Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”

The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

from the NY Times

Global warming: enough to make you sick

Oysterman Jim Aguiar had never had to deal with the bacterium Vibrio parahaemolyticus in his 25 years working the frigid waters of Prince William Sound.

The dangerous microbe infected seafood in warmer waters, like the Gulf of Mexico. Alaska was way too cold.

But the sound was gradually warming. By summer 2004, the temperature had risen just enough to poke above the crucial 59-degree mark. Cruise ship passengers who had eaten local oysters were soon coming down with diarrhea, cramping and vomiting — the first cases of Vibrio food poisoning in Alaska that anyone could remember.

"We were slapped from left field," said Aguiar, who shut down his oyster farm that year along with a few others.

As scientists later determined, the culprit was not just the bacterium, but the warming that allowed it to proliferate.

"This was probably the best example to date of how global climate change is changing the importation of infectious diseases," said Dr. Joe McLaughlin, acting chief of epidemiology at the Alaska Division of Public Health, who published a study on the outbreak.

The spread of human disease has become one of the most worrisome subplots in the story of global warming. Incremental temperature changes have begun to redraw the distribution of bacteria, insects and plants, exposing new populations to diseases that they have never seen before.

A report from the World Health Organization estimated that in 2000 about 154,000 deaths around the world could be attributed to disease outbreaks and other conditions sparked by climate change.

from the LA Times

In New Orleans, Progress at Last in the Lower Ninth Ward

The first new houses built in the Lower Ninth Ward since Hurricane Katrina were turned over to their owners on Thursday, creating a small island of hope in a sea of ruin.

Side by side, sparkling and bright on Delery Street at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, the two houses unveiled at a ceremony on Thursday stand out in a landscape grimly frozen since the storm. The twin pastel variants on traditional New Orleans architecture sit incongruously whole amid block after block of ruined shells with doors swinging open and windows gaping wide.

Empty during the day and dark at night, this area is a long way from being a neighborhood again, even though it has been the focus of intensive volunteer efforts and organizing since the storm. The destruction of the Lower Ninth Ward, which was working-class and black before the hurricane, and its subsequent failure to begin recovering, have become symbols for what some see as inequities in this city’s halting revival.

That symbolism was much in evidence at the ceremony, a gathering of the homeowners and the varied volunteer forces that built the $125,000 solid pine houses, which officials said are elevated five feet and designed to resist hurricane-force winds. It was an occasion to look past the catastrophe that sent a wall of water rushing into the Lower Ninth Ward 18 months ago, at least for the moment. If the levees fail again and a similar volume of water comes through, the new houses will take only two feet of water, the contractor said.

from the NY Times

Massive flooding returns, but Mozambique prevents disaster

Paulo Zucula listens intently to the aid workers' firsthand reports: Whole villages submerged. Hungry families. An estimated 70,000 now homeless. The nightly updates list the mounting challenges as Mozambique experiences the worst flooding since 2000 and 2001.

Yet, Mr. Zucula, the head of Mozambique's National Disaster Management Institute, exudes calm, even satisfaction. Unlike six years ago, when the flooding killed some 700 people, the government says that fewer than 10 people have died so far.

This time, the Mozambican government moved early and deliberately to avert a massive humanitarian crisis. Months ago, it began preparing to evacuate villages, moved food supplies into the area, and had set up early warning systems throughout the flood-prone Zambezi River basin.

"If you're looking for a success story of an African government that's trying to make things better for its people, this is a very good example of that." says Mike Huggins, spokesman for the UN's World Food Program (WFP) in southern Africa. "Their response [to flooding this time] is massively better. The government is doing a lot this year to try to mitigate the impact – they've evacuated everyone from the really critical areas, they've made sure that the UN and the aid organizations are all working together to bring a coordinated response."

from the CS Monitor

LA levee plan leaves some helpless

State and federal plans for a massive hurricane protection bulwark for Louisiana would sacrifice dozens of coastal communities, some with thousands of residents, to the next Katrina-sized hurricane. The reason: Protecting them would cost too much.

"We believe that it's probably not possible to provide adequate protection that people should be living down there," says Randy Hanchey of the state's Department of Natural Resources, which drafted one of the plans. Even so, the state has not encouraged residents to move from those areas.


The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, ordered by Congress last year to design its own set of storm defenses, reached a similar conclusion, project manager Tim Axtman says. "The reality is, the cost of protection doesn't equate to what's there," he says.


If state and federal recommendations are adopted, places such as Venice, a riverbank town of about 2,000 people south of New Orleans, will be left with hurricane protections comparable to the levees they had before Hurricane Katrina swamped them. Venice was devastated by Katrina, a Category 3 storm that came ashore with winds of 127 mph. In most places, existing barriers could not defend against a similar strike today, says Andrew MacInnes, who manages coastal issues in Plaquemines Parish.


The state and federal plans are due to be turned over to lawmakers this year. Together, they will recommend stringing hundreds of miles of fortified levees across the Louisiana coast and restoring or protecting vast stretches of fast-disappearing coastal wetlands, creating defenses around New Orleans and other populated areas that could withstand a storm more powerful than Katrina.

Final costs haven't been tallied, but Hanchey and Axtman each say the work will easily top $30 billion.

from USA Today

Climate change laps at Bangladesh's shores

Global warming has a taste in this village. It is the taste of salt.

Only a few years ago, water from the local pond was fresh and sweet on Samit Biswas' tongue. It quenched his family's thirst and cleansed their bodies.

But drinking a cupful now leaves a briny flavor in his mouth. Tiny white crystals sprout on Biswas' skin after he bathes and in his clothes after his wife washes them.

The change, international scientists say, is the result of intensified flooding caused by shifting climate patterns. Warmer weather and rising oceans are sending seawater surging up Bangladesh's rivers in greater volume and frequency, experts say, overflowing and seeping into the soil and water supply of thousands of people.

Their lives are being squeezed by distant lands they have seen only on television — America, China and Russia at the top of the list — whose carbon emissions are pushing temperatures and sea levels upward. This month, a long-awaited report by the United Nations said global warming fueled by human activity could lift temperatures by 8 degrees and the ocean's surface by 23 inches by 2100.

Here in southwestern Bangladesh, the bleak future forecast by the report is already becoming reality, bringing misery along with it.

The heavier than usual floods have wiped out homes and paddy fields. They have increased the salinity of the water, which is contaminating wells, killing trees and slowly poisoning the mangrove jungle that forms a barrier against the Bay of Bengal.

If sea levels continue to rise at their present rate, by the time Biswas, 35, retires from his job as a teacher, the only home he has known will be swamped, overrun by the ocean with the force of an unstoppable army. That, in turn, will trigger another kind of flood: millions of displaced residents desperate for a place to live.

from the LA Times

After String of Disasters, Indonesians Ask: Why Us?

Too many shopping malls in the city. Too many squatters on the riverbanks. Too many villas on the southern hillsides. Or a curse hovering over the president, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono.

Filthy water still fills much of the city a week after the start of the worst flood in decades, draining slowly away during dry spells, then topped up again by new rain storms. Officials say 80 people have now died, mostly by drowning and electrocution.

And along with the misery of homelessness, power failures and traffic jams, the city is troubled by a babble of theories, recriminations and superstitious whispers about why Indonesia is plagued by natural disasters.

Over the past two years, Indonesia has suffered an encyclopedia of troubles, from the devastating tsunami of December 2004 to earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, droughts, bird flu outbreaks, landslides, airline crashes and a vast, bizarre geyser of mud — a constant pounding of catastrophes that has worn down the national psyche and convinced many that something supernatural is going on.

“Since the day he took office there have been unending disasters,” said Permadi, a member of Parliament and a mystic, of the president. Like many Indonesians, he uses only one name. Mr. Yudhoyono was born under a bad sign, he said, and nature is demonstrating its anger at him and the nation.

But the flood that at one point inundated up to 70 percent of the city is traceable to more tangible problems, many here say. It exposes the limitations and dangers of Indonesia’s aging infrastructure. And it demonstrates the growing pains of a democratic transformation that could produce more responsive governments.

from the New York Times

Gaping Reminders of Aging and Crumbling Pipes

After a sinkhole swallowed a sewer-repair truck in Portland, Oregon, on the day after Christmas, the truck’s crew crawled to safety, muddy and mystified.

Last summer in Irving, Tex., a 2-year-old boy disappeared near a sinkhole. One theory was that he was kidnapped. Another was that he was lost in the sewer system that had broken open and caused the collapse.

In December, firefighters in Brooklyn rescued a grandmother carrying groceries who fell into a hole that opened beneath her on a sidewalk. And in Hershey, Pa., a damaged storm drain caused a six-foot-deep sinkhole in Chocolate Town Park, nearly sinking the town’s New Year’s Eve celebration.

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.

from the NY Times

Storms, Global Warming Not For the Birds

Thomas Sherry hacked his way with a machete through the Bogue Chitto National Wildlife Refuge on the Pearl River last summer, clearing trails of vines and vegetation downed by Hurricane Katrina.

Sherry, a professor of ecology and environmental biology, worked for days and days with graduate student David Brown nearly a year after the storm to get to forest study-sites that he'd set up pre-Katrina.

Sherry studies the ecology of migratory birds. He usually focuses much of his research in Jamaica, and he's particularly interested in the Swainson's warbler, a bird that breeds in Louisiana and the Gulf Coast and winters in the Caribbean.

Since the massive storm hit, Sherry has been looking into the impact the Katrina "experiment" had on birds.

As a scientist, he's not content with anecdotal information. "Unless you have good, hard data on how many birds there are before and after a storm, it's hard to make any kind of rigorous statement," he said.

Indonesians Still Seeking High Ground

Strings of bright laundry hang among the gravestones and people who are brave enough sleep among the dead, taking refuge on the high ground of the Karet cemetery from the worst flooding in Jakarta in decades.

The skies were clear Tuesday but stagnant water filled nearly half the city’s streets and more than 220,000 people remained homeless after several days of torrential rains and overflowing rivers.

The water level dropped in some areas and officials said that more than 100,000 people had returned from government shelters to their homes. But electricity and water supplies had not been restored to much of this city of 12 million people.

As of late Tuesday, the death toll for greater Jakarta had risen to 44, said the city’s police spokesman, Col. I Ketut Untung Yoga Ana.

Tens of thousands of people who chose not to evacuate remained stranded on upper floors, receiving government food deliveries by boat.

For several hundred evacuees, the cemetery offered a refuge with public toilets and water pumps for laundry. An informal community has emerged, with women cooking donated food at a communal fire under a big blue tarpaulin.

Siti Amina, 23, who fled chest-high floodwaters on Thursday night with her 4-year-old daughter in her arms, has settled into what could be a lengthy stay.

The tiny home she shares with 10 other people remained almost entirely under water. She and her husband, Saefullah, 25, who sells fried bananas and fish cakes, do not know when they will be able to return.

“We are afraid to sleep in the cemetery,” Ms. Siti said, “but we have no other place to go. We are sleeping among the dead.”

from the NY Times

25 Dead in Indonesia Flood; 340,000 Flee

Boats ferried supplies to desperate residents of Indonesia's flood-stricken capital on Sunday as rivers burst their banks following days of rain. At least 25 people have been killed and almost 340,000 forced from their homes, officials said.

Storm waters that inundated scores of residential areas and shopping districts late last week were still almost 10-feet deep in places on Monday, according to witnesses and Anwar Arifin, an official with Jakarta's flood information center.

"As of today, 75 percent of Jakarta remains flooded," Arifin said. The death toll from flooding in the capital had reached 25 as of Monday, he added, mostly by drowning or electrocution.

Jakarta's heavily criticized governor said he could not be held responsible for the worst floods to hit the city of 12 million in living memory, saying they were a natural phenomenon.

"There is no point in throwing abuse around," Governor Sutiyoso, who like many Indonesians uses one name, told el-Shinta radio station. "I was up till 3 a.m. this morning trying to handle the refugees."

Hundreds of people scrambled to the second floors of their houses to escape the rising waters. Some found themselves trapped, while others refused to leave despite warnings that the muddy flood waters may rise further in the coming days.

from the AP via the Los Angeles Times

A Warming World

Global warming has already led to rising sea levels and dramatic increases in temperature in the Arctic, and scientists warned Friday that its effects will hit closer to home, creating heat waves, droughts and hurricanes.

How bad it gets, say international scientists in the latest release of findings on climate change, depends on what actions people and nations take to reduce the burning of fossil fuels, the destruction of forests and everyday activities that emit carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the air.

In the United States, the West will be hardest hit, scientists say. Heat waves, droughts and intense hurricanes are likely to increase in the coming decades. Air temperatures in the Southwest, particularly from California to Texas, are projected to rise in the summer about 10 degrees by the end of the century, assuming there is a moderate increase in greenhouse gas emissions. A reduction in emissions might keep the temperature rise to 5 degrees.

The findings were released in Paris as part of the fourth assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, formed by the United Nations. It is the result of six years of work and is built on a previous dozen years of study by hundreds of researchers from more than 100 nations.

In a warming world, the Southwest will receive less rain, and the Pacific Northwest may get more, although that is less certain, scientists say. And even less clear is what will happen in Northern California, where the unpredictability of El Niños, ocean winds and currents make forecasting difficult.

Over the next several decades, the snow season is expected to shorten across North America, and the snow cover is expected to contract. Permafrost will thaw to greater depths, the scientists project. And the East Coast will be wetter and cloudier.

from the San Francisco Chronicle

A warmer Maryland will be wetter

By 2100, Baltimore's Harborplace could be under water at high tide. Ocean City might be frequently evacuated because of Atlantic storms. Hooper and Smith islands in the Chesapeake Bay could join 13 others that have been submerged in the estuary.

Across Maryland, almost 1,000 square miles of coastal land are threatened by rising sea levels, scientists warn.

These are a few of the local effects of global warming that researchers are discussing in the wake of a new report by a United Nations panel. More than 2,500 scientists from 130 countries in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict that sea levels will rise by up to two feet over the next century.

This figure is lower than a 2001 estimate of as much as a three-foot rise.

But scientists in the Chesapeake region took little comfort in that, in part because land in this area is also sinking at a rate of about seven inches a century - making it a particularly vulnerable area.

Donald F. Boesch, president of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, said the most recent U.N. summary of the state of scientific consensus probably underestimates the rate of sea level rise. He said it doesn't take into account more studies over the past few months that suggest that the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica might be melting faster than previously thought.

from the Baltimore Sun

Global Warming Poses Health Threats

Global warming not only poses significant threats to the Earth's ecology, it may also unleash unprecedented health risks, experts say.

On Friday, an international panel of scientists released a report predicting that global warming due to greenhouse-gas emissions will continue for centuries, no matter what's done to check pollution. The result will be killer heat waves, devastating droughts, rising sea levels and fiercer storms.

Saying it was acting with 90 percent confidence, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations said carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases produced by human activity are the main cause of the global warming that has taken place since 1950.

Michael A. McGeehin, director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects, said, "There are some health effects from climate change that we are comfortable in predicting. We will see an increase in the intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves around the world. We will see more severe precipitation events, both heavy rainfall and severe droughts."

That flooding and drought with bring attendant health problems, McGeehin said. "There are health effects secondary to flooding, such as contaminated water supplies, that could result in the spread of infectious diseases," he said.

from the Washington Post

Closings and Cancellations Top Advice on Flu Outbreak

In the event of a severe flu outbreak, schools should close for up to three months, ballgames and movies should be canceled, and working hours should be staggered so subways and buses are less crowded, the federal government said Thursday in issuing new pandemic flu guidelines to states and cities.

Health officials acknowledged that such measures would greatly disrupt public life, but argued that they would provide the time needed to produce vaccines and would save lives because flu viruses attack in waves lasting about two months.

“We have to be prepared for a Category 5 pandemic,” said Dr. Martin S. Cetron, director of global migration and quarantine for the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in releasing the guidelines. “It’s not easy. The only thing that’s harder is facing the consequences. That will be intolerable.”

Officials are, for the first time, modeling the new guidelines on the five levels of hurricanes.

Category 1 assumes that 90,000 Americans would die, Glen J. Nowak, a spokesman for the disease centers, said. (About 36,000 Americans die of flu in an average year.) Category 5, which assumes 1.8 million dead, is the equivalent of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. That flu killed about 2 percent of those infected; the H5N1 flu now circulating in Asia has killed more than 50 percent of those infected but is not easily transmitted.

The new guidelines advocate having sick people and their families — even apparently healthy members — stay home for 7 to 10 days. They advise against closing state borders or airports because crucial deliveries, including food, would stop.

from the NY Times

19 levees in King County at risk of failure, corps reports

King County alone has more levees at risk of failure in a flood than in all but one other state in the nation, concluded a report issued Thursday by the Army Corps of Engineers.

The 19 decaying county levees, most in North Bend and along the Cedar and Green rivers near Kent and Renton, put Washington behind only California as the state with the most serious potential for levee breaks.

North Bend Mayor Ken Hearing said most of the city is the flood plain of either the Middle or South forks of the Snoqualmie River. Five of the problem levees on the list are within the city limits and three are nearby.

The Corps of Engineers' "unacceptably maintained levees" list is distressing, but it didn't come as a total surprise, he said.

"It's a cause for concern," Hearing said. "Maybe now we have the opportunity to get them fixed, to get them corrected."

In all, the corps ranked 122 levees as needing immediate maintenance. California led the nation with 37.

from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

Fixing levees isn't easy or cheapr

Communities responsible for maintaining levees publicly identified as substandard by the federal government are racing to fix problems caused by years of neglect.

One obstacle might prove more formidable than the levees themselves: money.

The Army Corps of Engineers identified 122 levees on Thursday that it said posed an unacceptable risk of failing in a flood. Although a few of the levees protect major cities such as Albuquerque and Sacramento, many guard sparsely populated areas and have been overgrown with trees and brush that could weaken them.

MORE: Corps reveals locations

The levees were identified by a corps inspection program that intensified after Hurricane Katrina overwhelmed Gulf Coast levees in August 2005.

The corps has given the communities a year to make repairs. That deadline has left levee owners — primarily local governments for whom the corps built the levees — scrambling for the money to get the job done. For some, the challenge is significant.

Cost is large, but time short

In tiny Lincoln, N.H., floodwaters dug gaps between some of a levee's granite blocks in 1995. "It's not like it's going to fall down tomorrow," town manager Ted Sutton said. Even so, he estimated repairs will cost $500,000 to $1 million.

Sutton said he's frustrated by the corps' deadline. The town has three months to produce a repair plan and one year to fix the levee, which protects about 90 homes and businesses. The levee is currently covered by snow and ice. "They're demanding we give them a plan in the middle of winter. I don't think so," he said. "It's frozen and under snow."

Repairing the levee in a year also will prove financially difficult, he said. "It took us 10 years to save enough money to build a new town hall, and that only cost between $250,000 to $300,000," he said. "We have no way of paying for something like that. It's just impossible."

from USA Today

Bangladesh plight serves as warning to world

If climate change continues unabated, the plight of Bangladesh, which wages an annual battle against floods, provides a grim lesson for many other parts of the world. It will loose the war against rising water.

“If the sea level predictions are true, parts of the country will simply disappear,” said Jo Scheuer, deputy country director of the United Nations Development Programme in India.

Most parts of Bangladesh are less than 10m above sea level, so rising seas coupled with storm surges could put large parts of the population and agricultural land under threat of severe flooding.

The toll would be catastrophic for a country where half its population lives below the poverty line.

South and east Asia, including Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and parts of China, including Shanghai, will be most vulnerable to climate change because of their large coastal populations in low-lying areas, according to the UK International Institute for Environment and Development.

Poor countries, which consume little energy per capita relative to developed countries, have historically played the smallest role in producing carbon emissions.

The average Briton, for example, produces 48 times more carbon dioxide than someone living in Bangladesh. India’s per capita annual energy consumption was just 594 kWh in 2003 compared with 14,057 kWh in the US.

The Financial Times

Panel Says Warming Caused by Humans

The world is already committed to centuries of warming, shifting weather patterns and rising seas from the atmospheric buildup of gases that trap heat, but the warming can be substantially blunted by prompt action, an international network of climate experts said today.

The report released here represented the fourth assessment since 1990 by the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, of the causes and consequences of climate change. But for the first time the group asserted with near certainty — more than 90 percent confidence — that carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping greenhouse gases were the main drivers of warming since 1950.

In its last report, in 2001, the panel, consisting of hundreds of scientists and reviewers, put the confidence level at between 66 and 90 percent. Both reports are online at www.ipcc.ch.

If carbon dioxide concentrations reach twice their pre-industrial levels, the report said, the climate will likely warm some 3.5 to 8 degrees. But there would be more than a one in 10 chance of much greater warming, a situation many earth scientists say poses an unacceptable risk.

from the NY Times

download the IPCC report

Damage of Exxon Valdez endures

Oil from the massive Exxon Valdez spill, which coated 1,200 miles of Alaskan coast when the tanker ran aground in March 1989, continues to threaten the damaged ecosystem there long after experts believed it would dissipate.

When the ship hit Bligh Reef, it released as much as 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into Alaska's pristine Prince William Sound and parts of the Gulf of Alaska. The spill was the largest in U.S. history, the Environmental Protection Agency says, and killed an untold number of fish, birds, seals and sea otters.

According to a study out Feb. 15 in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, scientists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. Geological Survey and Alaskan agencies found that oil levels in the sands around the sound are much the same as they were when tests were done five years ago. The study says oil has seeped down 4 to 10 inches.

The oil is a continuing, "far-ranging" problem for fish and wildlife, says Kim Trust, science director of the Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council, an Alaska-federal partnership that works to repair the environmental damage. A 2006 council report found that two species — Pacific herring and pigeon guillemots — are not recovering. Populations of clams and mussels are still affected by the lingering oil, as are sea otters and birds such as harlequin ducks and black oystercatchers.

The new report states that subsurface oil poses a contact hazard for foraging otters, ducks and shorebirds, creates a chronic source of low-level contamination, discourages subsistence and "degrades the wilderness character" of protected lands.

from USA Today