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"The Arctic climate of the Bering Sea is in full retreat"

Not to belabor this, but if your appetite for alarming environmental news wasn't sated by our special issues on global warming and, more recently, the roiling sewers that are our oceans, well, then, the LA Times has just the story for you.

Whales, walruses, seabirds and fish are struggling to survive the changing climate of the Bering Sea, their northern feeding grounds perhaps permanently disrupted by warmer temperatures and melting ice, scientists reported Thursday in the journal Science.

By pulling together a broad range of observations and surveys, an international research team concluded that it is witnessing the transformation of an entire ecosystem in a region home to almost half of U.S. commercial fish production.

Then it gets shocking.

...As sea ice diminished, breeding grounds for seals were disrupted and populations plummeted. Polar bears started to drown. Walruses, accustomed to diving in the shallows to feed along the sea bottom, found themselves adrift on broken ice floes in waters 6,500 feet deep. The animals starved.

For more on the effects of climate change on polar bears in particular--if you can take it--see this piece by Marla Cone in the current issue of Mother Jones.

Posted by Julian Brookes on 03/10/06 at 12:21 PM | E-mail | Print



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Comments

And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth: and God saw that it was GOOD.

Offshore drilling--currently banned in fed. waters along most of the US coastline--is allowed in large portions of the gulf, off the Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana coasts, and look at the damage following Katrina...

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have DOMINION over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth.

Yes, for decades now, drilling for oil and natural gas off much of our beautiful coastline has been declared off limits, however this year, with Congress acknowledging high energy prices (caused by Katrina) and a fresh lobbying push from oil companies, even drilling opponents are figuring that the fight is lost...

Only one week after Florida's US Senators offered up a deal to keep the state's Gulf Coast largely free from oil and gas rigs, the chairman of the Senate energy committee proposed just the opposite, filing a bill to open up a Vermont-sized chunk of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling.

The bill would open access to almost 5-trillion cubic feet of nat. gas, or enough to heat nearly 5 million homes for 15 years.

Yeah, heating is going right through the roof--in all those under-insulated attics...

Funny? how electric lighting uses up one forth of all energy produced in the US, consuming the electricity equal to that generated by 120 large power plants, while compact fluorescent lighting uses almost sebenty-five percent less electricity than standard incandescent bulbs...

It's been estimated that half the dirty fossil fuels used in the majority of power plants are simply wasted, while big oil has an effective tax rate of 11% compared to the 32% average...

The US pollutes more per head than any other country, and it also produces more wealth... We're citizens of the nation that produces one quarter of the world's carbon dioxide emmissions--modern science tells us we need to cut emmissions by a staggering sixty to seventy percent...

Perhaps the real issue here isn't whether implementation of the Kyoto Protocol would avoid a mere 14/100ths of a degree of global warming by 2100, rather it's that during the 2000 pres. race Bush stated that he would seek to "establish mandatory reduction targets for ... carbon dioxide, but then, later on, he did a complete turn around and said, "I do not believe ... that the gov should impose on power plants mandatory emission reductions for carbon dioxide."

It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for the rich man to enter the kingdom of God.

Yeah, actually the knife to the throat here is that land plants only release as much oxygen as they absorb, while, in fact, it's the ocean phytoplankton that is solely responsible for atmospheric oxygenation!!!!

Posted by: Michael L. Wagner on 03/13/06 at 11:14 AM

As reported in Marla Cone's article, Polar Bears are in trouble. Some scientists predict that with current warming, the animals could face extintion within the century.

To fight this, Greenpeace and other orgs sued the Gov't to add the bears to the endangered species list. The US Fish and Wildlife Service announced they would consider the proposal and have opened up a public comment period. You can send them a letter through this link: http://members.greenpeace.org/action/start.php?action_id=84&ref_source=mojopolarbear

Posted by: Nick on 03/13/06 at 1:56 PM

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This article has been made possible by the Foundation for National Progress, the Investigative Fund of Mother Jones, and gifts from generous readers like you.

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