Yearly Archives: 2015

PLEA Network

22 October 2015, Science Daily, Plastic litter taints the sea surface, even in the Arctic. For the first time, researchers survey litter on sea surface at such high latitudes. In a new study, researchers from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) show for the first time that marine litter can even be found at the sea surface of Arctic waters. Though it remains unclear how the litter made it so far north, it is likely to pose new problems for local marine life, the authors report on the online portal of the scientific journal Polar Biology. Plastic has already been reported from stomachs of resident seabirds and Greenland sharks. Plastic waste finds its way into the ocean, and from there to the farthest reaches of the planet — even as far as the Arctic. This was confirmed in one of the first litter surveys conducted north of the Arctic Circle, carried out by an international research team from the Alfred Wegener Institute, Helmholtz Centre for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) and Belgium’s Laboratory for Polar Ecology. The researchers presented their results in an article released on the online portal of the journal Polar Biology. Read More here

PLEA Network

22 October 2015, TruthDig, ‘The Drone Papers’ Offer Even More Reasons to End Remote-Controlled Wars. The recent publication by The Intercept of the “The Drone Papers” should have made an explosive splash both in the media and Washington, D.C. But the leak of classified documents has so far generated only modest media coverage (as of this writing, The New York Times has yet to cover it), and there has been no acknowledgment of it by elected officials. The documents were provided by an anonymous source to an outlet with a strong reputation for muckraking journalism. They reveal how the CIA—an agency with no mandate to fight wars—and the Joint Special Operations Command vie for control of the remote-controlled battles fought in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. They also make clear that the U.S. is well aware of the vast civilian carnage from drones. In Afghanistan, “[d]uring one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets,” wrote Jeremy Scahill, who led the reporting. Scahill further determined that “the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA—‘enemy killed in action’—even if they were not the intended targets of the strike.” The intrepid journalist has spent years tracing the inner workings of U.S. drone programs, revealing the results in his 2013 book “Dirty Wars” and a documentary film of the same name. Read More here

PLEA Network

22 October 2015, BBC News, Bonn climate talks: Questions over cash dominate. Negotiators meeting in Germany say that questions over cash are the biggest barrier to a new global climate deal. The Bonn talks are the last chance for delegates to clarify their positions before the Paris conference that aims to seal a new binding treaty. Developing country delegates said clear guarantees on finance must be a core part of that compact. Officials said that finance was likely to be the very last issue to be resolved before a deal is struck. Money has always been at the root of difficulties in solving the climate issue. Developing countries point out that while they had done least to create the problems associated with more carbon in the atmosphere, they were the ones already feeling the greater impacts of a warming world. Howls of protest They have long sought significant flows of finance to help them curb their emissions and to cope with the storms and droughts expected to be more common in a changing climate. In Copenhagen in 2009, as countries tried to put together a comprehensive agreement, the richer nations promised to provide $100bn a year in climate finance from 2020. That deal ultimately failed, but countries are hoping to conclude a more ambitious agreement in Paris in December. Read More here

PLEA Network

22 October 2015, The Guardian. Perth’s double whammy: as sea levels rise the city itself is sinking. The city’s growing population means a growing demand for water, but as more and more water is drawn out of Perth’s acquifers, the land is slowly subsiding. Growing demand for water in Perth has caused the city to sink at up to 6mm a year and could be responsible for an apparent acceleration in the rate of sea level rise, according to new research released by Curtin University. The study, published in the Journal of Geophysical Research in October, found that the rate of subsidence in Perth increased between 2000 and 2005, at the same time as the Water Corporation of WA increased the amount of water it was drawing from the city’s two main aquifers to meet the demands of a growing population. Will Featherstone, professor of geodesy at Curtin and the lead author of the study, described the effect as “like slowly letting the air out of a balloon”. “If you take the water out of the ground, the overburden of all the rocks above pushes down,” he told Guardian Australia. The city appears to be sinking at a rate of between 2mm and 6mm a year, variable throughout the Perth basin. The greatest change was measured at the seaside suburb of Hillarys, which has a GPS sensor to measure the rate of subsidence and a tidal marker operating side by side. Data for much of the Perth basin is patchy. A sinking city also has ramifications for the measurement of sea levels. A few years ago the rate of sea level rise in Western Australia was reported – not entirely accurately, it turned out – to be three times greater than the global average. Read More here