text: Cempaka Maritime, Marine and Fisheries: April 2013
  Google – AFP, 24 April 2013
  An aerial view of the Mangrove of the French Pacific island territory of New
  Caledonia, in September 2006 (AFP/File, Marc Le Chelard)
  NOUMEA, New Caledonia — The government of the Pacific paradise of New Caledonia said Wednesday it had decided to ban fishing of sharks, which are being decimated to feed growing demand for luxury goods.
  "New Caledonia took the decision to ban the fishing, capture, detention or commercialisation of all species of sharks" in its exclusive economic zone (EEZ) -- an area roughly the size of South Africa, authorities in the French territory said.
  According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), humans kill about 100 million sharks each year, mostly for their fins, which are used for expensive, luxury soups in China.
  Shark-fin soup was once a luxury enjoyed just by China's elite, but as the country's 1.3 billion people have grown wealthier and incorporated it into their festivities, shark populations have been increasingly decimated.
  The government of New Caledonia also banned so-called "shark-feeding", a popular adrenalin-fuelled tourist activity that consists in giving food to the animals to observe them from a close vantage point.
  The territory joins other countries in the region to have created shark sanctuaries, including French Polynesia, Palau and Cook Islands.
  "Asian flotillas don't come to New Caledonia's EEZ but this will stop any attempt to do so. It's a really good decision, as it affects all species," said Thea Jacob of the WWF.
  New Caledonia's decision joins a growing trend of protecting shark species worldwide, despite opposition from countries such as Japan and China that support shark fishing.
  Last month, a decision to restrict exports of the oceanic whitetip shark, the porbeagle, three types of hammerhead and the manta ray won final approval by the 178-member Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES).
  The species now join the great white shark, the whale shark and the basking shark, which already enjoy international trade controls.
  Labels: Animals - Birds, Australia, China, New Zealand, Sharks, Tourists, WWF
  Deutsche Welle, 18 April 2013
  The cold start into spring has made people in parts of Europe wonder if the climate is really warming. Global temperatures have not been rising in recent years. Is the earth cooling instead of warming?
  Looking at the average temperature over five years during the last 15 years, global temperatures might appear to be flattening out.
  "Over the last decade there has been very little new warming," says Ed Hawkins from the University of Reading in the United Kingdom. The development is not unexpected, he told DW: "We are confident that human emissions of greenhouse gases have caused a large component of the warming over the last 150 years, but at the same time we do not expect every year to be warmer than the last. There are reasons why temperatures may remain flat for a decade and continue to warm later on." Hawkins cites periods in the 1960s and 1970s when temperatures were actually cooling.
  The current flattening out of the temperature curve could be due to natural fluctuation:
  "The earth's system undergoes variability on decadal time scales, which causes heat to be mixed into the deeper ocean. We think that's what's going on at the moment. Some of the heat is being mixed down into the deep ocean, where we do not observe it as well, so the surface is not heating up as much as it might have done."
  Countries like China need power
  Another possible reason Hawkins mentions is the increased burning of coal in countries like China and India. The particulates produced help reflect solar radiation back into space, and so cool the planet. He stresses it is not yet possible to say whether the current slow-down in temperature rise is being caused by natural variability or is human-induced.
  Too short a time to tell
  Peter Lemke is head of Climate Science at Germany's Alfred-Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine studies (AWI). He warns against taking a short five-year average as an indicator of how the climate is developing:
  "When it comes to climate processes, we always look at 30 year periods", he told DW. "And for the last 30 years there is a clear upward trend." Using a shorter time span means that one single year can distort the picture. If, for instance, 1998, an exceptionally hot year, is taken as the start or end of a five-year period, the trend would appear to be rising or falling, accordingly. Lemke says temperatures have indeed risen in the last 15 years - if you look at the overall development and not at shorter intervals within the time span. "2010 was the warmest year from a global perspective," says Lemke. "2005 was not far behind it. Since 1978, temperatures have not been within the normal range but considerably above it." "Normal" means an average measured over a 30-year period.
  But certainty that global warming is happening does not mean certainty over its effect, says Lemke: "The question is: how sensitive is our climate system to the rise in the CO2 concentration? And what will it mean in terms of precipitation, temperature rise or ice melt? That is a complicated issue."
  But this very issue is the crucial one for those who have to take decisions about preparing for and adapting to climate change. A whole range of different models estimate the likely temperature rise in the next 100 years as somewhere between 1.5 and 6 degrees Celsius. The next IPPC report, due to be published in 2014, is unlikely to be able to solve the problem of this wide range of estimates and methods, says Lemke. Nevertheless, he says the current slow-down of the warming rate is no reason to stop worrying about climate change.
  British scientist Hawkins thinks there may be a "slight downwards nudge" in the IPCC estimates of climate sensitivity. Nevertheless, he says, "we are still predicting a large warming over coming decades. It may be that we have slightly more time than we did before, which is obviously a good thing, but the impacts are still projected to occur. "
  Climate warming = colder winters?
  The long winter and cold spring which might give people in western Europe the impression the earth is cooling rather than warming have been caused by a stable area of high pressure over Scandinavia - a weather phenomenon rather than climate change. AWI climate chief Lemke stresses that seen from a global point of view, the winter was warmer than usual.
  It's a climate paradox that melting
  ice could mean colder winters
  "The interesting thing is that some climate studies indicate that a stable area of high pressure over Scandinavia like this one could occur more often when the pack ice in the Arctic has been significantly reduced in the previous summer and autumn", Lemke explains. This lack of ice means the ocean warms up and releases the warmth into the atmosphere in the autumn. That disturbs the usual circulation patterns, so that we get the area of high pressure, and that it is more stable than usual." In 2012, Arctic sea ice coverage reached a record low. The long period of cold spring weather would seem to confirm the theory expressed by Vladimir Petoukhov from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. When he published his paper in late 2010, his comment was "hard winters do not contradict our image of global warming. On the contrary, they complete the picture. "
  Posted by Cempaka at 9:28 PM 0 comments
  Labels: Arctic, Climate Change, Energy, Global Warming, Oceans, Science - Research, Water Cycle
  Google – AFP, 15 April 2013
  A peguin lands on the ice in Antarctica, November 1, 2011 (Antarctic
  Ocean Alliance/AFP/File)
  SYDNEY — Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting 10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago, with the most rapid melt occurring in the last 50 years, a joint Australian-British study showed Monday.
  A research team from the Australian National University and the British Antarctic Survey drilled a 364-metre (1,194 feet) long ice core from James Ross Island in the continent's north to measure past temperatures in the area.
  Visible layers in the ice core indicated periods when summer snow on the ice cap thawed and then refroze.
  A helicopter from the Royal Navy vessel HMS
  Endurance brings scientists and equipment
  to James Ross Island in 2008 (Australian
  National University/AFP/File, Jack Treist)
  "We found that the coolest conditions on the Antarctic peninsula and the lowest amount of summer melt occurred around 600 years ago," said lead author Nerilie Abram of the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences.
  "At that time, temperatures were around 1.6 Celsius lower than those recorded in the late 20th century and the amount of annual snowfall that melted and refroze was about 0.5 percent.
  "Today, we see almost 10 times as much of the annual snowfall melting each year.
  "Whilst temperatures at this site increased gradually in phases over many hundreds of years, most of the intensification of melting has happened since the mid-20th century," she added.
  Abram said it helped scientists gain more accurate projections about the direct and indirect contribution of Antarctica's ice shelves and glaciers to global sea level rise.
  "What it means is that the Antarctic peninsula has warmed to a level where even small increases in temperature can now lead to a big increase in summer ice melt," she said.
  Summer ice in the Antarctic is melting
  10 times quicker than it was 600 years ago,
  survey shows (Antarctic Ocean Alliance/
  "This has important implications for ice instability and sea level rise in a warming climate."
  "Having a record of previous melt intensity for the peninsula is particularly important because of the glacier retreat and ice shelf loss we are now seeing in the area," he said.
  "Summer ice melt is a key process that is thought to have weakened ice shelves along the Antarctic peninsula leading to a succession of dramatic collapses, as well as speeding up glacier ice loss across the region over the last 50 years."
  Labels: Antarctic, Climate Change, Oceans, Science - Research, Water, Water Cycle
  An activist dressed as a polar bear prepares to climb onto the drilling rig
  West Hercules, in a photo by Greenpeace (Greenpeace/AFP, Nick Cobbing)
  OSLO — Two Greenpeace activists dressed as polar bears boarded an oil platform in Norway on Wednesday to protest against Norwegian oil and gas group Statoil's planned drilling in the Arctic.
  "No oil company in the world is prepared for Arctic conditions," said the head of Greenpeace Norway, Truls Gulowsen, one of the two activists who boarded the West Hercules platform currently stationed in Oelen in southwestern Norway.
  "It is unacceptable that Statoil wants to gamble with safety and the environment in the vulnerable Arctic regions," he added in a statement.
  Greenpeace sent two "polar bears" to "inspect" the platform and to raise public awareness about the dangers of oil activities in the Arctic, a region with extreme climate conditions and located far from mainland infrastructures.
  The West Hercules is scheduled to be sent this month to the Norwegian waters of the Barents Sea, which is normally ice free, to conduct a prospecting campaign that is expected to last into 2014.
  The campaign, which calls for up to nine drilling operations including some in zones very far north, is already several months behind schedule.
  "Preparing the platform took longer than expected," Statoil spokesman Ola Anders Skauby said.
  After changes to the West Hercules' route, ope3 rations in the northernmost zones have been postponed but are still planned.
  "We are always evaluating the pace of our drilling in light of our resources and our priorities and there is nothing dramatic" about the changes, Skauby said.
  After Shell and Statoil both postponed their respective drilling campaigns in Alaska, Greenpeace said it believes the major oil companies are realising how difficult it is to operate in the Arctic.
  "The oil industry is beginning to understand that drilling in the Arctic is much more difficult than it had us believe," Gulowsen told AFP.
  According to a 2008 study by the US Geological Survey, the Arctic could hold up to 22 percent of the world's undiscovered oil and gas reserves, resources which have become more accessible in recent years as the Arctic ice melts.
  Norway's oil production has been in steady decline for more than a decade. But the country recently raised its estimates for its oil and gas reserves, due to the Barents Sea reserves.
  Posted by Cempaka at 1:09 AM 0 comments
  Labels: Arctic, Environment, Greenpeace
  Google – AFP, 9 April 2013
  A MH53E helicopter takes off from the USS Ponce to conduct a mine
  clearance exercise in the Gulf on September 24, 2012 (US Navy/AFP/File,
  Jumar T. Balacy)
  WASHINGTON — The US Navy said it is preparing to roll out a sea-based laser weapon capable of disabling small enemy vessels and shooting down surveillance drones.
  Equipping Navy ships with lasers "could lead to changes in naval tactics, ship design and procurement plans for ship-based weapons, bringing about a technological shift for the Navy - a 'game changer' - comparable to the advent of shipboard missiles in the 1950s," it added.
  Labels: Innovation, Navy, US
  Deepwater Horizon: Gulf of Mexico 'deep-cleaned' itself
  BBC News, Jason Palmer, New Orleans, 9 april 2013
  The explosion at the Deepwater Horizon rig led to one of the worst oil
  New details have emerged about "self-cleaning" effects in the Gulf of Mexico witnessed in the wake of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
  Research has also outlined how chemical "dispersants" used in clean-up efforts actually frustrate these processes.
  Terry Hazen of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has been studying oil-degrading microbes in greater and greater detail since the disaster, even discovering some that had never been seen before.
  They can break down the long-chain carbon-based "alkane" molecules present in oil - and in isolated conditions will even move towards oil.
  "They're really oil-seeking missiles," he told the meeting.
  In a sense, it is no surprise that the seas should host oil-hungry microbes; natural seeps from the ocean floor have been releasing oil into the world's waters for millions of years.
  But Prof Hazen's research has revealed more of the complex web of microbes that feed on oil - and are in turn fed on.
  A release like that of Deepwater Horizon contains a rich mix of carbon-containing molecules - alkanes, methane and what are called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), each presenting its own risks to the environment.
  The new finding is about methanotrophs, which feed on methane - among the last compounds to be degraded.
  "All of a sudden the [methanotroph populations] go up to really high densities and they're fat and happy - and then [the methane is] gone." he told BBC News.
  "At that point, they degrade anything else that's there fortuitously, and they'll degrade it down below what would be usable as a carbon and energy source - so it's really sort of a 'deep-cleaning' effect.
  The jury is still out on the long-term
  "That's why I think the Gulf of Mexico is cleaner than you would expect, not only from the oil but from everything else that goes into it."
  'Dramatic traumas'
  "We took samples 3m and 15m from the shores… followed that for about a year and did some modelling. We found that the half-life of the half-lives of the alkanes was about 70 days and PAHs was 100 days," he told the meeting.
  "After a year, the concentrations had pretty much reduced to background levels."
  But Dongye Zhao from Auburn University in the US said that the dispersants also caused sediments to absorb more of the harmful compounds, lengthening their effects on the environment.
  "Preliminary results show us that adding dispersants induces a series of hystereses," he told the meeting.
  "That means it's really going to… increase absorption, which is quite counterintuitive."
  Chemical dispersants probably held back many self-cleaning processes
  The group's work presented here also showed that dispersants interfered with other natural processes that degrade oil, including effects from sunlight and ground-level ozone.
  "There was a lot of oil out there for 84 days," he told BBC News.
  "Fish and bacteria and plankton and everything else were swimming through that oil, and we don't know what long-term effects that'll have.
  "I am quite worried about how resilient the Gulf of Mexico is," Prof Hazen said.
  "She's had some pretty dramatic traumas, and I'm worried how much the ecosystem can actually tolerate."
  Labels: Climate Change, Disaster / Accident, Environment, Gaia, Oceans, Oil Spills, Pollution, Science - Research, US, Water Cycle