A recent study shows the arctic seabed is releasing up to ten-million tons of methane annually. (Photo Courtesy of Patrick Kelley, U.S. Coast Guard)
New research indicates the Arctic seabed is releasing methane at a rate higher than all the other oceans of the world combined. This recent discovery raises concerns about the pace of global warming. Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
New research indicates the Arctic seabed is releasing methane at a rate higher than all the other oceans of the world combined. Lester Graham reports, this recent discovery raises concerns about the pace of global warming.
Under a shallow part of the Arctic Ocean, the seafloor was thought to be permanently frozen, capping vast stores of methane underneath. Researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks have found that frozen cap is beginning to leak large amounts of methane into the atmosphere. Natalia Shakhova is one of the leaders of a team that’s been studying the permafrost under the Arctic Ocean.
“What we’re having now, it’s up to ten-million ton[s] of methane annually escaping from this seabed. That means that permafrost does not serve as an impermeable cap to prevent these leakages any longer.”
Methane is a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide. The greatest concern about methane releases had been the permafrost on land… but this underwater release could mean climate changes could accelerate.
President Barack Obama meeting with former Vice President Al Gore in the Oval Office on December 7, 2009 regarding Copenhagen. (Photo by Pete Souza, courtesy of the White House)
With no legally-binding agreement in
Copenhagen, there’s now talk of another global
warming conference next summer in Mexico
City. Lester Graham has more on that:
Transcript
With no legally-binding agreement in
Copenhagen, there’s now talk of another global
warming conference next summer in Mexico
City. Lester Graham has more on that:
When the U.S. House passed a climate bill this summer, the Senate was expected to pick it up and vote on it by the end of the year—maybe before the U.N. summit on climate change in Copenhagen.
That didn’t happen.
In Copenhagen last week, former U.S. Vice-President Al Gore looked ahead to another conference next year.
“I believe that we are capable of resolving the remaining issues to the point we can meet in Mexico City this July in the aftermath of a successful action by the United States Senate in April and conclude a binding international treaty.”
Al Gore wants the Senate to pass the legislation by April 22 to be exact – Earth Day. With business concerned about coming greenhouse gas regulations from the Environmental Protection Agency, the Senate might feel more pressure to by then.
Oliver Pergams used a tiny caliper to measure the mice, tracking changes in size over the years. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago has a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets. (Photo by Gabriel Spitzer)
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Transcript
Evolution takes place over long stretches of time: millennia and epochs. But some new research shows that animals might be changing much
faster than nearly anyone thought. Gabriel Spitzer has more on those
changes, and how they seem to be linked to humans:
Tall Trees Park is a little patch of green in Glenview, Illinois – a
northern suburb of Chicago. About a hundred years ago, a lot of this area
looked a lot like this. It was mostly farms and pasture and forest. And now
of course it’s a lot of strip malls and subdivisions and stuff. And the
population has grown seventyfold. The climate has changed, too. It’s
gotten a little warmer, a little wetter.
And all this has made life a lot different for the northern white-footed
mice who live here. It’s actually not just made life different for the
mice, it’s changed the mice themselves.
That gets back to a guy named Oliver Pergams. He’s an ecologist, and in
the mid-90s, he was looking at deer mice who live on the Channel Islands
off the coast of California. And he was taking these mice and comparing
them to museum samples of the same kind of mice from the same place, but
decades earlier.
“And I found something kind of strange – that the older specimens were
larger than the newer specimens, so they shrunk in size over a period of
about 30 or 40 years.”
That got him wondering if those relatively quick changes are happening in
other places. So years later, now on the faculty at the University of
Illinois at Chicago, he gathered up some of those White Footed Mice from
the Chicago suburbs. And he went to the Field Museum of Natural History…
(sound of a cabinet opening)
… where they have a hundred years of dead mouse specimens stored in
white metal cabinets.
“Here we have trays and trays of the northern white-footed mouse.”
With a tiny caliper, he’d measure their skulls, their feet, the distance
from their eyes to their noses.
“So this one here was collected by Aikley in 1903.”
And he compared mice from before and after 1950.
“Here are some skulls, this one was collected in 1989.”
Lo and behold, these mice had grown: by more than 10% on some measures.
This phenomenon goes way beyond Chicago. Pergams measured more than 1,300
rodents from four different continents – Alaskan lemmings, Mexican
gophers, Filipino rats. Some of them got bigger, some smaller. But across
the world, most of the animals have changed over time spans thought to be
mere evolutionary eyeblinks.
The next step is to figure out why.
“You can’t get in a time machine and go back and look to see what
actually happened. So the next best thing is to see if there’s
associations or correlations with big factors.”
He found the variations correlate with changes in climate and human
population density. The exact reasons aren’t clear – more people might
mean more yummy trash for the mice to eat, for example. That’s going to
take more research to figure out, and these critters might be overdue for
some extra attention.
“One of the questions is, well, why didn’t anybody notice this before?
And I think the answer is, they haven’t looked.”
Larry Heaney curates the Field Museum’s mammal collection. He says
Pergams’s research opens up new questions about how animals respond to
changes driven by humans.
“The implication is, these animals are changing very, very rapidly. So in
a sense, it’s good: they can change. But the other side of the coin is,
they’re having to change.”
Now, the question is, is this happening in other species, too? What about
birds or bugs or plants?
“There’s been this default attitude that if you go to one place and you
capture or you observe animals or plants, that essentially there’s going
to be the same animals or plants 50 years or 100 years later. I don’t
think that’s possible to assume at all. We have to include the fact of
this change in all of our decisions, from ecology to evolutionary biology
to conservation.”
Pergams’s findings show that even the most common creatures have more to
teach us – when we ask the right kinds of questions.
The climate change bill is currently in the Senate, awaiting the Senators when they return from August recess.
(Photo courtesy of the Architect of the Capitol)
Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:
Transcript
Experts are saying the fate
of the climate change bill
is tied to health care reform.
Mark Brush has more:
The climate change bill squeaked through the House of Representatives. And now it’s waiting for action in the Senate. But the Senate has full plate right now with health insurance reform.
And some experts are saying the fate of the health care bill will have a big impact on the climate change bill.
Nicky Roy with the Pew Center on Global Climate Change.
He says if the Obama Administration manages to do well in the health care debate, that will carry over to the debate on climate change.
“On the other hand, if the health care rallies succeed in fatally wounding the whole healthcare process, I think that’s going to make it tough for energy and climate because it’ll show that that tactic has worked.”
Some lobbying groups are using the same tactics being used in the health care debate. We’re already starting to see some anti-climate change legislation rallies in big energy states of Texas and Colorado.
Many scientists are finding that much of the Arctic's ice cover could melt by the end of this summer. However, the Bush Administration cites a few reasons why compliance with the Kyoto treaty is still not a favored option. (Photo by Michael Slonecker)
Despite warnings that global warming is causing the
Arctic to warm up at twice the rate of the rest of the world, the Bush administration is not changing its policies on emissions in the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
Despite warnings that global warming is causing the Arctic to warm up at twice the
rate of the rest of the world, the Bush administration is not changing its policies
on emissions in the U.S. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Earlier this month 300 scientists presented a four-year study that concluded the
Arctic was warming up right now. The report indicated the northern ice cap was already
diminished by 15 to 20 percent, and by the end of this century half of the Arctic’s summer
ice cover would be melted and polar bears could be nearly extinct. The study predicted that
the wildlife in the Arctic and the people who depended on it for food would be in dire straits.
But even with the new evidence that the Arctic is facing worse warming than first predicted,
the Bush adminsitration is not changing its course. The White House has indicated the U.S.
would lose too many jobs and have to restrict its economy more than other nations such as
China and India if it were to adhere to the Kyoto global warming treaty. So far, the Bush
administration has agreed only to fund further research on the issue.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
"Look! No handle." Jim Fashbaugh shows off one of the waterless urinals Michigan State University is installing in new buildings. It uses no water. (Photo by Lester Graham)
There’s a change happening in certain restrooms across the country. With growing concerns about wasting water, companies have been looking at ways to use less water to flush… and now a new product uses no water at all. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
There’s a change happening in certain restrooms across the country. With growing concerns about wasting water, companies have been looking at ways to use less water to flush… and now a new product uses no water at all. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Alright… this is a story for the guys. I mean, you women might be interested, but this is really a guy thing. They’re taking the flush away from us. You’ve probably noticed that urinals have been changing from manual flush to some kind of automatic or motion-detecting sensor flush. Now a few companies are producing urinals with no handle, no button, no sensor. Companies such as Sloan Valve Company, Waterless Company and Falcon Waterfree Technologies are making urinals without flushers.
Bruce Fleisher is the Vice President of Sales and Marketing for Falcon Waterfree Technologies.
Fleisher: “Literally there is zero water consumption with the use of this urinal product.”
Graham: “Well how do you flush it?”
Fleisher: “Well, in fact, it’s the no-flush urinal.”
No flush. No water. The urine just goes down the drain, past a sealant and it’s trapped there. All the no-water urinal companies use similar technology.
“Because it’s a dry surface, that prevents the urine from breeding bacteria rather quickly. And, as a result, you have no odor.”
Hold it. What did he just say?
(sound of rewinding tape)
“And, as a result, you have no odor.”
Now, I couldn’t let that one go… so I asked Mr. Fleisher to explain how that works.
“The odor that people would typically experience in a urinal derives from the combination of the urine and the water creating a breeding ground for bacteria. Bacteria then generates ammonia gas. Ammonia gas is what most people are picking up. That’s what smells.”
I remember from some high school science class that urine, when it’s expelled, is sterile. So, it kinda makes sense. But hey, this guy’s in charge of sales. So I called up a nephrologist. Nephrologists study kidneys so they know something about urine. Dr. Akinolu Ojo is the director of nephrology outpatient services at the University of Michigan. He explained why urine smells.
Ojo: “The odor that one gets from the urine comes from exposure to atmospheric air and water moisture. As that happens there is decomposition of some of the compounds in the urine. One of the by-products is ammonia. And so you get at that point an ammonia smell.”
Graham: “So, this mixture with water, it becomes a better breeding ground for bacteria?”
Ojo: “That’s correct.”
Graham: “And then the chemical reaction in addition to that also could cause some odor?”
Ojo: “You are correct.”
Glad we got that cleared up. In fact, when I went to see the Assistant Manager of the Physical Plant and Maintenance Services at Michigan State Univesity, Jim Fashbaugh said an odor problem with flush urinals is what prompted that univeristy’s first experiment with no-flush urinals.
“We’d heard about the waterless urinals. We thought we’d give them a chance to see how they would work. And we installed it and it took care of the odor problem, but we also realized we were saving water at that point, so we thought we’d take a look at other applications.”
So, they had one installed in the bathroom in the building where the top maintenance guys work.
(sound of men’s room door opening)
We took a peek at it.
Fashbaugh: “It’s one of the first ones that we ended up trying out. That’s basically it.”
Graham: “It looks like it’s broken, like there’s-”
(sound of laughing)
Fashbaugh: “Yeah. As you see, there’s no flush valve. There’s no- anything else happning. It just goes down through the ports there and there’s a blue liquid that allows the urine to go through and it separates it out. Frankly, we have hard water here at MSU; we’ve got those deep water wells. And it eliminates that lime buildup and whatever that we had to clean up before. So it saves us on products to have to do that issue too.”
Fashbaugh says the janitors love them. Instead of disinfectant, water and a lot of scrubbing, it’s more of a spray and wipe procedure. The no-flush, no-water urinals have been around in Europe for a long time, and they became popular in the drier areas of the American Southwest a few years ago. Now, universities, stadiums, and airports among others all across the country are installing them.
Guys… it could be that this sound…
(sound of flushing)
…might soon be flushed down the drain of water-wasting history.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham
(sound of restroom door opening)
Fashbaugh: “Do a lot of interviews in restrooms?”
Graham: “Uh, not – I think that might be a first for me.”
Fashbaugh: “Yeah, really. I was glad we didn’t have to do a demonstration.”
A recent study shows the arctic seabed is releasing up to ten-million tons of methane annually. (Photo Courtesy of Patrick Kelley, U.S. Coast Guard)
