Melting Arctic ice, high temperatures a concern

The following article appeared on HuffPost Green today, and it is definitely worthy of our readers' attention.


Missing Arctic Sea Ice: Wake-Up Call

by Dr. Reese Halter, Conservation Biologist

As a field biologist with more than a quarter of a century of experience, the unprecedented warming of our globe is disturbing to my very core. Having spent the first half of this year reading and writing for my upcoming book on the beleaguered state of our forests in western North America, the news on the wire over the weekend (September 10, 2011) by German researchers that the Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point since the start of satellite observations in 1972 is outright heartbreaking.

On September 8, 2011, the North Pole's ice cover shrank to 1.64 million square miles or about a half of a percent beneath the record low set in September 2007 according to the University of Bremen's Institute of Environmental Physics. Moreover, air temperatures were 2 to 7 degrees Fahrenheit higher than average (compared to 1981 to 2010) over the Arctic at 3,300 feet above the surface. The feeble argument that the melt is accounted for by natural variability is clearly erroneous because we have reached an all-time low cover, furthermore the volume or thickness of sea ice is continuing to mirror that of the diminishing sea ice cover.

The real question is what does the leadership in Washington, DC intend to do with the latest scientific information? Science has played a significant role shaping every facet of our world, as we know it today. As a profession, we are rigorously trained to be cautious and meticulous. We are curious by nature and our business is knowledge. Knowledge is power. And it empowers us to take action when necessary.

In 2008 Wall Street received almost a trillion dollars yet today we are faced with an unacceptable unemployment of more than 14 million people who live on Main Street.

The most powerful and watched media corporation in the U.S. chooses daily to denigrate climate science. Interestingly, the same people enjoy their smart phones, i-tablets and flat-screen televisions -- all courtesy of ingenious scientific innovations.

If those same people who sneer at climate science were faced with a sick child and they sought medical advice from 100 doctors, I predict they would follow the consensus of the experts. Particularly if 97 or 98 out of 100 doctors told them their child were deathly ill and the steps necessary to save its life. The opinions of the two contrarian medical scientists would be dismissed.

Let's examine this same scenario only substitute "medical" scientist with "climate" scientist. Ninety-seven to ninety-eight percent of the 1,372 scientists polled in 2010 by Stanford University agree that humans are forcing Earth's climate by burning fossil fuels, releasing heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

It appears that the most powerful media empire and special interest groups like oil; gas and coal are hiding behind the intellectual wall of informed denial and social irresponsibility with respect to global warming.

NOAA has predicted that a cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean has begun or the return of the La Nina. This is potentially disastrous for the southern half of the U.S. Texas is facing unparalleled drought damages estimated for 2011 in agriculture alone in excess of $7 billion. Thousands of buildings have burned and wildfire has scorched over 3.6 million acres in the past 12 months of record-breaking drought. The price of cotton, wheat and corn crops (to name just a few) are spiking. The cattle herd in the U.S. has been culled to a population now equal to that of the size of mid 1970s. Expect beef and all other commodities to continue to rise this fall and winter of 2012 at the supermarket.

It is very apparent that elevated temperatures are creating climate disruption. For example, Hurricane Irene caused $7.4 billion in damages and Tropical Storm Lee, seven days later, inflicted another couple billion in damages.

What exactly do the lawmakers intend on doing about future climate disruption? The people on Main Street want to work. So why not begin to plan for future climate disruption by creating millions of jobs that will protect our nation, reduce our greenhouse gas emissions and demonstrate to the world that the U.S. is taking a leadership role in fighting climate change. Incidentally, Australia has recently brought in a carbon tax and China is trialing a greenhouse gas reduction for six of its cities and 250 million people.

There are at least four areas where both white and blue collar jobs could be created:

Professor Steven Chu, Energy Secretary and Nobel Prize-winning physicist, is a proponent of mimicking the missing sea and land ice on Earth by making all roofs and pavement white (or at least light colored) to help reduce global warming by both conserving energy and reflecting the sunlight back into space. At least two million jobs could be created coast to coast from this endeavor. If every country followed America's lead it would be the equivalent of taking all the cars in the world off the road for 11 years.

The current drought in the South is causing at least 700 watermain breaks a day in Houston; and an antiquated water system throughout the U.S. that was initiated in the late 1800s, the 1920s and post WW II is leaking at least 7 billion gallons of water, daily. The American Society of Civil Engineers has graded the U.S. water infrastructure D- stating that the water mains are well beyond the designed span of 65 to 90 years.

Given that every climate model I've seen (over two dozen and counting) predicts more severe drought for the ensuing years and decades ahead it is incumbent that the lawmakers plan for a drier future and protect the citizens of our nation.

Stopping leaking water is no longer an option; it's a necessity. Furthermore, the economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment.

There are at least two models that the lawmakers can immediately examine:

Las Vegas - strict water conservation has helped water consumption drop even as the population has ballooned, as the city has tough rules promoting water reuse.

New York - Mayor Bloomberg has spent $252 million on wireless meters that detect leaks four times a day, promoting green rooftops and other ground-breaking green infrastructure to capture rain water, reduce sewer overflows and save the city $2 billion over 20 years.

At least 4 million jobs to redo the aging water systems, protecting towns and cities across the United States could be created.

There are at least four million homeowners across the West who straddle the urban/wildland Ponderosa pine interface. This year alone Arizona and New Mexico have both recorded their largest single fires (Wallow and Las Conchas, respectively) since the inception of record keeping. Climate change has enable bark beetles to kill at least a billion trees across 40 million acres in the West (combination of drought which has weakened the trees and warmer winter temperatures enabling beetles to successfully overwinter and breed at historic levels).

A Smokey Bear fire policy has prevented wildfires for almost 100 years. This has allowed forests to create a huge food supply for the beetles, which otherwise would not be available, thus preventing them from reaching an epidemic.

One hundred and eighty million acres of Ponderosa pines spreading across America are overstocked due to fire suppression. Removing dead beetle-killed trees and restoring the Ponderosa pine forests by thinning them to a healthy stocking level of 100 years ago could easily create one million jobs. Our forests are the life force of the nation, providing fresh air and clean water - priceless ecosystem services.

According to the EPA ever day in the U.S. we dump approximately 690,000 tons of material into landfills. These landfills bleed toxicity in the form of heavy metals into underground water and release heat-trapping greenhouse gases like methane (23 times stronger at retaining heat than CO2) into the atmosphere.

Building thermal conversion landfills could create three million jobs coast to coast. These facilities are lined and sealed so no toxicity pollutes the ground water, and they are capped and slowly cooked using high pressure and temperature to break down toxic long-chained molecules. Moreover, by siphoning the methane from the process it is used to power the entire system. The thermal conversion process converts plastics, hospital wastes, diseased cattle, feedlot manure, bleached paper, yard waste, agricultural waste, forestry waste, cardboard, used tires, municipal solid waste, trash, sewage sludge and even anthrax into oil and non-toxic useful products including biogas. This process safeguards the environment for our children.

America excels in science, technology and engineering; it's time to roll up our sleeves and put Main Street back to work; show the rest of the world that the United States values the environment and is committed to reducing greenhouse gases, now!

Dr Reese Halter is an award-winning science communicator: voice for ecology and distinguished conservation biologist at California Lutheran University. His latest book is The Insatiable Bark Beetle. He can be contacted through Dr.Reese.com

Elizabeth May outlines potential risks of cellphones, Wi-Fi

During May 2011, in response to a firestorm of flames over Elizabeth May's Twitter comments, she released this well-researched and presented argument that the issue does indeed require serious attention.


By Elizabeth May on 28 July 2011 - 12:01am

It has been an interesting day. While doing my work on constituency matters, I tried to keep at bay a growing furor over why I had tweeted about the safety of electromagnetic radiation and Wi-Fi. I haven’t been attacked with such nastiness in ages. (I used to be used to it. It was almost refreshing.) The easiest thing to do on twitter, would, I suppose, be to wave a white flag and say “just kidding.” Instead, I think the controversy has created a good teaching moment.

When I was first attacked and lambasted for expressing concern about various forms of pollution and human health, I was young and the attackers were brutal. I was worried about things like Agent Orange. Health Canada wasn’t. I was concerned about lead in gas, but it was hard to get the government to act. I worked to get certain pesticides banned, but they were “safe” right up to the day they were banned.

So, for friends and foes alike on Twitter, I think a fuller explanation for my views than can fit in a tweet is required.

First, a few clear caveats to keep the issue in proportion:

The health risks of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones, cell phone towers and Wi-Fi have not become the Green Party’s top priority.
For those who tweeted that other issues are more important, no argument.
Poverty is a more important determinant of health.
Active lifestyle and nutrition are also more important.
The pharmaceutical industry and our lax testing is more important.
Climate change is a more important priority for all of us.
Nevertheless, I was not speaking without a careful review of the background on this issue which I would like to share (please forgive the length of this blog as I will be posting links to important documents.)

The Green Party has passed the following members-based resolution:

BE IT RESOLVED THAT THE GREEN PARTY OF CANADA DEMAND THAT HEALTH CANADA CREATE ENFORCEABLE, BIOLOGICALLY- BASED REGULATIONS, THAT WOULD LIMIT HUMAN EXPOSURE TO RADIO FREQUENCY RADIATION TO A PRECAUTIONARY LIMIT OF 0.1 uW/cm2 (or 0.614 V/m ) FOR CUMULATIVE OUTDOOR EXPOSURE, AS RECOMMENDED IN THE “BIOINITIATIVE REPORT” OF 2007. (www.bioinitiative.org/report/index.htm)

This is not to say the science is essentially “settled,” as it is on climate change. There is no scientific consensus on EMF and health. But, it is equally not possible to make the claims many of Twitter have made today that Wi-Fi and cell phones are all proven “safe.”

There are studies on both sides of the issue. They fall into two general categories – epidemiological studies on humans and animal studies.

Epidemiological studies (studying the human population exposed to a substance or activity and then working to assess whether a health impact is linked to that substance or behaviour) are inherently fraught with difficulties in proof. There are always issues of bias (not the same as suggesting researchers are biased, but that the patient’s recall may be flawed), and there are confounding factors (such as other things in the subjects’ environment that could have caused the health problem). Causal links come slowly and over decades in some cases to build up a weight of evidence. One study, either way is never conclusive.

Animal studies have their own limitations. Rats and humans are different. Exposure rates used in animal studies will exceed (often substantially) an approximation of what humans may be exposed to.

I have been paying close attention to the issue since the first peer-reviewed medical study of Dr. Lennart Hardell in Sweden. He found an association between cell phone use and brain cancer. I paid attention because I knew Dr. Hardell’s name, his reputation and his work. He was one of the first researchers to find an association between phenoxy herbicides (Agent Orange) and cancer.

I paid attention to an editorial in The Lancet, the Journal of the British Medical Society, over ten years ago (which I cannot now find on Google, but which I have hard copy in files back in Ottawa). It warned that, under the precautionary principle, children and adolescents should not be exposed to cell phones and that exposure to EMF should be kept to a minimum. It said young people were more vulnerable -- not only to cancer but to mental confusion after being exposed to EMF.

In 2008, the European Parliament took action to bring in stricter limits for cell phone and Wi-Fi use for children. The following is from The Independent (Geoffrey Lean, “Mobile phone use 'raises children's risk of brain cancer fivefold',” September 21, 2008.):

“Last week the European Parliament voted by 522 to 16 to urge ministers across Europe to bring in stricter limits for exposure to radiation from mobile and cordless phones, Wi-fi and other devices, partly because children are especially vulnerable to them. They are more at risk because their brains and nervous systems are still developing and because – since their heads are smaller and their skulls are thinner – the radiation penetrates deeper into their brains.

David Carpenter, dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of NewYork – who also attended the conference – said: "Children are spending significant time on mobile phones. We may be facing a public health crisis in an epidemic of brain cancers as a result of mobile phone use."


In 2000 and 2005, two official inquiries under Sir William Stewart, a former government chief scientist, recommended the use of mobile phones by children should be "discouraged" and "minimised".”



Why did I say the evidence is mounting?

Because of two recent and important reviews and events.

One is the May 6, 2011 Resolution passed by the Council of Europe. http://assembly.coe.int/Documents/WorkingDocs/Doc11/EDOC12608.pdf

The Council of Europe Resolution bemoans the fact that earlier calls for the use of the precautionary principle in relation to exposure to EMF (such as the 2008 resolution cited above) have been ignored and that children and young people, in particular, are being exposed to increasing levels of EMF. The children and young people are described as a “particularly vulnerable group.”

Please go to the text of the full resolution to review the Council’s detailed call to restrict exposures.

The second major event was the recent decision which I posted earlier on Twitter by the World Health Organization to list EMF as a Class 2B human carcinogen. The immediate twitter reaction was to latch onto the fact that it was not conclusive. I know it is not conclusive, but you have to read the study that was conducted by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Thirty scientists from 14 countries reviewed a large number of human and animal studies. It was published in The Lancet on line on June 22, 2011. (see this link for the full study http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanonc/article/PIIS1470-2045(11)70147-4/fulltext)

Here is an excerpt to give you the feeling of the weighing of competing studies. This was a rigorous review:

“Although both the INTERPHONE study and the Swedish pooled analysis are susceptible to bias—due to recall error and selection for participation—the Working Group concluded that the findings could not be dismissed as reflecting bias alone, and that a causal interpretation between mobile phone RF-EMF exposure and glioma is possible. A similar conclusion was drawn from these two studies for acoustic neuroma, although the case numbers were substantially smaller than for glioma. Additionally, a study from Japan11 found some evidence of an increased risk for acoustic neuroma associated with ipsilateral mobile phone use.”

(Glioma is a form of brain cancer. The INTERPHONE study has been controversial as it was industry funded, but it needs to be considered. The debate has been from two primary cancer research groups -- Hardell’s work and INTERPHONE’s)

I will attach an older review from the European Environment Agency in 2007, but it is useful due to a list of citations and references. Not all of the references say there is a problem. As I hope is now clear, I am not saying we know for sure that Wi-Fi, cell phones and cell phone towers are health hazards. What is important to appreciate is that a significant number of serious medical researchers, none of them wearing tinfoil hats, are concerned that the human population is being subjected to an enormous biological experiment.

As for the theory re pollinators, going back to review the current state of information, the evidence is weaker. There is one study from India and a presentation from the US Fish and Wildlife Service, briefing to Congress expressing concerns, May 10, 2007.

Our stance is simple and responsible. Exercise the precautionary principle. A risk of a health problem requires a cautious approach until the science is settled.

For me personally, that translates into using my blackberry, but not carrying it in my pocket. I do not hold it up against my head. I prefer land lines. Do I occasionally use cell phones? Sure. Do I want high speed internet in my house? Yes, and I have a cable. Am I happy to latch onto a signal in the airport by Wi-Fi? You bet.

It is a matter of knowing there are unanswered questions and taking reasonable precautions. If you have Wi-Fi in your home, turn it off when you are sleeping. Locate the router away from where your kids are sleeping. Urge your kids to text more than talk with the phone to their head.

Elizabeth May article on cellphones, radiation, cancer, wi-fi