decline:
* Only two of the distinct population groups, accounting for about 16.4 percent of the total population, are decreasing.
* Ten populations, approximately 45.4 percent of the total number, are stable.
* Another two populations - about 13.6 percent of the total number of polar bears - are increasing.
The status of the remaining six populations (whether they are stable, increasing or decreasing in size) is unknown.
Moreover, when the WWF report is compared with the Arctic air temperature trend studies discussed earlier, there is a strong positive (instead of negative) correlation between air temperature and polar bear populations. Polar bear populations are declining in regions (like Baffin Bay) that have experienced a decrease in air temperature, while areas where polar bear populations are increasing (near the Bering Strait and the Chukchi Sea) are associated with increasing air temperatures. Thus it is difficult to argue that rising air temperatures will necessarily and directly lead to a decrease in polar bear populations.
---
http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba551
Polar bear expert barred by global warmists
ReplyDeleteMitchell Taylor, who has studied the animals for 30 years, was told his views 'are extremely unhelpful’ , reveals Christopher Booker.
Christopher Booker
Published: 5:20PM BST 27 Jun 2009
Comments 195 | Comment on this article
Ap Polar bears Polar bear expert barred by warmists
According to the world?s leading expert on polar bears, their numbers are higher than they were 30 years ago Photo: AP
Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group (set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission) will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.
This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN's major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world's leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week's meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with those of the rest of the group.
Related Articles
*
A pipedream of six turbines a day until 2020
*
Army chief kills off plans for European Army
*
Climate change: The elements conspire against the warmists
*
2008 was the year man-made global warming was disproved
*
The Ashes: England v Australia live, fifth Test day two
*
The 'Global Warming Three' are on thin ice
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming over the last 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".
Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents...
---
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/5664069/Polar-bear-expert-barred-by-global-warmists.html
So where are all the pictures of drowned and drowning polar bears?
ReplyDeleteLast fall, as a massive media campaign reminded us, the extent of Arctic ice was at an all-time (since 1979) low, yet we cannot recall a single report of a drowned polar bear as a result. Surely, with all the attention on polar bear well-being that arose as the Interior Department considered its ESA decision, if there were evidence of polar bears drowning last summer, it would have been held up front and center. But it wasn’t. Because they weren’t.
So where does this now omnipresent notion come from that polar bears—famously strong swimmers—will perish in droves under the warming waves as the distance between the ice edge and the shore becomes too great to overcome? Let’s have a look-see.
The original source of the drowning polar bear story is a series of studies conducted by Charles Monnett and colleagues from the U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS) out of Alaska which as been observing and counting polar bears on Alaska’s north shore for the past 30 years or so as part of a broader efforts to survey bowhead whale populations in the region and assess any impacts that oil and gas exploration activities may be having on them. Since the late 1970s, aerial surveys have been conducted from small airplanes flown during the late summer/early fall documenting the numbers of whales, polar bears, and other large marine mammals.
In December 2005, Monnett et al. presented a poster at the Marine Mammals Conference in San Diego (followed soon thereafter by a publication in the journal Polar Biology in early 2006) in which they documented a change in the patterns of late-summer polar bear sightings. During the first part of the record, polar bears were usually spotted on ice floes lying off the Alaskan coast, between say Barrow and Demarcation Point, near the Alaska/Canada border. During the latter part of the record, from 1992-2005, most of the bears were spotted on land as there was little ice to be found within tens to hundreds of kilometers of the coast. Alone, these observations indicated that the behavior of the polar bears was changing as the environmental conditions around them were changing. Hardly newsworthy in and of itself—polar bears adapting as best they could to climate change.
But the part of the study that garnered the press attention so much so that it has become ingrained in global warming lore was that Monnett et al. reported the sighting of four polar bear carcasses floating in the sea several kilometers from shore, presumably having drowned. All four dead bears were spotted from the plane a few days after a strong storm had struck the area, with high winds and two meter high waves. Since polar bears are strong swimmers, the authors concluded that it was not just the swimming that caused the bears to drown, but that the swimming in association with high winds and waves, which made the exertion rate much greater, sapping the bears of their energy and leading to their deaths. The authors also suggested that the frequency and intensity of late summer and early fall storms should increase (as would the wave heights) because of global warming and thus the risk to swimming bears will increase along with the number of bears swimming (since there will be less ice) and subsequently more bears will drown. But they didn’t stop there—they suggested that the increased risk will not be borne by all bears equally, but that lone females and females with cubs will be most at risk—putting even more downward pressure of future polar bear populations. And thus a global warming poster child (or cub) is born.
But does all of this follow from the data? Again, we haven’t heard of any reports of polar bear drownings in Alaska in 2005, 2006, or 2007—all years with about the same, or even less late-summer sea ice off the north coast of Alaska than in 2004, the year of the documented drownings.
...
[continued]
ReplyDelete...
In 2004, the researchers saw four, that’s right 4, polar bear carcasses floating at sea where they had never seen any in previous surveys. The 4 dead bears, coupled with 10 other bears that were observed to be swimming in open water, more than 2 km from land, led them to conclude that global warming was making the bears swim long distances and then drowning as the exertion overcame them when they got caught in a storm.
But is this really true? This NASA web site shows the minimum extent of Arctic sea ice each summer since 1979. As you scroll down through the list of years, notice that in many if not most late summers, the edge of the sea ice is quite a ways from the north coast of Alaska. So, the sea ice conditions along the northern coast of Alaska were hardly that unusual during September 2004. No more so than they were in the years since or in many prior. So bears weren’t encountering unusual ice conditions in 2004. In fact, in the period 1992-2004, more than 50% of bear sightings were in regions of no ice (Monnett et al., 2005). Why an elevated number of bears were observed swimming in open water in 2004 is unclear, but it could be from any number of reasons, sampling effort, bear population dynamics, bear food dynamics, to name a few—but an unusual expanse of open water doesn’t seem to be one of them.
What was potentially unusual was a big storm that caught them off guard. But even that seems unlikely. True it was windy for a several day stretch in mid-September 2004, but such a windy stretch is not particularly unusual there during that time of year.
What all of this means is that the number of drowning polar bears is not very significant in terms of the overall population of bears, which number in the low thousands in Alaska. In fact, polar bears drowning seems to be quite rare and unusual events, perhaps brought about by a confluence of ice free ocean waters and an especially strong storm. However, as summer ice conditions off the north Alaskan coast couldn’t get much worse than they were in 2007, when there was hardly at all, and since there has been no evidence yet presented that a large number (if any) bears drowned as a result, it would seem that death by drowning is not putting any meaningful downward pressure on the population of Alaskan polar bears.
But, truth be told, we have been withholding a piece of information this whole time—there were reports of drowning polar bears in 2007, and they were directly attributable to human activities. But they didn’t drown because of global warming, instead, they drowned because they had first been shot with tranquilizer darts and then slipped into the sea and were unable to be recovered.
This goes to show what we have been proclaiming all along—the real reason polar bears may suffer under climate warming is their increased encounters with humans as the bears change their adaptive behavior.
And this is where the application of the ESA to polar bears could prove most effective.
References:
Monnett, C., Gleason, J. S., and L. M. Rotterman, 2005. Potential effects of diminished sea ice on open-water swimming, mortality, and distribution of polar bears during fall in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. 16th Biennial Conference on the Biology of Marine Mammals, 12-16 December 2005, San Diego, CA.
Monnett, C., and J. S. Gleason, 2006. Observations of mortality associated with extended open-water swimming by polar bears in the Alaskan Beaufort Sea. Polar Biology, 29, 681-687.
---
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2008/05/16/where-are-all-the-drowning-polar-bears/