Clubbing baby seals

Byoliveridley

Regarding the recent brouhaha that started with the EU banning Canada’s seal products, I confess to being in two minds about Canada’s sealing practices. Of course, clubbing baby seals to death seems barbaric, but so is confining pigs (intelligent and cute in the right circumstances!) to pens where they can barely move and slaughtering them, so is de-beaking chickens and cooping them up in ultra small cages, so is fattening cows with growth hormones, then slaughtering them. If you have any questions, I give you

and this:

and this too:

Okay, now that you have become part of the meatrix, why is industrial animal farming, which is way more destructive on the planet, the people involved and the animals completely and utterly acceptable while the (admittedly barbaric) “culling” of a small proportion of a wild population of seals is banned?

Yes, seals are cute, but so are chickens, baby pigs, calves, you name it, I even think most snakes are cute, it’s all optics anyway.

If you’re against the seal clubbing, you need to be against all current animal farming practiced in all of the Americas, and yes, Europe as well.

FAQs: The Atlantic seal hunt

Few facts in this debate go unchallenged. All sides agree on where and when. But the answers to how, why, and even how many aren’t as clear. 

Even the language is chosen carefully. Hunt or slaughter. Sea mammals or baby seals. Cherished tradition or economic disaster. Cod-eating nuisance or adorable innocent.

The images of the hunt are even more powerful, and seal hunt opponents know it. Most people find the pictures difficult to watch, but supporters say the same kind of thing happens in slaughterhouses — places where cameras aren’t allowed

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  • Environmental Disaster, Local Edition

    Byoliveridley

    newsobserver.com | Apex fire spreads toxic gas

    APEX – Fire crews have not begun to fight a fire at a hazardous waste plant that has spread a cloud of dangerous chlorine gas across Apex this morning, forcing more than 15,000 people to evacuate.Officials say they planned to send a hazardous materials crew in at daybreak to evaluate the fire. In the meantime, they’ve been letting it burn, out of concern that pouring water or foam on it would make things worse, said town manager Bruce Radford. The rain that started falling around 7 a.m. “doesn’t make anything better,” Radford said.

    The fire that followed a series of late-night explosions at Environmental Quality Co. just east of downtown has closed all Apex schools and school bus routes that start inside the Western Wake town. In addition, the Wake County Public School System said bus transportation elsewhere in Western and Southwestern Wake County would likely be delayed this morning. Green Hope High School in Cary, which is being used a shelter for evacuated residents, will also be closed.

    Officials urged people to evacuate an area bounded by U.S. 1, N.C. 55 and U.S. 64 highways in Apex and unincorporated areas. Police are blocking roads into the center of town, and Radford urged everyone to stay away.

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    Gaping Reminders of Aging and Crumbling Pipes – New York Times

    Byoliveridley

    Gaping Reminders of Aging and Crumbling Pipes – New York Times

    Local and state officials across the country say thousands of miles of century-old underground water and sewer lines are springing leaks, eroding and — in extreme cases — causing the ground above them to collapse. Though there is no master tally of sinkholes, there is consensus among civil engineers and water experts that things are getting worse.

    The Environmental Protection Agency has projected that unless cities invest more to repair and replace their water and sewer systems, nearly half of the water system pipes in the United States will be in poor, very poor or “life elapsed” status by 2020.

    Yes, sewers are unsexy, there’s no new fancy science involved. But water and sewer systems are the very basis of public health, and the biggest reason why Americans don’t die of sleeping sickness and dengue fever (or their subtropical equivalents) in large numbers evey year. People who want to cut taxes and limit government need to keep this in mind. There’s no money to be made out of building and maintaining sewers, it’s a dirty job and government has to do it, or else nobody will, and money is required. We produce the waste, we need to be taxed appropriately for it. It’s that simple.

  • Hansen on understating sea level rise due to climate change

    Byoliveridley

    Hansen, the grandfather of all climate research has an essay today in the open access journal Environmental Research Letters arguing that scientists are not communicating the seriousness of sea level rise. And, it is open access, so, no kidney sale required!

    Scientific reticence and sea level rise

    I suggest that a `scientific reticence’ is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create a situation with future sea level changes out of our control. I argue for calling together a panel of scientific leaders to hear evidence and issue a prompt plain-written report on current understanding of the sea level change issue.

    In this paper, Hansen reviews a number of recent studies that point to positive feedback in ice melting (remember, poitive feedback, good for morale, not good for climate change). Hansen then points out that due to these feedback mechanisms, sea level rise is non-linear. His thesis is that all this information is known to most climate scientists, and to a lot of people who maintain even a cursory interest in the matter.

    He finishes with a call to action.

    There is, in my opinion, a huge gap between what is understood about human-made global warming and its consequences, and what is known by the people who most need to know, the public and policy makers. The IPCC is doing a commendable job, but we need something more. Given the reticence that the IPCC necessarily exhibits, there need to be supplementary mechanisms. The onus, it seems to me, falls on us scientists as a community.

    Important decisions are being made now and in the near future. An example is the large number of new efforts to make liquid fuels from coal, and a resurgence of plans for energy-intensive `cooking’ of tar-shale mountains to squeeze out liquid hydrocarbon fuels. These are just the sort of actions needed to preserve a BAU greenhouse gas path indefinitely. We know enough about the carbon cycle to say that at least of the order of a quarter of the CO2 emitted in burning fossil fuels under a BAU scenario will stay in the air for an eternity, the latter defined practically as more than 500 years. Readily available conventional oil and gas are enough to take atmospheric CO2 to a level of the order of 450 ppm.

    In this circumstance it seems vital that we provide the best information we can about the threat to the great ice sheets posed by human-made climate change. This information, and appropriate caveats, should be provided publicly, and in plain language. The best suggestion I can think of is for the National Academy of Sciences to carry out a study, in the tradition of the Charney and Cicerone reports on global warming. I would be glad to hear alternative suggestions.

    Do we need another study? As we wait for the National Academy of Sciences to conduct a study on how best to communicate the danger of sea level rise, many more villages in India and Bangladesh will go under the sea. Apparently, the sea cannot wait for the best communication strategies. It communicates the only way it can, directly!!

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    You breathe in toxic chemicals too.

    Byoliveridley

    Behind a frigging pay wall, as usual! Kelly et al. argue in Science that hydrophobicity, the tendency to favor oil over water (to break it down to the simplest explanation) is not the only factor that explains biomagnification. The underlying theory used to be that compounds that can dissolve in water would swiftly degrade (either chemically or biologically) and not be of any concern to humans. Compounds like dioxins, PCB’s, DDT, etc. accumulated in fat tissue of aquatic animals and these were the compounds that would biomagnify through ingestion (eating!). Kelly et al. uncover another pathway that probably made every scientist go “D’uh”! – Apparently, chemicals animals breathe in can also bioaccumulate if they are not cleared efficiently by the lungs. So, air breathing cows, chickens and pigs can also cause significant bioaccumulation of certain compounds. Which ones? I guess you’ll have to pay to find out more, but this Scientific American article adds some context. Turns out, it is about 10000 chemicals, not all of them known to be harmful, but because they were never suspect, their metabolism is unknown.

    Well, if anything, it will keep the biomonitoring folks busy for a while!

    Chemical Consequences — 317 (5835): 165g — Science

    Global regulators of commercial chemicals apply a scientific paradigm that relates the biomagnification potential of the chemical in food webs to the chemical’s hydrophobicity. However, Kelly et al. (p. 236; see the news story by Kaiser) show that current methods fail to recognize the food web biomagnification potential of certain chemicals. Certain chemicals do not biomagnify in most aquatic food chains, but biomagnify to a high degree in air-breathing animals, including humans, because of low respiratory elimination. Thus, additional criteria for evaluating biomagnification and toxicity in chemicals that biomagnify are required.

  • James Hansen today at the Friday Center, 3:00 PM

    Byoliveridley

    Environment North Carolina is co-sponsoring 2 events featuring Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute and the nation’s foremost climate expert. In the past year, Dr. Hansen has lead the charge in calling for action on global warming, stating, “We have at most ten years-not ten years to decide upon action, but ten years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse gas emissions.”

    RSVP-NASA’s Dr. James Hansen coming to North Carolina – Environment North Carolina

    Well, if I’d been keeping normal bogging hours, this would have been up last week, anyway… Full report on the talk later tonight/tomorrow. It figures to be exciting, always great to see visionary scientists in person.

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    One Person's Carbon Offset – Another's Child labor?

    Byoliveridley

    The ‘carbon offset’ child labourers – Times Online

    “Pumping furiously on a foot treadle in the afternoon heat, six-year-old Sarju Ram is irrigating her impoverished family’s field, improving the crop and – without knowing it – helping environmentally sensitive holiday-makers assuage their guilt over long-haul flights to dream destinations.

    But Sarju and her four brothers and sisters working flat out in a clump of trees that provide scant shelter from the sun illustrate a growing argument over claims that British environmentalists’ efforts to curb greenhouse emissions are inadvertently fuelling an increase in child labour.”

    Carbon Offsets are a pricing mechanism setup where people can sign up to pay various companies to compensate for their greenhouse gas emissions by funding mitigation projects, such as planting trees, funding renewable energy projects, and in this case, paying money to farmers (and their families) to pump their water using a foot pump. Terrapass is one such well known company and there are many others.

    I am not so sure I would characterize this as exploitative child labor. There’s plenty of that going around in conventional manufacturing in Asia, not to mention children being used to kill. Compared to this general egregiousness, the prospect of a farmer’s kid, who would be working on the farm anyway, biking away for half an hour so his family can get some extra money does not sound all that bad. Yes, the colonialistic aspects of the story hit me in the face and makes me want to condemn a practice where a rich Westerner pays a poor farmer to pedal away for hours so she can fly to the Galapagos for a eco-vacation.

    But, in the end, these offsets do something. No, they will not do anything to slow (well, maybe a little, imperceptibly, perhaps?) CO2 emissions. Obviously, there’s no substitute to comprehensive worldwide carbon reduction strategy which prices carbon correctly, does not put barriers on technology transfer, and does not transfer greenhouse emissions from the US to Western Europe to China and India in the name of efficiency while doing nothing to ensure that that this manufacturing uses clean technology. Offsets make people aware of their actions, and choices they can make. This makes them (I hope) more likely to support major climate change legislation. It is more about attitudinal change than major change. But calling this child labor and exploitation is, I think, unwarranted.

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